Explore how Communist-era regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia reshaped cultural heritage through nationalization, confiscation, and restitution of museum collections. Cases span Poland to Uzbekistan.

The workshop focuses on museums and collections from the Communist-era regimes in Poland, East Germany, as well as in Slovenia and Croatia, representing cases from historical Yugoslavia. It also examines collections in Uzbekistan and Georgia, considered from a broader historical perspective that includes their incorporation into the Russian Empire and, later, the Soviet Union.

Across these contexts, the presentations explore how political regimes transformed cultural property through mass nationalization, the alienation of private collections, state confiscations, sales of seized assets, and subsequent restitution efforts.

Programme

• 14.00 Nino Simonishvili | Institute of Art History and Theory at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Georgia:
  The Value of Collecting, Preserving and Displaying Artifacts in Georgia’s Changing Political Context.
• 14:50 Ewa Manikowska | Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw:
  Taking the Property of "the Others". Explaining Nationalisations of Cultural Assets in Poland.
• 15:30 Tanja Trška | University of Zagreb:
  Transformations, alienation and reappraisal of art collections in former Yugoslavia: case studies and research perspectives in Slovenia and Croatia.
• 16:10 Julia Kretzschmann | Technische Universität Berlin:
  Expropriation and Utilization for Foreign Currency: The Acquisition of Cultural Property in the GDR.
• 16:50 Svetlana Gorshenina | EUR'ORBEM, CNRS, Paris:
  The Genesis of Central Asian Collections and the Politics of Restitution: Blind Spots in Contemporary Debates in Uzbekistan.

Please feel free to send the invitation to those of your colleagues who might be interested.

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This workshop, supported by the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) and the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen), is part of the 2024–2025 series "Curating in Times of Crisis: A Transregional Research Network Connecting the Baltic, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia".