[spectre] CFP, book publ: Shifting Images of Europe's East: An Art Historical Inquiry from the Margins.

[Andreas Broeckmann]

From: Jana Graul
Date: Oct 24, 2026
Subject: CFP: Shifting Images of Europe's East: An Art Historical 
Inquiry from the Margins.

Deadline: Nov 30, 2026

In what ways were perceptions of the eastern parts of the European 
continent and the border region with Asia shaped by images? What 
contribution did visual media, artefacts or performative practices make 
to processes of spatial or cultural inclusion and exclusion in this 
region? And how have artistic perspectives, on the one hand, helped to 
shape the idea of ‘Eastern Europe’ and, on the other, counteracted it or 
contributed to its deconstruction? These questions are the focus of the 
volume Shifting Images of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Inquiry from 
the Margins, which was preceded between autumn 2022 and summer 2023 by a 
research seminar series of the same name at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – 
Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, and for which we are 
delighted to be able to publish a call for papers today. Building on the 
seminal 2021 study Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe by Katarzyna 
Murawska-Muthesius, which argues that images played a primary role in 
the construction of Eastern Europe, this publication sheds light on the 
visual Imaginarium of Europe’s eastern regions and examines its 
influence within the tension between external attributions and 
self-identification. The aim is to examine, from a historical 
perspective, the diverse representational strategies through which the 
eastern parts of Europe, from the early modern period to the present 
day, have been imagined, visually shaped, constructed and defined, as 
well as subversively undermined, deconstructed and reinvented.

In a plea for ambiguity and the diversity of European worlds, the winner 
of this year’s Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, the writer 
Miljenko Jergović, recently compared Europe’s eastern expansion to an 
open-ended narrative and stated that it is impossible to draw a boundary 
here, “[…] because no matter where the boundary is drawn, beyond it 
there always remains a part of Europe that Europe cannot come to terms 
with. Or a part of Europe that does not wish to be Europe…” 
(Award-winner’s lecture, Leipzig, 18 March 2026). In fact, from a purely 
geographical perspective, the course of the continental boundary between 
Europe and Asia is unclear (there is no binding definition under 
international law) and is subject to differing interpretations, 
particularly concerning the Caucasus region. This is because, 
geologically speaking, the two continents together form a single 
continental plate and are not separated by marine boundaries. The 
borderline, as well as the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and 
multi-cultural border region between Europe and Asia, has been the 
subject of debate and negotiation in Europe since the 14th century and 
increasingly so from the 16th century onwards. On the one hand, the 
continental boundary came into focus as a result of the gradual 
expansion of the Ottoman Empire from Asia Minor into the Balkans, 
culminating in the capture of Constantinople in 1453. On the other hand, 
the renewed availability of Ptolemy’s Geography, decisive innovations in 
the field of cartography, as well as more intensive contacts, travel and 
conflicts, heightened humanist interest in ‘Sarmatia’ and thus in the 
topographies, cultures and languages of the eastern regions of Europe; 
whilst, analogous to Europe’s expansion westwards, there were also 
aspirations for expansion eastwards. The fictitious ancient boundary 
along the Don and mythical mountain ranges such as the Rhipaean 
Mountains was increasingly called into question, as in Maciej 
Miechotwita’s influential Tractatus de Duabus Sarmantiis Asiana et 
Europiana (Krakow 1517), which for the first time discussed the 
possibility of establishing new criteria for the continental dividing 
line (Piechocki 2014; Piechocki 2019). In the 18th century, the 
geographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, in Das Nord- und Östliche 
Theil von Europa und Asia (Stockholm 1730), established a line running 
along the Ural Mountains and River, which has since been followed by the 
majority, albeit by no means unanimously or in every detail.

To complicate matters further, despite the lively academic debate 
surrounding the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ – including questions about 
its validity (see, amongst others, Lemberg 1985; Tornow 2005; Pejić 
2009; Forgács 2014) – it remains unclear what we actually mean when we 
speak of Eastern Europe. For where Eastern Europe begins or ends, which 
territories it encompasses, and which overarching characteristics 
(supposedly) define and unite the region in question and the people 
living there, depends largely on who made this attribution, when, from 
which perspective (geographical, political, historical, cultural, 
religious, ethnically or linguistically), and with what intention, and 
what it implies in each specific case. Thus, the term ‘Eastern Europe’ 
may refer equally to the territory of present-day Belarus, the European 
part of Russia and Ukraine, as it may to the spheres of influence of the 
Orthodox Church or all areas inhabited by Slavic peoples; it may include 
the Caucasus but, for example, exclude Russia – classifying it instead 
as part of the North – or, as during the Cold War, refer to all European 
Eastern Bloc states, including the Balkans, the former GDR and the 
Baltic states. It should be noted that, in any case, this is not a 
geographically defined area but a theoretical construct – in other 
words, an idea. This idea gradually took shape as, alongside the 
established North–South division at the beginning of the Early Modern 
period, ancient notions of a geographical symmetry of Europe into West 
and East were further developed, and over time a veritable West–East 
dichotomy emerged, within which Eastern Europe was then subjected to a 
powerful denigration as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘backward’ in Enlightenment 
discourse (Wolff 1994; Bisaha 2004; Piechocki 2019).

