Invisible Labour: Women's Experimental Art in East-Central Europe, 1970-1989

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'Can there be contemporary art in North Korea?' asks Octavian Esanu (Esanu 2021), contesting the market-oriented logic of 'the contemporary' and the implicit portrayal of non-Western societies with no or limited market economies as 'backward' and in need of modernisation. Attending to East-Central European women artists' experimental work (including performance, participatory practices and visual media) in the late Soviet-influenced context, my project challenges the 'backwardness' thesis that reproduces the centre/periphery paradigm, not least for historically marginalised subjects such as women artists. The histories of women's experimental art in the former East can expand contemporary feminist thinking precisely because they do not anchor the critique of gender inequality to relations dictated by the market.My thesis responds to Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski's nuanced approach towards the experimental art of East-Central Europe under state socialism (Piotrowski 2009 and 2012). This reassessment of overlooked art scenes is essential to a decolonial modern and contemporary art history, rendering visible more artists from the region and explicating their historical and socio-economic values (Piotrowski 2009 & 2012; Bryzgel 2013 & 2017; Kemp-Welch 2014 & 2018; Esanu 2021). Yet a major weakness in this horizontal art history is its marginalisation of women artists (Jakubowska and Radomska 2022), replicating women's invisibility in western culture. My project addresses this limitation by closely examining the gender divide in artistic labour in East-Central Europe in the period (1970s and 1980s) when the main parameters of 'contemporary art' were established globally.Crucial to my research is the idea that the term 'contemporary art' has not been neutral but has been overtly or covertly defined through a market hegemony - especially so in the 1970s and 1980s when postmodernism became a 'cultural dominant' despite being specific to western 'consumer society' (Jameson 1984 & 1991). This was the period when second-wave feminism in the market-dominated West claimed visibility for women as makers of culture, but it is far less known what strategies women artists deployed in contexts of different priorities and determinants, such as those of East-Central Europe. I will approach women artists' visible and invisible labour as an indicator of the work that matters to the market as well as to state power. 'Visible labour' refers to how women artists needed to 'work harder' to be viewed as producers of culture - e.g. in Polish artistic duo Kwiekulik's performances, Zofia Kulik allowed herself to be physically restricted and mentally humiliated (Jakubowska 2020). 'Invisible labour' refers to a particular form of maintenance work, not connected with domestic labour - planning, producing, documenting, archiving, and promoting art. Unlike the marketing apparatus developed in the West, designed to appeal to curators and buyers, this gendered maintenance work as part of artistic production was essential to women artists' struggle against their marginalisation both by the state (locally) and the market (as an imagined 'international' destination). This generates a different understanding of what women artists' work consisted of, given that so far international art historical scholarship has highlighted western examples of social reproduction activities (e.g. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Manifesto, 1968).Interviews with artists, testimonies, catalogues, and archival material are my primary sources. Besides archives such as the Richard Demarco Archive (Scotland), the Piotr Piotrowski Archive (Poland), the Artpool Archive (Hungary), etc., I will consult online databases run by independent researchers and institutions from East-Central Europe, including Forgotten Heritage, Secondary Archive, ARTLIST, Web umenia etc.