Columbia University in the City of New York

Harriman Institute

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Spartakiada image. Image links to event page.

Date

Location

Reaching the Masses Through Sports: Visual Propaganda of Spartakiads in Central and Eastern Europe, 1920s-1930s
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Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on February 14, 2025 in order to attend this event.

Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Przemysław Strożek. Moderated by Aleksandar Bošković.

In 1921, the first Spartakiad was organized in Prague, and subsequently in 1928, the first All-Union Spartakiad in Moscow, while the 1928 edition in Prague and 1931 edition in Berlin were cancelled due to political reasons. Contrary to the Olympic Games, these events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilizing workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This talk examines the visual propaganda of the realized and unrealized Spartakiads expressed through prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, and photographs. It emphasizes the significance of Spartakiads as the biggest cultural mass-events for workers, and a counter-Olympic events, as visualized by avant-garde and modernist artists from Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary.

Przemysław Strożek is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences and an Associate Researcher and curator at the Archiv der Avantgarden, Dresden. He was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Georgia, a fellow at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, recipient of a Korea Foundation fellowship in Seoul and Japan Foundation in Tokyo. He is the author of several dozen academic articles, and published extensively his research on sport and the avant-garde, as well as on sport and contemporary art. Together with Andreas Kramer he has co-edited “Sport and the European Avant-Garde (1900–1945)” (Brill: 2021), and published a monograph “Picturing the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads. Modernist and Avant-Garde Engagement with Sport in Central Europe and the USSR (1920-1932)” (Routledge: 2022). Currently, he is a Kosciuszko Foundation Fellow at the University of California Riverside working on Eastern European Art at the Olympic Art Exhibition in Los Angeles (1932)

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