Images played a key role in these debates, negotiation processes and 
attributions. Regarding the continental border, for example, the 
frontispiece of the 1521 Kraków edition of Miechotwita’s aforementioned 
treatise depicts a battle between two mounted armies, reflecting the 
expansionist ambitions of the Polish King Sigismund I towards the east. 
For Sigismund’s armoured troops, who symbolize the European part of 
Sarmatia, are clearly superior in the woodcut to their Asian opponents – 
a Tatar army depicted without protective armour, helmets or visors – 
which is, moreover, characterized as treacherous and dangerous by the 
scorpion, its heraldic animal. Similarly, the demarcation between Asia 
and Europe is addressed in cartography: maps not only constitutively 
introduce and legitimize the abstract continental dividing line, but can 
also, at the same time, call it into question and shift it. In doing so, 
they too employ attributions regarding the peoples living in the East on 
either side of the continental dividing line; for example, when, 
following an ancient tradition, they depict monstrous creatures in the 
border regions or show people worshipping idols. The image of Eastern 
Europe, in turn, as Murawska-Muthesius has shown, is fundamentally 
shaped by the ambiguous visual formula of ethnically attired figures, 
which has been in use since the 17th century and, although often 
interpreted as a symbol of Eastern European backwardness, has also been 
self-assuredly employed and (re)interpreted by Eastern Europeans themselves.

Following the end of the Cold War, the question of the relationship 
between East and West in Europe was raised once again with renewed 
intensity. When the IRWIN collective created the multimedia East Art Map 
in the early 2000s, it sought to map art from Eastern Europe and 
visualize its internal connections. A black A2-sized map accompanying 
the book, does not reflect the geographical location of the 18 countries 
represented but rather superimposes a timeline (1945–2005) onto clusters 
of artists’ names – loosely arranged by origin – each entered an oval 
bubble. Countless lines between the bubbles reveal – or rather 
construct, for the first time – connections between disparate artistic 
positions across temporal and national boundaries, whereby the artistic 
landscape of Eastern Europe appears more as a sketch of constellations 
in a segment of the dark firmament than as a map, particularly as 
references to the outside world are absent from this rigorous mapping. 
The book itself, however, adopts a comparative approach that places 
20th-century Eastern European art in dialogue with its Western 
counterpart. (IRWIN 2006) Over the following two decades, the concept of 
Eastern Europe became increasingly less self-evident among artists and 
curators, partly because the particularity of historical experiences 
once again came to the fore. As Bojana Piškur observes, however, 
situating oneself within the pre-socialist past – between the Habsburg 
and Ottoman Empires, and Christian and Muslim religions – is not making 
the question of identity any easier. (Piškur 2024) As disillusionment 
with the policies of the West or the European Union grows, new points of 
reference move into the foreground. Thus, the 2025 Kyiv Biennale focuses 
on art from Middle-East-Europe, “a term encompassing Central & Eastern 
Europe, the former Soviet Central Asia, and the Middle East.” (Near East 
– Far West 2025) The curators emphasize: “By questioning the 
(neo)colonial relationship between Europe and its so-called peripheries, 
the exhibition asserts that the fate of ‘Greater Europe’ is now being 
forged in its eastern borderlands.” At the same time, artistic practices 
repeatedly illustrate that the “eastern borderlands” can run right 
through the centre of the continent. In Everybody Wants to Live by the 
Sea (2014), for instance, Nikita Dakan explores Tatar settlements in 
occupied Crimea, which reflect the precarious status of the Tatars as an 
‘Eastern element’ within a Russia conceived as Western.

The book offers the opportunity to juxtapose the shifting images of the 
continental boundary and the border region between Europe and Asia with 
the visual constructions of Eastern Europe, thereby not only revealing 
the historical dimension of ideas about this region – some of which 
remain influential to this day – but also highlighting the role of art 
in shaping the collective imagination of Europe’s East. The focus is 
therefore on self-attributions and attributions by others as negotiated 
through images, and on the relationships between the Eastern parts of 
Europe and the neighbouring continent of Asia, as well as with other 
European regions – particularly their self-declared counterpart, the 
West. The publication explores how images address questions of identity, 
meaning and geographical and cultural boundaries in these regions, with 
a focus on artistic perspectives, artefacts and exhibitions. The aim is 
to understand how Europe was continually reproduced and reconstructed in 
images amidst the shifting tensions between East and West, and under 
what circumstances and with what intentions these changes took place.

