RHETORIC OF DISPLAY: CURATORIAL PRACTICE AS ART HISTORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE

The ideological aspects of writing art history as parts of a rhetorical construction have been variously stressed. However, less stress has been put both on the association and dissimilarity between curating and writing art history. Especially in the case of the art from the former Central and Eastern-Europe, the curator lately appeared as a substitute for an underdeveloped art historical research on the Region. The present text analyzes the art historical shift in recent curatorial practices concerning art produced in Central-Eastern Europe after 1945, regarded as form of art historical revisionism by creating specific political and temporal imaginaries. By focusing on the logic of visual display as a knowledge/power apparatus and on the operations of archiving, framing and narrating, it addresses the way aesthetic experience and visual rhetoric construct the idea of historicity. It also questions the ways politics of regional identity is embedded in politics of time and the way temporality is enacted by different strategies of spatialization.