During the event, art historian Svitlana Biedarieva talked about the development and transformation of documentary practices in Ukrainian wartime art, analyzing works by Dana Kavelina, Vlada Ralko, Alevtina Kakhidze, and Yevgenia Belorusets. Researcher Ewa Sułek expanded on her proposal that what happened in the visual arts after 2014 can be named a “postcolonial turn”—a phenomenon based on healing and the acceptance of history and of the past in its hybrid form, without the imposition of imperial or national patterns. Artist Lesia Khomenko discussed her own practice, which is currently focused on ways of looking at the war and the relationship between the digital archives and the materiality of painting. And Nikita Kadan spoke about his own practice, which references the Ukrainian avant-garde and modernism.

This conversation is a continuation of the presentations and conversations commenced that evening.

Inga Lāce: The full-scale war has been going on for more than a year. Could you say where you’re at now, and share a few words about how your surroundings and the cultural landscape have changed.

Ewa Sułek: I am currently in Warsaw, and the city has changed tremendously—Ukrainians have become part of the urban fabric. Works by Ukrainian artists are widely exhibited, and Polish art institutions are making an effort to enable refugee artists to live and work here. When the war started, I was at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, very far from Ukraine and from my own country. While all of my Polish friends were engaged in a massive, beautiful effort to help the millions of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland, I felt useless. But my perspective changed once I realized that one of the reasons this war is mainly understood as colonial is that all imperial and colonial powers aim at denying subjectivity to their subjects. This reality has been influencing Ukrainian history and culture for centuries but, once revealed, can become a powerful tool of subversion. So now is exactly the time when art and academic work in Ukrainian studies as separate from Russian ones is important. I have recently completed my PhD on contemporary art centers in Kyiv from the postcolonial and neocolonial perspectives, and I am planning to publish it as a book.

Svitlana Biedarieva: In January 2022, I talked with Ukrainian artists Alevtina Kakhidze, Maria Kulikovska, Piotr Armianovski, and Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev for October about the wartime experiences of displacement and loss reflected in their art, and we also discussed the then-hypothetical threat of Russia’s attack.¹ Based on their responses, it was apparent that, at that time, such a rapid and violent turn of events seemed completely unlikely. But then the reality proved to be worse than the most pessimistic predictions.

The war-related displacement from 2014 that had affected the cultural landscape of eastern Ukraine and Crimea became the new reality for the rest of the country in February 2022. Violence and destruction in the suburbs of Kyiv reinforced the vulnerability of human life. Many artists and researchers have been forced to continue their work outside Ukraine, but rather paradoxically, this movement provided a new opportunity to globally showcase Ukrainian culture, which until recently, was largely overlooked. 

We saw much more radical forms of antiwar and anti-colonial expression. Artists and curators became more decisive and direct in their discourse, tracing the causes and consequences of the aggression through personal lenses—as direct witnesses to or victims of violence—and they set an important precedent for antiwar resistance through art in Eastern Europe, catalyzing the final dismantling of post-Soviet space together with its postcolonial agenda.

Lesia Khomenko: Immediately following the full-scale invasion, I evacuated my family from Kyiv while my husband joined the Territory Defense Forces. I moved to the United States with my daughter, and we are now based in Miami at an artist residency. Since 2014, a lot of artists from eastern Ukraine and Crimea have moved to Kyiv. There was a very interesting, dynamic exchange in the art community there between those who worked with the issue of war, observing it from outside, and those who had been forced to leave their homes, to run from the war. Now, as of February 24, 2022, there is no such difference.

Before fleeing to the US, I had been deeply involved in developing alternative art education in Ukraine beyond just Kyiv. The institutional landscape was fragile but developing fast. A lot of artists were investing their energy in expanding the context of their practices by curating, teaching, establishing residencies, or opening artist-run spaces. Since February 24, most of these new institutions have been in survival mode or functioning as volunteer hubs.

IL: Svitlana, you have been researching artists’ documentary practices since the beginning of the war in 2014. Could you elaborate on how narratives created by Ukrainian artists have shifted since the full-scale invasion in February 2022?

SB: I wrote in detail about the turn to documentary art in 2014 in the book I recently edited called Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021.² Directly following the Maidan Revolution and Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, artists such as Yevgenia Belorusets, Piotr Armianovski, Alevtina Kakhidze, Mykola Ridnyi, Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, and Dana Kavelina—among many others—engaged with the effects of war by undertaking documentary practices incorporating photography, text, video, and existing archives and creating new accounts focused on notions of displacement, violence, and trauma.

