Adrienn Kácsor (PhD 2023, Northwestern University) is a scholar of modern and contemporary art and theory, with a geographic focus spanning from East Europe to Central Asia. Both in her research and teaching, Adrienn is interested in the multifold (neo)imperial, (post)colonial and ethno-racial histories of modern and contemporary art, as well as in the global circulation and transcultural migration of artists, artworks, exhibitions, and aesthetic theories in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Adrienn is completing her book manuscript, titled Revolutionary Accents: Hungarian Artists in the Service of Soviet Internationalism, 1919-1956, which investigates the visual culture of mass migrations, multilingualism, and linguistic “otherness” in the aftermath of the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires. Considering accent as a visual phenomenon, her research posits foreign accents as a form of linguistic defamiliarization, yet as one that structurally diverts from the more familiar avant-garde gestures of linguistic estrangement.
Her research has been supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship hosted by the Bauhaus University in Weimar (2024-26); a residential research fellowship at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2021-23); two Mellon awards by the Social Science Research Council (2020-21) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (2018-19); and a research grant by the Getty Museum Research Library in Los Angeles (2019), among others.
Adrienn is most interested in museums as collectively shaped spaces of learning, unlearning, debating, and imagining alternative futures. She is currently working on a research-led exhibition in collaboration with the University Gallery of the Angewandte in Vienna and the Kassák Museum in Budapest.
Teaching at the Courtauld
MA Critical Debates, ‘Archival Bodies’
MA Critical Debates, ‘Modernities and Modernisms’
MA Curating, core module, ‘History and Theory of Curating’
MA Curating, core module, ‘Group Exhibition Project 1 and 2’
Research interests
-Accent and linguistic theory
-Archives and epistemological violence
-Migration and exile
-Postcolonial narratives of art
-Socialist exhibition cultures
-Soviet internationalism and multinationalism
-Transcultural modernisms
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Socialist Exoticism: Hungarian Socialist Art Encounters Iraqi Abstraction.” Hungarian Studies Review 53 (1): 68–107.
“Tracing Fannina Halle in El Lissitzky’s Letters.” Getty Research Journal 18 (August 2023): 145-163.
co-authored with Douglas Gabriel: “Architecture in Anticipation: Building Socialist Friendship Between Hungary and North Korea in the 1950s.” Art History 45, 5 (November 2022): 996-1015. Special Issue on “Red Networks: Post-War Art Exchange.”
“Us vs. Them: Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet ܲ.” View 31 (October 2021). Special Issue on “The Visual Cultures of Class.”
“Two Million Forint’ Purchases: Fine Arts and Politics in the Kádár Era.” Médiakutató(Fall 2009). (in Hungarian)
Book Chapters
co-authored with Dr Douglas Gabriel: “.” Curating Socialism: A Handbook of International Art Exhibitions 1947-1989, edited by Sven Spieker, Polly Savage, Bojana Videkanić and Christene d’Anca, 52-62. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2026. DOI: 10.3138/9781487552961.005
co-authored with Douglas Gabriel: “Fraternal Encounters: Socialist Art and Architecture Between Budapest and Pyongyang in the 1950s.” Universal– International– Global: Art Historiographies of Socialist Eastern Europe,edited by Beáta Hock, Marina Dmitrieva, Antje Kempe, 240-257. Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2023. DOI: 10.7788/9783412520830.240.
Museum Publications, Exhibition Reviews, Roundtable Contributions & Academic Blog Entries
Exhibition Review: EastUnBloc Exhibition, Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin, 29 November 2025 – 15 November, 2026. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22 (2026).
DOI:
“Alex Keil, Arbeitsbeschaffungsprogramm (Job Creation Program), 1927.” Research (a publication of the Merrill C. Berman Collection), no. 4 (July 2024), series editor Adrian Sudhalter.
“Reed, Alma.” The Modern Art Index Project (March 2024), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Hans Tietze.”The Modern Art Index Project(March 2024), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Mór Lipót Herzog (also Baron Herzog).”The Modern Art Index Project (March2024), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The MetropolitanMuseum of Art.
co-authored with Megan McDonie: “Digitization and Archival Violence.” Adventure, Inquiry, Discovery: CLIR-Mellon Fellows and the Archives, edited by Yuting Dong, R. A. Kashanipour, Joana Konova, Seth Stein LeJacq, Ania Nikulina, Diane Oliva, and Naomi Ruth Pitamber, 92-95. Council on Library and Information Resources: May 2023.
“Conditions of Invisibility: Jolán Szilágyi’s Communist Artmaking Between the Two World Wars.”
ZARAH Guest Blog Series: Through the Lens of Women’s Work and Activism (March 2023).
“Dénes, Zsófia.” The Modern Art Index Project (November 2022), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. .
“Kohner, Adolf.” The Modern Art Index Project (November 2022), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. .
“Mátsa, Ivan (born János Má).” The Modern Art Index Project (November 2022), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Recent conferences and presentations
“Archaeologies of the Communist Avant-Garde: Ephemerality and Leftist Visual Production in Central and Eastern Europe between the World Wars.” International conference organized in collaboration with Dr Tobias Ertl at the Bauhaus University Weimar, June 25-26, 2026
“Accents: The Migratory Aesthetics of Defamiliarization in Soviet Visual Culture.” Part of panel titled Defamiliarization Beyond the Avant-Garde: Migratory Conditions in Soviet and Post-Soviet Art, EAM Migration, Stockholm, Sweden, September 5, 2026
“‘Re-inventing’ Kyrgyz Abstractions in the 1930s.” Part of panel titled Transcultural Abstractions, Colonial Histories, Annual Conference of Association for Art History, Cambridge, UK, April 9, 2026
“Tough Love: Caricatures of a Socialist Friendship across Hungary and North Korea during the 1950s.” Collaborative talk with Douglas Gabriel at Socialist Visual Cultures and Decolonization, convened by INHA, Paris/online, March 11, 2026
“A Migrant Painter’s Worldview after 1945.” Trading Zones: Art and Philosophy in Eastern Europe since 1945, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, Florence, June 26, 2025
“Baghdad-Budapest: Fragile Cold War Alliances.” Repositioning the Postwar Avant-garde in the East, organized by ADA, Constructor University, and KU Leuven, Archiv der Avantgarden, Dresden, June 12, 2025
“The Fugitive Avant-garde.” The College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, New York, February 15, 2025