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Contemporary artists rewriting the story of Central and Eastern Europe

For decades, Central and Eastern Europe has often been portrayed through narrow visualizations of communist relics, poverty and conflict. Today, however, a new generation of artists is reclaiming the narrative, offering more complex and personal perspectives that challenge long-held stereotypes and reshape how the region is understood at home and abroad.

September 11, 2026 - Zula Rabikowska - Issue 5 2026MagazineStories and ideas

Since moving to the UK from Poland in 2001, this is a phrase the artist, Zula Rabikowska, has heard again and again, and still hears today. This project is a creative response to strangers, and sometimes colleagues or friends, offering unsolicited comments and advice about her accent, comments that end up questioning her sense of self, belonging and identity. Source: Zula Rabikowska, But Your English is So Good (2026)

There is a new wave of visual artists who use photography, video and performance to challenge out-of-date stereotypes of countries that were once behind the so-called Iron Curtain. Visual tropes of babushkas with fur hats, chickens, harsh winters, communist architecture and poverty have been exhausted by photojournalists and photographers in the last few decades. This reductive visual approach was often reflected in works of American or British photographers who would be, often literally, parachuted in to document conflict zones whilst the region pulled itself up by the bootstraps and out of Soviet domination.

Unfortunately, to this day the understanding of this complex region is frequently reduced to its occupation by the USSR, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. What often surprises Central and Eastern European diasporas living in the United Kingdom or the United States, is the extent to which these reductive stereotypes and limited understanding underpin social imagination and political or economic decisions.

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