Poland
Pawel Leszkowicz, is a Professor in the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland.
He is an academic lecturer and a freelance curator specializing in international contemporary art, curatorial and LGBTQ studies. He is the author of the Ars Homo Erotica (2010) exhibition at Warsaw's National Museum and numerous queer exhibitions and symposia in Poland and the UK.
He has written four books: Helen Chadwick. The Iconography of Subjectivity (2001), Love and Democracy. Reflections on the Homosexual Question in Poland (2005), Art Pride. Gay Art from Poland (2010), and The Naked Man: The Male Nude in post-1945 Polish Art (2012). His contributions have been published by Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, New York University Press, Ashgate and Manchester University Press. He was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Sussex in Brighton (2011-2014) and a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow at One Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles (2015-2016) and the EU EURIAS Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2016-2017).
Recently he worked on public art festivals in Poland in Lublin and Gdansk on the subject of hospitality and ecology.
He is a member of the International Art Critics Association (AICA).
dr hab. Łukasz Guzek, prof. Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk. In his work combines scientific research in art history with art criticism and curatorial practice.
His research interests cover the art of the twentieth century, particularly the art of the seventies, including conceptual art, performance art, installation art, breakthrough modernism / postmodernism in the visual arts, as well as documentation of art, understood as both a problem of the theory of art and as the practice of archiving, retention, maintenance and care of works of contemporary ephemeral art forms. Research conducted recently link with the area of performance studies. The currently implemented research project concerns the study of contemporary art in Middle Europe. His methodological interests relate to research into the art of the ephemeral forms, time based, place related and context (contextual methodologies). In art criticism deals with a practical issues (workshop topics) and also methodological approaches in teaching art criticism.
2011 – present – professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk.
Since 2009-present he is an editor-in-chief of scholarly journal Art and Documentation (www.journal.doc.art.pl), published by Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk. It appears twice a year.
Books (in Polish):
Reconstruction of Action Art in Poland [Rekonstrukcja sztuki akcji w Polsce]. Warszawa, Toruń: Polski Instytut Studiów nad Sztuką Świata, Wydawnictwo Tako, 2017.
Performatization of art. Performance art and action factor in Polish art criticism. [Performatyzacja sztuki. Sztuka performance i czynnik akcji w polskiej krytyce sztuki.] Gdańsk: ASP w Gdańsku, 2013.
Installation Art. The Question of Relationship Between Space and Presentness in Contemporary Art. [Sztuka instalacji. Zagadnienie związku przestrzeni i obecności w sztuce współczesnej.] Warszawa: Neriton, IH PAN, 2007.
dr Magdalena Radomska
As a scholar, she describes herself as a post-Marxist art historian, focusing her research interests on the art of Central and Eastern Europe, communist and post-communist Europe on the one hand, and on the philosophy of Marxism and post-Marxism on the other. She is also interested, in a broader geographical perspective, in political art focused on the criticism of capitalism.
Editor of the cultural magazine Czas Kultury.
Author of a series of articles on the latest publications on post-Marxist philosophy and a series of translations of texts on Alain Badiou's philosophy, including Badiou's own text.
Since 2009, she has been working at Adam Mickiewicz University, Faculty of Art Sciences, Institute of Art History, Department of the History of Contemporary Art.
She is the head of Piotr Piotrowski The Center for Research on East-Central European Art at Adam Mickiewicz University.
Czech Republic
Stepanka Bieleszova - curator of the photography collection at the Olomouc Museum of Art. He has long devoted himself to the art of Central Europe after 1945, especially in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. For 25 years she worked as a chief curator at the Olomouc Museum of Art. From the beginning, she was at the birth of the idea of the Central European Forum Olomouc. Author of many publications and exhibitions: http://www.itf.cz/index.php?clanek=42
Ondřej Durczak graduate of the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Creative Photography, Faculty of Philosophy and Science, Silesian University in Opava. He deals with the history of photographic publications after 1945 in Central Europe. In his own photographic work, he focuses on the Ostrava and Karviná regions. He has had several author exhibitions and has curated a number of group exhibitions: www.durczak.cz
Jiří Siostrzonek sociologist, university pedagogue and deputy head of the Institute of Creative Photography of the Silesian University in Opava. He teaches sociology in photography, deals with social aspects in excluded localities. He regularly acts as an expert on social issues. Author of many publications and exhibitions: See here.
Slovakia
Vladimíra Büngerová
She studied at the Department of History of Art and Culture at Trnava University during 1995-2000. Her focus is on history, theory and critique of contemporary art, applied arts and design. She has prepared several exhibitions for Museum of Art in Žilina, Nitra Gallery in Nitra and City Gallery in Rimavská Sobota, Cyprian Majernik Gallery in Bratislava and Small Carpathian Museum in Pezinok, where she worked as the Curator of the Collection of Fine Art and Crafts during 2000-2005. In 2003-2005 she also worked for the collection of First Slovak Investment Group. She has done work for publications focusing primarily on contemporary art, design, and applied arts. From 2007 - 2009 she worked as a curator for the Collection of Arts and Crafts and Design (glass, design), and since 2010 acts as the curator of Collections of Modern and Contemporary Plastic Art at the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava.
