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Art

Shadows Before Sunrise: Nataliia Maiboroda and the Veps

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 27/07/2026 12:15 PM

A woman stands knee-deep in snow. Red headscarf, dark coat, hands folded in front of her. She’s looking somewhere beyond the frame, past the frost-covered forest, past the grey winter sky. The image is from Nataliia Maiboroda’s *Shadows Before Sunrise*, shot in December 2021 in the villages of the Veps, one of the region’s smallest […] Read More

Talks and Events

The Eastern European art events happening this August you won’t want to miss

BY Elena Demireva POSTED 20/07/2026 12:22 PM

We hope you’ve all been having a magical summer and to make sure you know exactly where you can go to feel a sense of bleonging and explore culture, we’ve curated a list of Eastern European artists you should know and where to see them this August in London and Edinburgh. In London: […] Read More

Reviews

How Bulgarian literature offered us a story western fiction never could

BY Elena Demireva POSTED 06/07/2026 2:38 PM

This year, She Who Remains – a short novel by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel – was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. The book was highlighted as one of the “Must-Read Books” on Dua Lipa’s book club Service 95, and literary critic Jack Edwards chose it as his “personal winner, in fact, a new favourite book of all time.” Dark, lyrical and spellbinding, it is a previously […] Read More

Reviews, Theatre

A Lightness Worthy of Nureyev: Martin ten Kortenaar in Nureyev at Staatsballett Berlin

BY Yulia Simic POSTED 04/07/2026 5:09 PM

When Staatsballett Berlin brought Nureyev to the Deutsche Oper Berlin, it was much more than the arrival of a celebrated ballet outside Russia for the first time. It was a reclamation of an artist whose life and identity remain inseparable from the history of twentieth-century dance. Kirill Serebrennikov’s production, with choreography by Yuri Possokhov, avoids […] Read More

Art

TuRist: Travel, Symbol, and the Aesthetics of Disquiet

BY Izba Arts POSTED 11/06/2026 11:32 AM

TuRist’s practice is rooted in movement, observation, and a desire to turn lived experience into visual form. Across painting and sculptural work, the artist builds a language shaped by travel, memory, and a strong sense of personal authorship. What emerges is a practice that is direct, image-led, and deliberately unafraid of conviction. At the centre […] Read More

Art

BLIN GAZETA: DISPLACEMENT, DUALITY, AND THE IN-BETWEEN

BY Margarita Makhanova POSTED 10/06/2026 4:02 PM

Keeping an eye out for new magazines, the IZBA Arts team came across Blin Gazeta, which features works of Slavic and Post-Soviet artists. ‘Gazeta’, translated from Russian, means ‘newspaper’, while ‘blin’ is a bit more interesting, meaning both ‘crêpe’ and ‘crap’ (or to be more precise, “Pancake/crepe/blini and minced oath, colloquial, Damnit! or Darn!”). Last […] Read More

Art, News

Imagination of Time: Mikheil Gogava at the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art

BY Izba Arts POSTED 09/06/2026 11:45 AM

At the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art in Tbilisi, Mikheil Gogava’s solo exhibition Imagination of Time (20 April–2 June) asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to remember, when memory itself refuses to stay still? Gogava, a Georgian artist with more than twenty years of practice, has long worked at the intersection […] Read More

Art

Privileged Enough to Enter, Not Quite Enough to Belong

BY Elena Demireva POSTED 08/06/2026 4:09 PM

It’s getting harder to be an immigrant, a woman, and a creative. The very characteristics that determine my identity – being an immigrant, a woman, and a professional in the creative industry – are also the traits that make me most vulnerable in 2026 as I navigate life in London’s changing political landscape. I moved […] Read More

Music, Reviews

Dance Around the World Without Leaving London

BY Elena Demireva POSTED 26/05/2026 10:42 AM

Dance around the world without leaving London In the UK’s unsettling climate toward immigrants, an urgent longing for connection, empathy and shared memory is born. A dance party in Stratford brings back Slavic disco, Eurodance, and Balkan turbofolk from the dyskotekas, family gatherings, and worn-out tapes of a generation’s childhood. Dance around the world without […] Read More

Art

Wandering Through Concrete and Light: The Transient Geometries of Natasha Navasardian

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 24/05/2026 11:45 AM

An exploration of the photographer’s practice as she navigates work, life, and quiet moments across the cities along her journey, from the linear blocks of New York to the galleries of London and Seoul. Modern cities are built for speed. In the constant rush of daily life, our eyes tend to glide over surfaces without […] Read More

