LFU:online

Expanded knowledge and independent application of art-historical methods on examples referred to in the lecture.

With the collapse of communism thirty years ago, a radical socio-political break occurred in the countries of Eastern Europe. The former one-party regimes were overthrown or resigned themselves, thus paving the way for the establishment of parliamentary democracies, the transition from socialist planned to free market economies and the independence of the media. Despite these fundamental similarities, the political turn in the former Eastern Bloc countries did not take place in the same way everywhere. In this course we will ask how the historical caesura of 1989/91 was reflected in images from the period and what role these images played in visual memory. Besides reading theoretical texts on the visual representation of historical events, we will discuss key images from the Baltic to the Balkans. Our aim will be to work out the different visual signatures and characteristics of pictures and to explore their historically shaping power.

Short presentation, weekly readings (text and pictures), discussions.

Interest in the topic, (group) presentation, regular attendance, active participation and weekly readings, seminar paper

Ana Karaminova/Martin Jung (eds.): Visualizations of change. Strategies and Semantics of Images at the End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 2012; Simina Badica: "Forbidden Images"? Visual Memories of Romanian Comunism Before and After 1989, in: Maria Todorova et al. Private and Public Recollections of Lived Expirience in Southeast Europe, Budapest 2014, S. 201–216.

A detailed bibliography will be announced in the course.

LFU: online registration is required!