Ján Kralovič
completed studies in art history at the Faculty of Philosophy of Trnava University. In his historical, critical, curatorial work, he specializes in a range of aspects of contemporary art. From 2012 to 2016 he undertook scholarly research in the Division of Visual and Cultural Studies of Research Centre at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where he currently lectures in the Department of the Theory and History of Art. He lectures on the history of Slovakia’s 20th-century art and of new media, and leads seminars on the theory and interpretation of works of art. In current research, he also deals with the issue of visual forms of the book. He regularly publishes reviews and studies in journals (Jazdec, Ostium, FlashArt, artalk.cz, Profil súčasného umenia, Vlna and others). In 2014 he published Teritórium ulica :Umenie akcie v mestskom priestore v rokoch 1965 – 1989 na Slovensku (The Territory of the Street : Action Art in Urban Space from 1965 to 1989 in Slovakia) and at the beginning of 2017 monograph on exhibitions in homes and activities in the “normalizations” period, titled Majstrovstvo za dverami: Majstrovstvá Bratislavy v posune artefaktu v kontexte bytových umeleckých stretnutí v 70. a 80. rokoch 20. storočia (Championship behind Door: Bratislava Championships in the Shift of Artefact 1979-1986 in the context of home exhibitions 1970s and 1980s)
Helena Markusková
From 1986 to 1991 she studied theory and cultural management at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. Since 1991, she has been the curator of the Ernest Zmeták Art Gallery in Nové Zámky. She focuses on contemporary Slovak, Hungarian and Czech art, alternative and intermedia tendencies. She realized several exhibitions of Lajos Kassák, in his honor and re-installations of his exhibitions. Since 1990 she has been collaborating with the performer József R. Juhász, the organizer of the Transart Communication festival of intermedia art. In 1999, she initiated the PERTU project focused on the search for analogies in contemporary Slovak and Hungarian art, implemented at two-year intervals. It represents a dialogue between two artists, dealing with the contextuality of works (László Fehér - Martin Knut, 1999, Milan Bočkay - Gyula Pauer, 2001, Július Koller - Sándor Pinczehelyi, 2003, Ádám Kéri - Juraj Meliš, 2005, Peter Bartoš - Tamás St.Auby, 2007, Klára Bočkayová - Zsófia Pittmann, 2009, Juraj Bartusz - István Nádler, 2011, Károly Hopp-Halász - Peter Rónai, 2013, Milan Dobeš - János Fajó, 2015, Emese Benczúr - Emőke Vargová, 2017, Endre Tót - Monogramista TD, 2019 ). She is engaged in publishing activities. Since 2018, she has been the director of the Ernest Zmeták Art Gallery in Nové Zámky.
Hungary
Kata Balázs is a Budapest-based art historian. She graduated in Art History and Hungarian Literature and Linguistics at ELTE Budapest and is currently working on obtaining her PhD from the same university. She held various scholarships at the Jagellonian University, Krakow and at the University of Florence where she took part in the catalogisation project of Charles de Tolnay’s archive and researched early 20th century art focusing on Central European artists and theoreticians in Tuscany. Apart from periods spent at Ludwig Museum, working as a junior researcher grantee at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences or taking part in the SSE Heritage Project in the UK, she taught at various schools and universities like the University of Film and Theatre, the Visart Art Academy (Ecole d'Art Maryse Eloy) the University in Eger. She has been working at acb ResearchLab since 2020. In her work, a special focus is placed on the art of the 1980s, photography and performance art and since recently, textile/fibre art.
Róna Kopeczky is a curator and art historian based in Budapest. She completed her PhD in Art History in 2013 at Sorbonne University, with a dissertation that examined the activity of a group of abstract artists in Hungary during the sixties which considered abstraction as an ethical attitude and a form of artistic protest against the communist regime and socialist realism.
She worked as a curator for international art in Ludwig Museum Budapest between 2006 and 2015, where she mostly focussed on the site- and situation specific practices of young and mid-career artists from the Central Eastern European region, such as Katarzyna Kozyra, Société Réaliste or Jasmina Cibic, and on conceptual practices of the older generation with retrospective exhibitions of Braco Dimitrijević and Agnes Denes.
In February 2015, she joined acb Gallery in Budapest as artistic director, and also actively contributes to the publishing activity of acb Research Lab, with a focus on forgotten, neglected or ignored oeuvres of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde. She participated in the organization of the first OFF-Biennále Budapest that took place in 2015 and was member of the curatorial team for its second edition held in Fall 2017. She is the co-founder of Easttopics, a platform and hub dedicated to contemporary art of Central Eastern Europe. She is also the curator of the next edition of the Tallinn Print Triennial, scheduled to open in early 2022 in Tallinn, Estonia.
Zsóka Leposa is a curator and art historian, currently based in Iceland. She studied art history at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and has a degree in German translation on the field of art history. Since 2017 she has been doing her PhD studies in Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (Dissertation: Abstraction In and Outside. Abstraction as Official Language of Modernism Under State Socialism). She has been working on the art field since 2005, among others as editor at the Hungarian National Gallery, project manager at the NGO tranzit.hu, and curator and museologist at Kiscell Museum – Municipal Gallery (part of the Budapest History Museum). She curated several exhibitions and edited academic publications. Since 2019 she has been living in Iceland and works as project manager of the museum collection and curator at LÁ Art Museum in Hveragerði, South Iceland.