CEED (Central Eastern European and Diasporic) Feminisms Bibliography

To order your free copy of the bibliography, please visit the Cell Project Space website.

Alternatively, view the digital copy on the Art Practices and British Central Eastern European Diaspora Research Group page.

The CEED (Central Eastern European and Diasporic) Feminisms Bibliography distils conversations and references offered by the Art Practices and British Central Eastern European Diaspora Research Group, comprising over 40 practitioners based in and beyond the UK, who participated in a British Art Network supported programme after joining the project through an open call in May 2023. Mapping CEED Feminisms for English readers, the bibliography highlights CEE feminist artists and writers who are under-acknowledged in Anglo-American feminist discourses, expanding upon the concerns of the CEED Feminisms event programme and adjacent conversations.

Embracing wom*n-led practices and organising before and under state socialisms, as well as academic and non-academic feminisms from the ‘region’ emerging after independence, the bibliography sketches a constellation of urgent and ongoing feminist and decolonial conversations that decentre Western feminism. Its sprawling form and content questions the scope of ‘CEED Feminisms’, problematising ‘Central Eastern Europe’ as a container for enormous cultural diversity and contextualising feminist discourses bound to post/state socialism, anti/imperialism and de/colonialism.

Aiming to share and pass on the CEED Feminisms research network’s conversations, the impetus for the bibliography responds to an asymmetry in the translation and circulation of feminist writing coming from Central Eastern Europe, or by writers in the diaspora, with many more feminist texts travelling West to East historically. Copies will be distributed to a number of libraries across the UK and in Central Eastern Europe.

The CEED Feminisms Bibliography launch event took place on Wednesday 15 May at Biblioteka, a reference library originally from Kyiv located on the ground floor of the Architectural Association. Free copies of the printed bibliography were distributed and the essay The Role You Made Me Play: About Unobvious Difficulties of Studying Eastern European Art (2022) by Ukrainian curator and scholar Asia Tsisar was read out loud by participants of the event. Tsisar’s thought provoking text opened a conversation about the stakes of representing ‘Central Eastern European’ art and feminist practice that was continued informally with drinks.

Curated by Jessie Krish, with Adomas Narkevičius, Helena Reckitt and Sabrina Fuller.