89. The Exhibition as Embassy: Art, Mobility, and Media between the Arab and the Socialist World

How can exhibitions reshape our understanding of the cultural geographies of the Global Cold War? This session proposes to rethink exhibitions not as isolated cultural events but as mobile diplomatic media that connected socialist Europe, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and the Arab world through artistic exchange, visual communication, and cultural diplomacy. Extending beyond the museum or gallery, exhibitions circulated through artists’ mobility, illustrated magazines, photography, exhibition catalogues, cultural missions, and educational exchanges, generating transnational narratives that crossed political and ideological boundaries.

Stretching from Moscow, Dresden, Warsaw, and Prague to Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Algiers, Tunis, and Beirut, these exhibitionary networks became arenas in which socialist internationalism, anti-colonial solidarity, and competing visions of modernity were negotiated through visual culture. Rather than merely documenting these encounters, print media, television, touring exhibitions, artists’ residencies, and cultural institutions expanded and reinterpreted them, creating an exhibitionary infrastructure through which art functioned simultaneously as diplomacy, propaganda, education, and cultural exchange.

The session particularly welcomes contributions on the role of women artists within these transnational networks, examining how they were mobilised as symbols of emancipation, internationalism, and socialist modernity while negotiating local artistic practices and political expectations.

Contributions are invited on exhibition histories, artistic mobility, museums, biennials, illustrated magazines, photography, film, media rhetoric, feminist art history, Arab modernism, Soviet and East European art, curatorial practice, and transnational or postcolonial approaches to Cold War visual culture. By placing the exhibition at the centre of analysis, the session seeks to rethink the interconnected histories of socialist and Arab artistic exchange beyond conventional East–West narratives.

Themes: Art and Politics; Cold War Visual Culture; Cultural Diplomacy

Lead Convenor: Hala Ghoname, Dresden University of Technology (TUD), Germany

Co-convenors: Maria Mileeva, Courtauld Institute of Art, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.