Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe

Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe investigates visual cultural projects in Europe from the 1970s onwards in response to industrial closures, resultant unemployment, diminished social services and shattered identities. Typically, art and visual cultural creations at one-time thriving European heartlands strive to make the industrial past visible, negotiable, and re-imaginable. Authors discuss varied and multiple types of art and visual culture that remember the sometimes-invisible past, create community in the face of social disintegration, and navigate the dissonance between past and present material reality. They also examine art and visual objects at post-industrial European sites for their aesthetic, historical, and sociological role within official and unofficial, government and community regeneration and re-vitalisation efforts. Sites range from former coal and steel plants in Duisburg, through shipyards and harbours of Gdansk and Hamburg, a Moscow paper factory and textile factories in Albania, to still-functioning Croatian metalworks.

Frances Guerin teaches film and visual culture at University of Kent. She is author of A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (2005), Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (2012), The Truth is Always Grey: A History of Modernist Painting (2018), all University of Minnesota Press. Her most recent book Jacqueline Humphries (2022) was published by Lund Humphries. Magda Szczesniak is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. Author of Normy widzialnosci. Tozsamosc w czasach transformacji [Norms of Visuality. Identity in Times of Transition, 2016] and Poruszeni. Awans i emocje w socjalistycznej Polsce [Feeling Moved. Upward Mobility and Emotions in Socialist Poland, 2023].