Researchers Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg point out that this “documentary turn” has emerged globally in response to the postcolonial transformation, when artists turned their gaze away from the centrally produced body of ideas to take up diverse local perspectives, especially through direct, often raw visual language—as has been true in Ukraine.³

Post 2022, there has been another turn in the ways that mediation has moved from social documentation and archival investigation to personal chronicle, in which the different visions of the artist’s diary—in the work of Kakhidze, Vlada Ralko, and Yevgenia Belorusets, for example—have become an emblematic form focused on trauma, the body, identity, and decolonization.

The task of documentary practices now is also to emphatically reflect on the audience’s own traumatic life experiences of destruction and human losses. The question of historical memory has become secondary.

IL: Lesia, you talked about the development of your practice, ending with your recent series Max in the Army (2022). So, I’ll start with that. What was the impulse for making this series, and what does the work open up in relation to digital technologies and images of war?

LK: It’s my first work after the full invasion and my escape from Kyiv. I depict my husband Max Robotov, who is an artist and musician, in the first weeks after he joined the army. I was curious how being a lieutenant had changed him. Early on, he sent me a photo of himself saluting in front of a dark and unclear background. He was in civilian clothes—as were most of the soldiers at the beginning of the war. This image epitomizes my personal experience of the war. The idea of the series is to reflect the merging of civil society and the army.

Since the full invasion, people are no longer allowed to take photos or videos of soldiers or military objects, because sharing them might give the enemy intelligence for an attack. Working on this series of paintings, I have been reflecting on the role and status of the image, which in the context of war has become a potentially lethal weapon. I’m using the photos that I have received from my husband—taken from outside his army unit—as well as footage circulating in the public sphere.

I’m referencing the history of battle painting and, at the same time, thinking about the role of the image and of representation in the context of the cyber war.

IL: Lesia, you and many of your peers got their education in post-Soviet Ukraine. How do you think the local education and museum system has affected your work and imagery and attitude toward painting?

LK: At my alma mater, painting is deeply rooted in the post-Soviet visual tradition, which, for me, is both problematic and productive. The programs in the state art academies in Ukraine are still based in the traditional school of the nineteenth century—corrected just a little during the Soviet period but almost unchanged in the post-Soviet period. By deconstructing the visual language of Soviet figurative painting, I’m rethinking the tools of Soviet propaganda and mythologization by comparing them to recent phenomena in the cyber war. I’m working not only with the idea of narrative but also rethinking the academic approach to producing images and to “realism” by using the method of copying or referencing traditional genres such as landscape, historical painting, or portraiture.

IL: Ewa, you talked about the curatorial strategies employed in Kyiv museums, which are rethinking their own art history, for example, bringing attention to self-taught artist Maria Prymachenko, who was falsely provincialized as the “happy peasant” by Soviet authorities. Can you delve a bit deeper into these curatorial projects and explain the context and intention behind them?

ES: I mentioned three projects in Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv: Kateryna Bilokur. I want to be an artist! (2015) and Mariya Prymachenko. Boundless (2016), both of which were curated by Alisa Lozhkina, and Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit. Overcoming Gravity (2019), which was curated by Kateryna Radchenko. These exhibitions aimed to re-narrate the work and lives of the self-taught Ukrainian women artists who were practicing in Ukrainian provinces during World War II and throughout the Soviet period. Bilokur’s and Prymachenko’s work, although widely recognized, was celebrated mostly for its floral or animal motifs or decorative patterns and thus fell into the category of folk art. In Soviet times, the myth of the Ukrainian village as the source and essence of Ukrainian culture was a state-supported construct that helped in colonizing the country, and so the artists were well supported by the regime.

Bilokur’s and Prymachenko’s work was seen back then as cheerful and optimistic, features that were desired in that they conformed to Stalin’s cultural policy that art should express the joy of the communist system. In fact, the policy of folklorization of Ukraine dates back to the Russian Empire. A similar policy was executed toward the Ukrainian language, which was perceived as a dialect of the main language­—that is, of Russian.

