[spectre] CFP: Avant-garde Art out of the Borderlands (Vienna, 1-2 Oct 26)

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Ana-Maria Milcic
Date: Dec 11, 2025
Subject: CFP: Avant-garde Art out of the Borderlands (Vienna, 1-2 Oct 26)

Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 
Vienna, Austria, Oct 1–02, 2026
Deadline: Feb 8, 2026

"Sitting on the Fence: Avant-garde Art out of the Borderlands", 
Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 
Vienna, October 1-2, 2026.

This symposium explores the relationship between avant-garde art and the 
notion of the borderland, focusing primarily on the period from the turn 
of the twentieth century to the Second World War, while also considering 
its continuation after 1945 in what is sometimes termed the 
neo-avant-garde. While the borderland is understood here in the 
geographical sense of a territory surrounding the line separating two 
countries, the symposium also welcomes proposals that approach the 
borderland as a more conceptual space: a dynamic, shifting, and 
negotiated zone between two self-differentiating entities, whether 
political, cultural, or ideological. Borderlands can thus serve as 
spaces of encounter, mixing, possibility, hybridity, and conflict, not 
only in terms of how communities and individuals relate to themselves 
and to one another, but also as a conceptual framework through which 
knowledge production and dialectical tensions may be examined.

The title, Sitting on the Fence, points directly to moments of artistic, 
discursive, or historiographical uncertainty, doubt, ambiguity, mixture, 
conflict, inconclusiveness, impasse, friction, and epistemic 
indeterminacy. The symposium seeks to explore the avant-garde in such 
moments, asking how art from borderlands either fails to register the 
complexity of these spaces or actively engages with their tensions. It 
examines how art from borderland contexts denies, overlooks, registers, 
responds to, manifests, navigates, expresses, embodies, illustrates, 
reveals, or indeed generates moments of indecisiveness, ambiguity, 
hybridity, fluidity, conflict, or friction, whether between communities, 
narratives, identities, or political imaginaries. The symposium 
therefore treats the failure of art to represent such phenomena as 
equally important to examine as its capacity to render them visible.

We welcome 300-word proposals for individual papers, accompanied by 
150-word biographies. In preparing your abstract, you might consider:

- how different methodological or theoretical frameworks (from 
decolonial studies and feminist theory to psychoanalysis, phenomenology, 
or network theory) can expand our understanding of borderlands;
- underrepresented or marginalised geographical regions, especially 
those removed from major metropolitan centres typically foregrounded in 
narratives of the avant-garde;
- the possibility of reframing modernity from peripheral, liminal, or 
otherwise bordered vantage points, and how such perspectives challenge 
centre-periphery hierarchies;
- the potential of borderlands to disrupt or consolidate the 
nation-state matrix as a referential point;
- the mobility of artists, objects, and ideas across contested or fluid 
borders, and the implications of such movement for cultural translation 
and artistic identity;
- the role of borderland archives, local institutions, or non-canonical 
actors in constructing alternative art-historical narratives or 
producing counter-modernities.

Please submit abstracts and biographies by February 8, 2026 to 
Ana-Maria.Milcic at oeaw.ac.at with "Sitting on the Fence" in the email 
subject line.


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Avant-garde Art out of the Borderlands (Vienna, 1-2 Oct 26). In: 
ArtHist.net, Dec 11, 2025. <https://arthist.net/archive/51323>.