10/03/2026
Przypominamy o najbliższym spotkaniu w ramach seminarium Instytut Sztuki PAN!
We warmly invite you to the next meeting of the seminar
"Art after 1945: New Research, New Methodologies"
19 March 2026 (Thursday), 18:00 CET | Online
Guest: Dr Maija Koskinen (University of Helsinki)
"Exhibiting Across Socialist Eurasia: Art, Mobility, and Cultural Diplomacy in the 1950s"
The 1958 Finnish Art Tour to the Soviet Union and China: An Unorthodox Cold War Itinerary
The presentation examines the 1958 Finnish art exhibition tour across the Soviet Union and China as an unorthodox case of Cold War cultural diplomacy and artistic mobility. Moving from Riga and the industrial city of Kuybyshev in the Middle Volga region to Beijing, Shanghai, and—ad hoc—Canton, the seven-month itinerary reveals how exhibition routes were shaped by both state frameworks and situational improvisation. Operating from a semi-peripheral Northern European position, Finland—a smaller state navigating between East and West—engaged the socialist cultural sphere while simultaneously expanding its global artistic reach. The tour generated dense professional encounters, ideological debates, and long-term networks that complicate conventional East–West narratives of postwar art exchange. Rather than a peripheral episode, the case invites us to reconsider Cold War exhibition history as a multi-directional and horizontal field of cultural negotiation in which also smaller actors played an active and shaping role.
Dr Maija Koskinen is an art historian specialising in exhibition history, the intersections of art, politics, and power, and the role of exhibitions in cultural diplomacy, with particular expertise in Cold War-era art exhibition diplomacy. Her doctoral dissertation (2019) examined Kunsthalle Helsinki’s exhibitions as politically embedded practices shaping Finnish art and its institutional context. In 2021–2024, she conducted research on Cold War cultural diplomacy and international art exhibition exchange from a Northern European perspective, including projects at the University of Turku and a Wihuri Foundation–funded individual fellowship. Currently, Koskinen is an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki (2025–2029), leading the project Art in Motion: Reframing Cold War Art Exhibition Diplomacy.
Format: Zoom
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/8483078653?pwd=PCaRmb7pMb9yXup7fCu7ezRtoHxKeF.1&omn=87914239161