About

Beáta Hock studied art theory and comparative literature at the Eötvös Lóránd University inBudapest. From 1998 to 2002, she held a research fellowship at the Artpool Art Research Center in Budapest. She received her MA und PhD degrees in Comparative Gender Studies from the Central European University Budapest (2001-2008).  Her doctoral thesis dealt with women in filmmaking and the visual arts in state-socialist and postsocialist Hungary. She carried out study and research stays at Beloit College, USA; the Humboldt University of Berlin; and the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. She has been a Visiting Professor at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2015/16) and the University of Vienna (2021/22). In the academic year 2023/24, she is Acting Chair of Eastern European Art History at the Institute of Art and Visual History (Humboldt University of Berlin).

 Beáta Hock has been a researcher at the GWZO since 2011. She has worked within the project groups “East-Central Europe from Transnational Perspectives” and “Cultural Icons of East-Central Europe”.  Since 2017, she has been in the department “Entanglements and Globalization”. From 2022 to 2024 is leading the Traveling Seminars Project “Linking (Art) Worlds: American Art and Eastern Europe in the Cold War and Since”. She is currently on leave.

Work focus

  • The cultural dimensions of the global Cold War
  • Roma contemporary art
  • Cultural circuits and the global contemporary
  • Race and ethnicity in East European art and exhibition history; decolonial museology

Kuratorische Tätigkeit

  • »Left Performance Histories« (2018 Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin), kuratiert gemeinsam mit dem DFG-geförderten Netzwerk »Aktionskunst jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs«
  • »Agents and Provocateurs« (2009 ICA Dunaújváros, Ungarn, Hartware Mediumkunstverein, Dortmund), kuratiert gemeinsam mit Franciska Zolyom

Functions (on committees)/memberships

  • Member of German Association for Art History
  • Member of the editorial board of ARTMargins: Art - Curating - Media - Politics - Transition, MIT Press (2012-2014)
  • Member of the DFG Research Network “Action Art on Either Side of the Iron Curtain” [[»Aktionskunst jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs«] (2015–2018)

 

Series editorship

  • General editor of “The Cultural History of the Avantgarde in Central and Eastern Europe”, I-IV. (Brill Publishing)
  • Co-editor of “Praesens: Central European Contemporary Art Review” (2003–2006, Budapest)

Teaching

Beáta Hock has taught at the Central European University and at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest as well as at the Global and European Studies Institutes of the University of Leipzig.

Current topic of research

The research provides a critical analysis of the motives driving some transnationally active funding bodies to ensure the continued production and the global distribution of contemporary art from East-Central Europe.

read more

The art scenes of the postwar United States and Eastern Europe have been rarely viewed within a shared framework. Rather, art history writing has captured the post-war decades in terms of an ultimate difference between artistic styles and cultural politics in the two opposing political blocs.

read more