We welcome contributions addressing these specific topics and questions, 
as well as any other proposal related to the overall theme of the call:

- To what extent do images address the dynamics and complex 
manifestations of the borders of Eastern Europe?
- And to what extent do they not only contribute to their precise 
geographical localization and description, but also resist this?
- How do images, artefacts or performances negotiate the question of 
Europe’s constantly shifting and changing ‘Other’?
- The role of exhibitions in the negotiation of external and 
self-attributions between West and East.
- How do artists, architects and other cultural practitioners challenge 
or resist the prevailing narratives about Eastern Europe and its 
internal divisions?
- What cultural mechanisms have led to certain groups being included in 
or excluded from the imagined community of ‘Europe’?

We invite you to submit your paper proposals (in English) to Jana Graul 
(jana.graul at uni-hamburg.de) and Seraina Renz (s.renz at hum.leidenuniv.nl) 
by 30 November 2026. Please ensure it is around 600 words long and 
includes 3–5 keywords, a brief introductory bibliography, and your CV 
with a list of publications. If your proposal is selected, we look 
forward to receiving your full 6,000-word essay by 30 April 2027 for a 
double-blind peer review process.

Related literature:

Bisaha, Nancy. Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the 
Ottoman Turks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Fornas, Johan. Europe Faces Europe: Narratives from Its Eastern Half. 
1st ed. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2017.

Forgács, Éva. “How the New Left Invented East European Art.” In 
Blindheit und Hellsichtigkeit. Künstlerkritik an Politik und 
Gesellschaft der Gegenwart, edited by Cornelia Klinger, 61–83. Berlin: 
Akademie Verlag, 2014.

Hildermeier, Manfred. “Where Is Eastern Europe and How Do We Deal with 
It?” H-Soz-u-Kult, May 30, 2006. 
http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/2006-05-002.

IRWIN, ed. East Art Map: Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe. London: 
Afterall, 2006.

Mark, James, and Paul Betts. Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and 
Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation. Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 2022.

Lemberg, Hans. “On the Emergence of the Concept of Eastern Europe in the 
Nineteenth Century: From the ‘North’ to the ‘East’ of Europe.” Jahrbuch 
für Geschichte Osteuropas 33, no. 1 (1985): 48–91.

Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna, ed. Borders in Art: Revisiting 
“Kunstgeographie”. Norwich: University of East Anglia, 1998.

Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna. Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: 
Sarmatia Europea to Post-Communist Bloc. London: Routledge, 2021.

“Near East—Far West: Kyiv Biennial 2025.” Museum of Modern Art in 
Warsaw. Accessed September 23, 2026. 
https://artmuseum.pl/en/exhibitions/near-east-far-west-kyiv-biennial-2025.

Nieslony, Magdalena. “The Reality of the Images of Eastern Europe.” 
Review of Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to 
Post-Communist Bloc, by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius. Kunstchronik 75 
[76], no. 1 (2022): 12–20.

Pejić, Bojana. “Proletarians of All Countries, Who Washes Your Socks? 
Equality, Dominance, and Difference in Eastern European Art.” In Gender 
Check: Rollenbilder in der Kunst Osteuropas, 16–27. Exhibition catalog. 
Vienna: MUMOK; Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 2009.

Piškur, Bojana. “Troubles with the East(s).” L'Internationale, January 
22, 2024. 
https://internationaleonline.org/contributions/troubles-with-the-east-s/.

Piechocki, Katharina N. "Discovering Eastern Europe: Cartography and 
Translation in Maciej Miechowita’s Tractatus de Duabus Sarmatiis 
(1517)." In Polish Culture in the Renaissance: Studies in the Arts, 
Humanism and Political Thought, edited by Danilo Facca and Valentina 
Lepri, 53–69. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2013.

Piechocki, Katharina N. Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early 
Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Piotrowski, Piotr. “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History.” 
Umění/Art 56, no. 5 (2008): 378–83.

Piotr Piotrowski: „East European Art Peripheries Facing Post-Colonial 
Theory“ http://non 
site.org/article/east-european-art-peripheries-facing-post-colonial-theory, 
No. 12, 2014.

Tornow, Siegfried. Was ist Osteuropa? Handbuch der osteuropäischen Text- 
und Sozialgeschichte von der Spätantike bis zum Nationalstaat. 
Slavistische Studienbücher: Neue Folge, vol. 16. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 
Verlag, 2005.

Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the 
Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Zabel, Igor. “‘We’ and ‘The Others.’” In After the Wall: Art and Culture 
in Post-Communist Europe, edited by Bojana Pejić and David Elliott, 
35–41. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999.


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Shifting Images of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Inquiry from 
the Margins.. In: ArtHist.net, Oct 24, 2026. 
<https://arthist.net/archive/54740>.