Overcoming Gravity⁠ was devoted to a reinterpretation of Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit’s work. A painter, folklorist, ethnographer, philosopher, and photographer, Plytka-Horytsvit lived and worked in the small village of Kryvorivnia, and she led a solitary life devoted to artistic and ethnographic practices. Her life was also marked by tragedies universal to many at the time—she joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and in the 1940s and ’50s, and spent almost a decade in labor camps and prisons in Germany and Siberia.

IL: Nikita, your projects are dealing with the historical references of avant-garde art and Soviet modernism. Could you elaborate on your strategy for dealing with the past, for unearthing these stories? Why is it important and what is your position with regard to it?

Nikita Kadan: I deal mostly with the ruins of the avant-garde. These ruins are covered with nationalist and neoliberal decorations, which aim to hide too radical universalist and internationalist intentions. I see my task as uncovering or unmasking these avant-garde intentions. “Back to avant-garde” means “back to universalism,” and the latter is no less paradoxical than the former. We have to go back to be able to restart the way to the future.

But local creators of universalist avant-garde work were often imprisoned and executed by the state for being “too Ukrainian.” The state publicly declared internationalist values but, in fact, reestablished a Russia-centric imperial structure for the Soviet republics and their cultural life. “Unearth” is a good word here—really. The remains of Ukrainian avant-garde creators are literally found in death pits in places of mass executions, like Sandarmokh.

The future is to be found in an execution pit—this is the horizon of the new utopia.

IL: There have been attempts across the Central Eastern Europe and Central Asia, especially the former Soviet Union countries to place their histories within the postcolonial debate and decolonial discourse. The recent full-scale invasion of Ukraine has amplified this approach among others with calls for decolonizing Russia. However, even though they share imperial domination with the postcolonial countries, their histories are very different. How, in your opinion, can we use the framework of postcolonialism and decolonization to speak about art in Ukraine?

ES: The story of Russian imperialism in Ukraine goes back much further than the Soviet Union, and a postcolonial perspective can be useful where there are relationships of domination and power that are imposed by imperial structures, like the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian cultures. I also find the concept of “coloniality” proposed by Aníbal Quijano and developed by Walter Mignolo and others helpful. While “colonialism” is a specific historical condition, “coloniality” emerged at the same time (in around 1500), and includes both imperialism and capitalism. It is not as much connected to the prevailing concept of the colony overseas based on geographical distance and racial distinctiveness, but rather to other factors stemming from the rhetoric of modernity, progress, and development. In that sense, the continuous narrative of Ukrainians as “little Russians”—meaning underdeveloped—also finds its place within this discourse. Furthermore, colonization is not only about territory, culture, or economics. There is also the colonization of minds, which likewise stems from the modern “civilizing mission,” and it includes communism.⁴

SB: My most recent research is dedicated to the dichotomy of postcoloniality/decoloniality in contemporary Ukrainian art and culture. I also employ a typology formed by [Madina] Tlostanova, who distinguishes between postcoloniality and decoloniality not only from a paradigmatic point of view, such as the postcolonial theory that was developed by such theorists as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak and the decolonial theory by Latin American scholars Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano, but also from a chronological perspective. The postcolonial development in Tlostanova’s model immediately follows the anti-colonial resistance and resulting downfall of an empire when a society of a now-independent country reworks its recent colonial experience.⁵ The decolonial process, however, goes one step further in its liberation from any colonialism-related elements, which is exactly what we are witnessing today in wartime Ukraine. I believe, however, that a new theory is needed to describe Ukraine’s complex situation in the post-Soviet space. In my research and the book that is currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, I use this theory as a cornerstone for developing a model that would be suitable for the Ukrainian/Russian case.

My position is that art in Ukraine has recorded how Ukrainian society went through a postcolonial stage after 1991 and entered a decolonial stage in February 2022. First, artists are dismantling postcolonial narratives and substituting them with decolonial ones, and second, they are creating new content that conceptually breaks with the imperial legacy of Russia. The current traumatic experience of war serves as the impulse for decolonial transformations—from the anti-colonial calls to cancel Russian culture to the civilized decolonization of institutions of power.

LK: I consider decolonial discourse in Ukraine extremely important. Articulated since 2014, it is in its hottest phase ever. But there is a contradiction among Ukrainian intellectuals: some insist on complete decommunization and on the de-Russification of public space and culture, while others propose rethinking and the reappropriation of certain names and phenomena. I think that the role of artists in this process is very important, because artists build nonlinear narratives and are able to operate within a complex system of paradoxes.

