SESSION: 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.
Session Convenors:
Katarzyna Falecka, Newcastle University
Przemyslaw Strozek Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw
Speakers:
Alexandra Chiriac, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO)
Strings Across Borders: Puppet Theatre and Cultural Diplomacy Between Socialist Romania and Northern Africa
IThis paper examines how puppet theatre provided a cultural and ideological common ground between countries in Northern Africa and socialist Romania. A tour by Romanian puppeteers in Egypt in 1957 prompted the creation, by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, of the Cairo Puppet Theatre, which opened in 1959 after extensive training from Romanian experts. In the mid-1970s, further puppet theatres were founded with the assistance of Romanian artists in Sudan and Libya. As a result of its affinity with young audiences, puppetry fulfilled both an artistic and a didactic function, making it an important means of shaping young nationhood. Central to this is the question of how an interest in local vernacular artforms as an expression of national identity enabled puppetry to become an especially effective vehicle for cultural diplomacy. The collaborative theatrical productions that emerged (often through linguistic, as well as cultural, translations) were grounded in the folk art and storytelling traditions of both Eastern Europe and Northern Africa, while retaining a modernising impulse. The paper argues that a shared enthusiasm for the contemporary potential of folk culture linked postcolonial nations, eager to foreground indigenous artistic expression, with socialist states like Romania, which sought to reposition their folk traditions within the parameters of socialist doctrine. By examining puppet theatre, an artform largely overlook in scholarship on interactions between the Eastern Bloc and African nations (Stanek 2020, Mark and Betts 2022, Lipska and Słodkowski 2024 etc), the paper reveals that Cold War era exchanges were conditioned not only by shared modernities, but also by shared traditions.
Hala Ghoname, TU Dresden
The Exhibition as Embassy: GDR–Arab Artistic Circulation and Media Rhetorics in the Global Cold War
In June 1964, the Dresden-produced Arabic tabloid al-Majallah profiled Syrian-Palestinian artist Ibrāhīm Ḥāzimah’s fifth GDR solo at Kunst der Zeit, tracing his Leipzig training and situating him among Arab expatriates Burhān Karkutlī and Ghiyāth Akhras. Crucially, Ḥāzimah explicitly situated his practice within a Kleean genealogy, casting Paul Klee as a tutelary figure and acknowledging an ongoing pedagogical and aesthetic debt to German modernism. Three months later, al-Majallah interviewed Werner Schinko on the eve of his mission to Syria; subsequent issues followed his sketches, the touring Art of the GDR Exhibited by East German Artists across Cairo, Aleppo, and Damascus, and the Berlin show Syria as Seen by German Artists (1967). Both trajectories, Arab artists in the GDR and East German artists in Arab cities, anchor this paper’s analysis.
The paper positions al-Majallah as a central yet understudied optic of visual diplomacy that translated socialist modernity for Arab publics while mediating Arab artistic presence in the GDR. Two reciprocal vectors structure the argument: (1) GDR artists’ missions and exhibition circuits that produced “Orient” imaginaries within East German art discourse; and (2) photographic and curatorial narratives, exemplified by Laṭīf al-ʿĀnī’s 100 Images from All Over the GDR and Maḥmūd Dabdūb’s Leipzig photography, projecting a utopic, anti-racist, cultured GDR to Arab readers.
The paper shows how mobility programs and exhibitions functioned as laboratories where socialist ideology, anti-colonial aspirations, and modern aesthetics were negotiated. It shows how GDR–Arab exchanges recast the Global Cold War as a network of mediated, state-orchestrated sites of cultural production and political pedagogy.
Riad Kherdeen, Department of Art History, University of Illinois Chicago
Farid Belkahia in Prague
After completing his training at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1959, the Moroccan artist Farid Belkahia continued his studies and worked in Soviet Prague until he was recruited to become the director of the Casablanca École des Beaux-Arts in 1962. Why did Belkahia seek out Prague, and what was its impact on his art and politics? Whom did he meet there, and what did he produce while in Prague? What exactly did he study in Prague, and who did he study under? This paper seeks to shed light on Belkahia’s time in Prague by investigating the pedagogy of the Theatre Academy he studied at, exhibitions histories of contemporary art in Prague during this time, and the circles of artists and literary figures that Belkahia overlapped with. Ultimately, this paper highlights some of the ways in which Belkahia’s understudied Prague years had a lasting impact on both his political and artistic formation.
Tobas Rosen, Princeton University, Art & Archaeology
Planetary Revolutions
In the 1970s and 80s, the East German company Carl Zeiss Jena sold planetariums and other optical technologies to several Non-Aligned postcolonial states in North Africa and the Middle East. For the GDR, foreign currency could potentially stave off the country’s mounting debt crisis and ensure state socialism’s future or even growth. For postcolonial states, socialist technology potentially offered a way to springboard past capitalist development without aid from former colonial powers.
This presentation focuses on the planetarium in Tripoli, Libya, completed in 1981, as a case study. Part of a larger trade agreement negotiated by Muammar Gaddafi and the East German diplomat Werner Lamberz, the Tripoli planetarium inaugurated a partnership between oil capital and socialist technology that was, in Gaddafi’s vision, supposed to advance infrastructure across the African continent. Built next to the government’s international guest house and in view of the capital’s ports, the planetarium’s architecture, which paired postmodernist thin-shelled construction technology with common North African building motifs, demonstrated that imported socialist technology could be adapted to local purposes. Further, the planetarium is also a public site for the homecoming and commemoration of medieval Islamic astronomy, which became the basis of the Copernican revolution and Cold War space race. Therefore, the planetarium reconnected modern technology and science with Arabic roots, cutting out Europe as the sole source of innovation.