Po strate istoty. Postkomunistická obraznosť v maliarstve: mýtus, pamäť a technológia v súčasnom stredo- a východoeurópskom umení
After the Certainty. Painting the Post-Communist Imaginary: Myth, Memory, and Technology in Contemporary Central and Eastern European Art

Summary/Abstract: This study examines contemporary painting in Central and Eastern Europe after 2000 as a key site for negotiating the post-communist imaginary under conditions of digitalization and technological acceleration. Focusing on selected artists, it argues that painting operates less as a representational medium than as an ontological and performative space in which inherited trauma, mythic structures, and platform-driven visuality intersect. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory, Roland Barthes’s and Hans Belting’s concepts of mediatized mythology, and Richard Coyne’s techno-romanticism—supplemented by Joselit, Steyerl, Groys, Rancière, Haraway, Braidotti, and others—the study proposes that these practices stage painting as a “stratified image”: layered, incomplete, posthuman, and structurally analogous to generative and algorithmic systems. Emotional tonality (melancholy, irony, ambivalent sensuality) is theorized as a form of affective intelligence that responds to post-socialist disorientation, the exhaustion of grand narratives, and the dematerialization of the image in AI-driven culture. By foregrounding fragmentation, situated knowledge, and “aesthetics of ruin,” the essay conceptualizes contemporary CEE painting as a metamodern practice “after certainty”: not a nostalgic return to medium-specificity, but a slow, materially insistent, and critically platform-aware mode of navigating memory, belief, and speculation in an oversaturated image world.

• Details
• Contents