PROJECT IDEA

Bridge over Time: Contemporary Picture of the Past. Part 2: After the Revolution

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a symbolic moment that marked a break with the post-Yalta past for all the Visegrad Group countries. They had to face transformation and navigate a new political and social situation, which impacted artistic practices.
The project Bridge over Time: Contemporary Picture of the Past. Part 2: After the Revolution (2026-27) focuses on the analysis of art created after the 1989 breakthrough and covers the period from the 1990s onwards. We have chosen the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sanitary crisis of 2020-2022 as the end date for our research. We therefore examine the first three decades of art after 1989 in the Visegrad Group countries – the period of transformation in the 1990s and stabilization following accession to the EU.
The research considers the local and national specificity of both artistic works and the context of the political history of the Visegrad Group countries in the EU. The research methodology is based on the assumption of the continuous development of post-conceptual forms in the face of new political, social, and
economic realities.
The results of our research are presented at meetings of the project's Working Group and at the final conference in Gdańsk, in the form of scholarly articles about art and artists in our four countries, and in a screening of 12 films on art and artists, representing the period following the 1989 breakthrough, the 1990s, and continuing through 2020-22. A consortium of scholars and curators has been established to analyze the shared history of contemporary art in the Visegrad Group countries. The main goal is togather existing knowledge to develop a comparative study of the region:s art as a
whole and to build a platform for higher education dedicated to art in the region.

The topics of the four meetings of the Working Group
First meeting - discussion about methodology, finding common points in the art history of the period under study, identifying main problems (topics) in each country, discussion and making a decision about the structure of the films, presentations by local researchers about
their fields of study;
Second meeting – presentation of the artists chosen for the films, and final selection of the artist for the films, research progress presentations by the group and detailed presentations by local researchers about their fields of study;
Third meeting – preparation of the conference in Gdańsk, working on the timeline of the period under study, presentations of the research results and presentation of the local Gdansk group studies.
Fourth meeting of the Working Group is the final conference in Gdańsk where the project results will be presented to the public.
Films on art and artists
In the course of the project 12 documentary films about the artists will be produced, 3 per each of the V4 countries. It will be prepared on the basis of the same structure.
The films will be presented during the final conference in Gdansk and then accessible for free online.
The artists featured in the films represent the period 1990-2020, approximately. The film is ca 10 minutes long. We assume that the primary content of this film is the documentation of the artworks, not interviews with the artists.
The film documentation is accompanied by verbal commentary, presented as subtitles or voice-over (off-camera commentary).

The first part of the project Bridge Over Time: A Contemporary Picture of the Past, was realized thanks to the Visegrad Grant in 2021-2022. Its aim was to examine the history of art in the Visegrad countries in the period from the 1960s,developing under the influence of conceptual art, to the breakthrough of 1989.

Despite the diverse conditions of totalitarian political rule, conceptualism was recognized as the source of contemporary art and a unifying factor in the art of ourcountries.
Link to download the ebook created as a result of the Bridge Over Time. Part 1 project:

https://www.laznia.pl/ksiegarnia/bridge-over-time-contemporary-picture-of-the-past-pdf-105/