Reviews, Theatre

Masks Without Mystery: Netrebko Leads a Musically Strong Un ballo in maschera in Berlin

BY Yulia Simic POSTED 21/04/2026 10:41 AM

Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, set to a libretto by Antonio Somma, remains one of the composer’s most politically and dramaturgically compromised works, shaped decisively by nineteenth-century censorship. Originally conceived around the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden, the opera was forced into an alternative colonial American setting, yet it retains the essential […] Read More

Art, News

Danaia Konstantinova and the Contemporary Politics of Memory

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 20/04/2026 10:05 AM

At a moment when contemporary image culture is increasingly defined by speed, excess, and disposability, Danaia Konstantinova’s practice offers a deliberate counter-position. Working primarily through analogue and craft-based photographic processes, the London-based artist uses material experimentation not as nostalgic gesture, but as a precise contemporary language for examining memory, migration, and the unstable construction of […] Read More

Art, Talks and Events, Theatre

Drop-In: spring equinox and Eastern European art

BY Izba Arts POSTED 20/03/2026 5:23 PM

From March 20th to the 22th, Izba Arts present a brand new festival and exhibition of works at Drop-In from across the former Eastern Bloc focused around belonging, myth and renewal. Weaving together stories old and new through a series of films, performances, paintings and interactive installations, the show brings together artists reclaiming and reimagining […] Read More

Art, Talks and Events, Theatre

The Claustrophobia of the Inner Critic: Revolt at Battersea Arts Centre

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 18/03/2026 7:07 PM

There is a particular kind of silence that precedes self-destruction – not the silence of peace, but of a clock winding down. It was this silence that filled the Battersea Arts Centre on 11 March, as Revolt premiered as part of London’s Borough of Culture festival. At its core, Revolt stages the most intimate and […] Read More

Art, Talks and Events

Through Her Eyes: Three Women Artists Explore Childhood, Play, and Perception

BY Natalia Andreeva POSTED 17/03/2026 7:22 PM

Through Her Eyes, an exhibition presented by The Kult Talk at Friendly Grounds in London, brings together three contemporary artists: Anna Kiparis, Tatiana Fetisova, and Olga Bonitas – whose work transforms personal experience into distinct visual languages. Running from 3 March to 4 April 2026, the project explores themes such as motherhood, childhood, play, and […] Read More

Music, Talks and Events

Music of Our Time: Contemporary Piano at Bechstein Hall

BY Natalia Andreeva POSTED 16/03/2026 7:32 PM

There is something particular about a room that is genuinely listening. Not the polite stillness of a classical concert, where silence is convention, but something closer to absorption — a collective leaning in. On 14 March, under the soft starlit ceiling of Bechstein Hall, that quality of attention held the room from the first note […] Read More

Art

Love Has Not Died. It Has Changed Its Language

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 13/03/2026 11:11 AM

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport…” There was a time when that line from Love Actually felt disarmingly tender. Today, it sounds almost provocative. The world has grown louder, more anxious, more brittle. We discuss crises, fractures and cultural fatigue with fluency. […] Read More

Art, Talks and Events, Theatre

Battersea Arts Centre: on ritual and a home renewed – equinox, maslenitsa and the in-between

BY Izba Arts POSTED 07/03/2026 9:29 PM

From March 9th to the 13th, Battersea Arts Centre and Izba Arts present an exhibition of works from across the former Eastern Bloc focused around belonging, myth and renewal. Weaving together stories old and new through a series of films, performances, paintings and interactive installations, the show brings together artists reclaiming and reimagining Eastness and […] Read More

Art, Art Market

Development, Explosion and Decay. Maks Shevchenko and His Diagnosis of Decline

BY Оskar Сzapiewski POSTED 27/02/2026 7:12 AM

The exhibition Entropy by Maks Shevchenko was presented at Espacio Art Gallery, London, 13-15 December in 2025 From Coloured Dots to the Atomic Bomb The dot in the language of modernist art has a deep and rich tradition. Pointillism, a movement of the second half of the nineteenth century emerging from Impressionism, became a symbol […] Read More

Art

On Gesture and Participation: Upside Down in Vienna

BY Izba Arts POSTED 26/01/2026 10:11 AM

After the moving success of Requiem — Toolip Art Gallery’s cycle-closing homage to Mozart in December 2025 — the Vienna-based gallery begins 2026 with a new group exhibition: Upside Down. Bringing together a range of international artists, Upside Down explores what happens when the familiar is disrupted — when perception shifts, and the world quite […] Read More

