Date and time
-Date: 19 May 2025
Time: 17.30 – 18.30 London
Online
Online audience members – please register via https://www.ucl.ac.uk/art-history/events/2025/may/movers-and-shakers-pu…
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
On the 19 May 2025 Abigail Winograd will deliver a keynote lecture on the eve of the start of a four-day workshop Movers and Shakers: Strategies for the Conservation of Kinetic Art, organised by the Getty Conservation Institute, the MSc in the Conservation of Kinetic Art and Media (History of Art) UCL East and Tate.
Abstract
The Other Transatlantic: The Curatorial and Exhibitory Challenges of Optical and Kinetic Art
The keynote will focus on the conceptualization, planning, and execution of The Other Transatlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, an exhibition which explored the confluence of enthusiasms in Soviet, non-aligned, and Latin American countries for two frequently overlooked and/or critically derided movements that flourished from the 1950s through the 1970s. The Other Transatlantic tracked a web of relationships between artists from Caracas to Moscow, São Paulo to Zagreb, and Buenos Aires to Warsaw writing an alternative history of abstraction in the second half of the Twentieth century that bypassed the so-called centers of western art. While artists in New York and Paris argued the relative merits of minimalism, Pop, and conceptualism, these artistic practices centered around an entirely different set of aesthetic concerns: philosophies of art and culture dominated by notions of progress and science, the machine and engineering, construction and perception. Opening first in Warsaw at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016 before traveling to the Garage in Moscow and SESC Pinheiros in São Paulo, The Other Transatlantic included the work of 36 artists and dozens of objects in various states of conservation. The lecture will likewise consider the challenges posed by the precarious nature of the works and their reliance on increasingly fragile technologies.