Past exhibitions

As the authors put it, the aim of East Art Map is to show the art of the whole space of Eastern Europe, to take artists out of their national frameworks and to present them in a unified scheme. We would like to display the practical fundamental relations between Eastern European artists there where they have not been documented, to draw a sort of a clear and user-friendly map of the art of Eastern Europe rather than to get some theoretical true thereof. History is not given. It has to be constructed.

The group worked over East Art Map project (www.eastartmap.org) from 1999 to 2005. The project is a sort of a guidebook through the contemporary art of Eastern Europe and its relations with Western arts, social and political history. Initially, Irwin invited a group of 24 eminent art critics, curators and artists from the different ex-socialist Central, Eastern and South-Eastern countries to perform and to show 250 crucial art projects and artworks from their respective countries. Upon the results thereof, in 2006, it published the project book. The next step, technically as well as conceptually, is to transfer the EAM onto Internet and to open it up for contributions by its users, the general public and specialists being invited to participate in discussion, which may, for sure, change the topography of the map.