Modernism’s Future Pasts is a travelling research seminar that considers the emergence of abstraction from an East-Central European perspective, challenging the overtly Westernized and Sovietized narratives of modern art in the region. A network of early and mid-career researchers and curators from the countries of the former Eastern bloc within Europe and the Soviet Union will visit collections at institutions across Poland (2025), the Czech Republic (2026) and Latvia/Lithuania (2026) and partner with local repositories to digitize and disseminate archival documents and artworks. In tandem with this initiative, the organizers plan to host a capstone summer school at the Universität Tübingen (2027), where participants will join with other scholars working on the history of abstraction to discuss methodology, terminology, and intellectual frameworks. Scholarship by network participants will be translated and shared on a peer-reviewed, open-source publication for international academic audiences.