Artistic Exchanges during the Global Cold War: Eastern Bloc, Northern Africa, and West Asia

This panel explores how transregional cultural exchanges between the Arab world and the former Eastern Bloc shaped artistic and creative practices during the Global Cold War. The transregional encounters of artists, architects, curators, and archaeologists ensured the transfer of ideas and inspired debates on modernity and cross-cultural exchange in the aftermath of the Second World War and during decolonisation struggles. During the Global Cold War, fine art students from the Arab world arrived in the Eastern Bloc as part of university exchanges and to attend International Youth and Student Festivals designed to cement anti–western, anti–colonial, and socialist alliances. Artists from the Arab world exhibited in Europe’s Communist/socialist countries, while their European counterparts participated in art festivals and took up teaching roles in fine art departments across West Asia and Northern Africa. Further, archaeologists, artists, and scientists from the Eastern Bloc travelled to the region to document local cultural heritage and engage with artistic communities. The panel aims to investigate cross–regional mobility from the Communist/socialist European countries to the Arab world, and vice versa, against the backdrop of state-sanctioned cultural politics. Attending to questions of hybridity, cultural transfers, translation, and mistranslation, the panel aims to understand how these histories shed new light on the Global Cold War, modern art, cross-cultural exchange, and cultural politics. We invite papers on any aspect of cultural exchanges between these regions during the Global Cold War, including exhibition and curatorial histories, artistic collaborations, pedagogical histories, archaeology, public art, visual culture.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Dr Katarzyna Falecka, Newcastle University, Katarzyna.falecka@newcastle.ac.uk

Dr Przemyslaw Strozek, Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, przemyslaw.strozek@ispan.pl