[Commlist] CfP - Collecting/Creating: Archive-Based Moving Image in Eastern Europe and Beyond

*/Collecting/Creating: Archive-Based Moving Image in Eastern Europe and 
Beyond /- 8 and 9 October, Budapest*

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*Deadline for abstracts: 19 June, 2026*

*
*

Collecting Creating fejléc 2.jpg

The archive has emerged as one of the most productive, 
cross-disciplinary frameworks for understanding contemporary media 
ecology. It operates as a site of collection and preservation, and also 
as a generative stimulus to creative artistic practice within a rapidly 
transforming media landscape. While the “image” in the digital age is 
often characterised by its fundamental processuality – accessible, 
malleable, and endlessly reproducible – the archive continues to signal 
questions of materiality, institutional authority, and ideological 
charge. If the archive “presents itself as the ultimate horizon of 
experience” (Callahan 2022), how does this horizon operate for artists 
working within precarious archival infrastructures? How can artists 
negotiate the potentials and limits of the archive across different 
geopolitical and institutional contexts in Eastern Europe and beyond?

This conference seeks to examine how artists and archivists mobilise 
visual media (ranging from state produced visuals to home movies and 
family photographs) to reanimate the archive. It asks whether thinking 
in terms of a distinct Eastern European archive-based art is productive, 
and if so, how this perspective might help reveal the particular 
conditions, practices, and creative interventions that shape engagement 
with archival materials in precarious contexts.

Post-cinematic media contribute “in actively re-shaping our inherited 
cultural forms, our established forms of subjectivity, and our embodied 
sensibilities” (Shaviro 2024), which compel us to reconsider the recent 
shifts in cultural logics and practices of producing, processing, and 
circulating images. While archive based artwork– including installation, 
found footage film, soundscape, performance, and digital interfaces – 
has been widely discussed for its formal elements and its ability to 
bring forward marginalised histories, significantly less attention has 
been paid to the intermedial aspects, ”the possible relations of 
transformation, transgression, and negotiation of media borders” 
(Grishakova 2024). This conference strives to position artistic 
engagement with the archive within the new sensuality of the emerging 
digital landscape, which redefines the intermedial and cultural-economic 
conditions of the artistic and vernacular processing of audiovisual 
heritage, and underscores the intertwined labour of artists and 
archivists in shaping what can be seen and reimagined.


In conjunction with the conference, a special screening by Hungarian 
media artist Péter Forgács and a public conversation with the artist 
will offer an opportunity to reflect on the practical and conceptual 
dimensions of archive-based art. While the conference aims to explore 
archive-driven artistic practices from an international perspective, 
this event highlights Forgács’s work as a significant point of reference 
within the broader landscape of media art. We particularly welcome 
contributions that place his practice in dialogue with other artistic 
and archival traditions, especially from Central and Eastern Europe and 
beyond, in order to foster comparative and transnational perspectives on 
the uses of archives in contemporary art.

**

*Keynote: *Oksana Sarkisova (Blinken OSA Archivum/Central European 
University)

Topics to discuss and analyse archive-based intermedial works may 
include, but are certainly not limited to:

· Collecting and creating in the post-cinematic age

· Dialogues between the archive and research-based art practice

· Digitisation and the transformation of archival labour

· Eastern European archival ecologies in transnational perspective

· Comparative perspective on audiovisual archives in precarious contexts

· Archiving, selection, and ethics in artistic and curatorial practice

· Transnational perspectives on archive-based art from Eastern Europe

· Works of Péter Forgács in the cross-section of media art, home movie 
heritage, and other artistic practices

· Comparative analysis of found footage films reworking public and 
private archives

· Remediation and intermediality in archive-based moving image

· Archive-based moving image and exhibition contexts: museums, 
galleries, festivals, and online spaces

· Materiality, instability, and the sensory dimensions of archives

We welcome submissions for individual twenty-minute presentations as 
well as for full panels and workshops. Proposals should be no more than 
*300 words*, accompanied by an *indicative bibliography* and a *brief 
third-person biography*.

Please send your proposals by filling in this form: SUBMISSION FORM

For submitting *panels *of 3 or 4 presentations, please send an email to 
the conference contact address. *Deadline for submissions: June 19, 2026. *


We aim to notify you about our decisions regarding the proposals by: 
*July 3, 2026 *(feel free to request an earlier reply if you submit 
before the final deadline and need it in order to apply for 
funding).**In case you have any questions, contact us at: 
(collectingcreating /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(collectingcreating /at/ gmail.com)>

It is intended that a peer-reviewed volume and a scholarly journal issue 
will be edited from selected conference papers.

**

*Organising institutions: *Hungarian Society for Film Studies (MFT), 
hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University 
(Budapest).

**

*Partners: *Blinken OSA Archivum. Participants of the conference will be 
invited to a special guided tour of the archive.

**

*Conference committee (convenors): *Ervin Török (University of Szeged), 
Beja Margitházi (ELTE), Lucy Szemetová (IAS), Melinda Blos-Jáni 
(Sapientia University).


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