Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Art History and Theory at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). Debeusscher received her PhD in Art History from the University of Barcelona and the University of Grenoble Alpes (2021), with a thesis entitled “The Circulation of Unofficial Art from Central Europe beyond the Iron Curtain: Exhibitions and Transnational Networks between 1971 and 1981”, completed under the supervision of Paula Barreiro López (UGA) and Laia Manonelles (UB). She was awarded a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish government (2016-2020), associated with the project MoDe(s). Modernidad(s) Descentralizada(s).
In 2021, she was a Paris x Rome postdoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome and the German Center for Art History Paris (Max Weber Foundation–German Humanities Institutes Abroad (MWS) with a project about the Italian critic and art historian Enrico Crispolti and his involvement in cultural decentering and participatory art in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. She was also the recipient of a grant to support creation from the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (2010).
Her research focuses on artistic exchanges in Europe during the Cold War, with particular attention to the history of exhibitions and transnational circulations between the countries of the socialist bloc and Southern Europe. She has participated in numerous conferences and seminars, and is the author of articles and essays, published in the edited books 1959-1985, au prisme de la Biennale de Paris (INHA, to be published early 2022), Atlántico Frío. Redes transnacionales del Arte y la política en los tiempos del Telón de Acero (Brumaria, 2019) and Media and the Cold War in the 1980s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), as well as in the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.
She also co-edited with Paula Barreiro López a special issue of the journal REGAC (Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo) dedicated to “Cold War networks and circulations: Cross-cultural Dialogues and Practices throughout the Global South (1957-1991)” (2017-2018).
Publications
J.Debeusscher, “From Cultural Diplomacy to Artistic and Curatorial Experimentation: The Paris Youth Biennale between 1965 and 1973“, in 24 Arguments, Early Encounters in Romanian Neo-Avant-Garde (exhibition-dossier), Institutul Prezentului, October 2020.
J. Debeusscher, “Traveling images and words: Czech action art through the lens of exhibitions and art criticism in Western Europe”, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. Special issue “Photo-Performance, Performance Photography in Real Existing Socialisms”, edited by Katalin Cseh, Vol. 27, 2019.
J. Debeusscher, “Debates en torno al Disenso: el arte del bloque soviético en la Bienal de Venecia de 1977”, in Barreiro López, Paula (ed.), Atlántico Frío. Historias transnacionales del arte y la política en los tiempos del Telón de Acero. Brumaria, Madrid, 2019, pp. 413-443.
Barreiro López, P. y Debeusscher, J. (eds.), “Cold War networks and circulations: Cross-cultural Dialogues and Practices throughout the Global South (1957-1991)”, REGAC (Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo), vol. 5, n°1, 2017-2018.
J. Debeusscher, “Mediating Alternative Culture: Two Controversial Exhibitions in 1980s Hungary”, in Bastiansen, Henrik G., Klimke, Martin and Werenskjold, Rolf (eds.), Media and the Cold War in the 1980s. Between Star Wars and Glasnost, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 161-188.
J. Debeusscher, “Dialogues engagés au travers du Rideau de fer: Raoul-Jean Moulin et Jindřich Chalupecký”, in Kramer-Mallordy, Antje (dir.), 1968 : la critique d’art, la politique et le pouvoir, online publication of the seminar organized by the PRISME program (Sept. 2018), Archives de la critique d’art, Université Rennes 2.
J. Debeusscher, “Information Crossings. On the case of The Fighting City”, in Afterall, n°31, October 2012, 72-83.
J. Debeusscher, “Retroavantgarde – Vertiginous forms of representation”, in Suzana Milevska (ed.), The Renaming Machine, Ljubljana : PARASITE Institute, 2010, 186-194.
