Katalin Cseh-Varga Receives Project Funds from the Austrian Science Fund

Katalin Cseh-Varga, alumna of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, has received a grant towards her three-year postdoctoral project. The Austrian Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research (FWF) will support her project "Hinter dem Kunstwerk [= Behind the Artwork]" at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna within the framework of the Hertha Firnberg Program for postdoctoral researchers with approximately 230,000 euros. Last year, Cseh-Varga was supported by a postdoctoral start-up Scholarship of the Graduate School.

In its recent session, the FWF Board of Trustees has decided to approve, in its Hertha Firnberg program, the proposed funding for the project "Behind the Artwork" (T1074) by the theater scholar Katalin Cseh-Varga. In this project, Cseh-Varga will investigate the transfer of artistic experience and knowledge between the blocs of the Cold War in the coming years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

The central research question is how the art movements of western Europe influenced the unofficial and semi-official artists east of the Iron Curtain. At the same time, it is important to examine how these, in turn, were able to modify new artistic ideas and transport their own ideas to the West. The project focuses on the countries of Central Europe and examines the general theoretical and methodological transfer processes of the countries Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in case studies. With her transfer-historical approach, Cseh-Varga questions the seemingly fixed boundaries of the bipolar world of the Cold War between 1956 and 1990.

Last year, Cseh-Varga was supported by a postdoctoral start-up scholarship of the Graduate School. She had already completed her PhD project "Rebellious (Game) Spaces and Underground Networks" in 2016. 'Second public' of the Hungarian Avant Garde" deals with the networking of East-Central European intellectuals in artistic parallel cultures.