Maja and Reuben Fowkes are London-based curators, critics and art historians specialised in East European art history and contemporary art and ecology.
They are authors of Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (World of Art), published by Thames & Hudson in March 2020, the "first ever comprehensive, transnational survey of the major movements and practitioners of recent art from Central and Eastern Europe."
They are co-directors of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art, a centre for transnational research into East European art and ecology that operates across the disciplinary boundaries of art history, contemporary art and ecological thought.
They head the Post-socialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.
They are founding members of the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative (EAH) at Central European University.
Art and ecology
Their extensive publications in the field of art and ecology are archived on Translocal Institute.
They have curated symposia and artist talks at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL, including on the Biopolitics of the Plasticene exploring artistic interventions in a plasticised world, and a discussion event on the Turbulent Geohistories of Sugar.
They are curators of the Experimental Reading Room, designed to create a space to interact, experiment, learn and dream our way to a new orientation towards ecological awareness in contemporary art and society and has been held in venues in Budapest, Vienna, Glasgow, Miami and London.
Their Danube River School brought together artists, writers, environmental historians and anthropologists for a series of symposiums, exhibitions and excursions into wilderness and resulted in the publication River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube (2015).
Their work within the field of environmental art history has included a chapter entitled 'Cracks in the Planet: Geo-ecological Matter in East European Art,' in Extending the Dialogue and an article on 'The Primeval Cosmic River and its Ecological Realities: On the curatorial project Danube River School (2013-2015),' in the journal Geohumanities.
Interviews about their recent publications and work on the issue of art in the Anthropocene appeared on Mezosfera and the Anthropocene Index.
Their contribution to the edited volume Curating Subjects III – Curating Research (2014) was a chapter on ‘Renewing the Curatorial Refrain: Sustainable Research in Contemporary Art.’
Their Danube River School project between 2013 and 2015 brought together artists, writers, environmental historians and anthropologists for a series of symposiums, exhibitions and excursions into wilderness and resulted in the publication River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube (2015),
They are contributors to the Post-Human Glossary (2016).
They have lectured widely on art and ecology including at Modern Art Oxford, Aarhus Kunstbygning, De Appel, Pav Turino, Bratislava Art Academy, MIT, and Museum Sztuki Lodz.
East European art
A major focus of their work is on researching East European art since 1945 and contemporary East European art.
They are co-directors of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories funded international programme Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History based at the Post-socialist Art Centre (PACT, UCL.
They are co-authors of the Thames & Hudson World of Art series book on Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950, the first of its kind to survey the art of the region from the Second World War till today.
Maja Fowkes is the author of The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (2015).
Their publications on East European art include two special issues of Third Text, the first on 'Socialist Eastern Europe' (2009), the second on ‘Actually Existing Artworlds under Socialism’ (2018).
Their performative lecture Points East: An Artworld, a City and a Continent in Transformation, held at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) Glasgow in November 2019 restaged a seminal meeting of critics, artists and art historians at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre in December 1990.
Their article 'Placing Bookmarks: The Institutionalisation and De-Institutionalisation of Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde and Contemporary Art' on the role of collectors, global museums and art historians in forming art historical narratives appeared in Tate Papers in 2016.