Art, Exhibition, Reviews

Life, Death, and Digital Dreams: Maya Yaroshenko at Milan’s Abstract in Motion

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 15/12/2025 1:58 PM

Milan has long been a city that negotiates the tension between old worlds and emerging artistic futures. This December, from 2 to 7 December, Art Gallery Finestreria hosts Abstract in Motion, a group exhibition uniting twelve artists investigating abstraction not as a style, but as a state of becoming. Among them, Maya Yaroshenko offers a […] Read More

Art, Exhibition

A Dialogue with Malevich and the Black Hole

BY Elena Smorodinova POSTED 14/12/2025 1:15 PM

Until the end of December, Maxim Boxer Gallery presents Bipolarisation, an exhibition by Semen Khanin and Artur Virtmanis. This project by a small conceptual gallery founded by curator Maxim Bokser carries particular significance for Riga, not only because of its artistic ambition, but because of the intellectual and perceptual risks it is willing to take. […] Read More

Art, Exhibition

Before and After the Gallery: After Art, Will, Save, Us

BY Izba Arts POSTED 11/12/2025 11:30 AM

Now closed, Art, Will, Save, Us leaves behind the trace of an exhibition that asked not what viewers saw, but what they carried away with them. Presented at Toolip Gallery in Vienna, the collective show brought together forty-four local and international artists and unfolded less as a conventional exhibition than as a proposition. Art here […] Read More

Art

Curatorial recommendation: 5 reads that helped shape the understanding of what curation is.

BY Margarita Makhanova POSTED 22/11/2025 2:01 PM

In one of the episodes of a ‘Curating Tools’ podcast hosted by Call for Curators and Node Centre for Curatorial Studies, one of the guests said that you don’t necessarily need an academic background to be a curator. Your own background determines your curatorial specialisation. Having received a formal education in creative events management, I […] Read More

Art

Traces of Touch: The Living Archive by Parks Sadler

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 18/11/2025 9:52 AM

In the former Eastern Bloc region, artists and researchers working with archives often explore silence as well as what’s present — what was hidden, censored, or deemed unworthy of remembrance? For London-based interdisciplinary artist Parks Sadler, who spent a formative period in Wrocław, Poland, the act of remembering becomes a radical gesture. Their practice — […] Read More

Calendar

August 2026

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Eastern European Art Week Guide

Read our current Art Week guide here, also view previous issues

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World's leading platform for culture from the Bloc

New exhibition featuring intimate gateways for mid-season

Zeitgeist of the Mongrel Child - a love letter to a bygone era of the Eastern Bloc

Rachmaninoff reimagined by Teodor Doré

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Want to reach new audiences: we can help

Shadows Before Sunrise: Nataliia Maiboroda and the Veps

The Eastern European art events happening this August you won’t want to miss

How Bulgarian literature offered us a story western fiction never could

A Lightness Worthy of Nureyev: Martin ten Kortenaar in Nureyev at Staatsballett Berlin

TuRist: Travel, Symbol, and the Aesthetics of Disquiet

BLIN GAZETA: DISPLACEMENT, DUALITY, AND THE IN-BETWEEN

Imagination of Time: Mikheil Gogava at the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art

Privileged Enough to Enter, Not Quite Enough to Belong

Dance Around the World Without Leaving London

Wandering Through Concrete and Light: The Transient Geometries of Natasha Navasardian

Masks Without Mystery: Netrebko Leads a Musically Strong Un ballo in maschera in Berlin

Danaia Konstantinova and the Contemporary Politics of Memory

Drop-In: spring equinox and Eastern European art

The Claustrophobia of the Inner Critic: Revolt at Battersea Arts Centre

Through Her Eyes: Three Women Artists Explore Childhood, Play, and Perception

Music of Our Time: Contemporary Piano at Bechstein Hall

Love Has Not Died. It Has Changed Its Language

Battersea Arts Centre: on ritual and a home renewed – equinox, maslenitsa and the in-between

Development, Explosion and Decay. Maks Shevchenko and His Diagnosis of Decline

On Gesture and Participation: Upside Down in Vienna

Life, Death, and Digital Dreams: Maya Yaroshenko at Milan’s Abstract in Motion

A Dialogue with Malevich and the Black Hole

Before and After the Gallery: After Art, Will, Save, Us

Curatorial recommendation: 5 reads that helped shape the understanding of what curation is.

Traces of Touch: The Living Archive by Parks Sadler

August 2026