IL: Nikita, in your prompt, you mentioned the changes in the perception of the notion of the avant-garde in post-1991 and post-2014 Ukraine, as well as the (im)possibility of a “national avant-garde.” Could you elaborate on this position?

NK: Early post-Soviet perception was part of Ukraine’s “multi-vector” position in the 1990s and early 2000s, when lots of imperial patterns in culture remained untouched. But the return of the Ukrainian avant-garde to the narrated history was often initiated by people whose position was rather conservative. [Mikhail] Semenko or [Valerian] Polischuk, [Maria] Siniakova or [Anatoly] Petritsky, [Boris] Kosarev or [Vasyl] Yermylov were observed through optics, in which “national” elements in their practices were seen as much better than “cosmopolitan” ones. And this very much differs from the original intentions of most Ukrainian avant-garde and modernist figures. On the other hand, the imperial phenomenon of the “Russian avant-garde” was not really questioned by decolonial thought and was not so problematic for many art professionals and audiences in Ukraine. So narrating avant-garde figures as conjointly Ukrainian, cosmopolitan, and non-Russian was like being between Scylla and Charybdis. 2014 made the “nation-centric” views more popular. At the same time, the field of discussion became broader, and the positions opposing both narrow national-conservative thinking and cultural neocolonialism became more visible.

IL: Could you talk about how your practices as researchers and artists have changed since the full-scale invasion in relation to representing a certain nation state and its art scene. I am thinking of many of our previous conversations, which have been full of ideas of cosmopolitanism, transnational research, and the fact that you are fundamentally international artists and scholars. However, with the war, the pressure to serve national representation seems to be very high. How does it resonate in your art and other activities? How do you negotiate this pressure?

ES: As a non-Ukrainian, I initially found myself doubting my right to comment on art practices in Ukraine now, since it is not possible to fully understand what it means to live and work in a country at war unless one personally experiences it. I have been working with Ukrainian art since 2014, and as a Polish scholar exploring Ukrainian topics, my postcolonial perspective has, at least a couple times, been criticized as a form of Orientalization. An interesting article titled “Explaining the ‘Westsplainers’: Can a Western Scholar Be an Authority on Central and Eastern Europe” was published by Aliaksei Kazharski in July 2022.⁶ It shows that we are maybe even more cautious now about who speaks about what and who is given a voice.

SB: I don’t see speaking about Ukraine or the war as the pressure to serve national representation, but rather as the only means of active protest against the war. Even though, currently, it’s very difficult to make any parallels or comparisons, in 2019, I spoke of the war in Ukraine to Latin American and Canadian audiences as part of the interdisciplinary project At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019, which took place in Mexico City and Winnipeg. This was the first large-scale research-led project in Latin America focused on the war in Ukraine that addressed the common experiences of conflict, violence, and displacement. When speaking about Euromaidan, for example, we encountered a vivid response from Mexican audiences who remembered or even witnessed the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968; similarly, stories of Russian military violence in eastern Ukraine prompted comparison with the drug cartels’ violent actions in the north of Mexico.

LK: The current attention being given to Ukrainian artists is helping us to better articulate a lot of messages. At the same time, there is very high turbulence in Ukrainian society itself, and a lot of artists are balancing between pure propaganda and critical artistic gestures, between personal stories and general conclusions. These debates, as well as the visibility of artists is very important for postwar Ukraine.

IL: Even though there is this visibility, in the context of the current war, there is a danger that Ukrainian art and artists are reduced to speaking only about the war. How do you deal with that?

LK: I’ve been working with the issue of war for more than ten years. I had been researching World War II and working with the story of my grandfather and Soviet postwar paintings. Now I’m looking at the current war through the perspective of the role of the image and representation—and, of course, I’m thinking about commemoration and the creation of historical narratives. Footage of this war has made me think about how war affects the global civilization in general and what it means to be visible—how security issues and technology are changing our optics. Personally it’s difficult to think about anything else but the war. And, on the other hand, to convey knowledge of the war with nuance is extremely important to resisting the propaganda machine.

NK: Ukrainian artists speak about reality. And reality is impregnated by war. Landscape is a war landscape. Bodies are war bodies. It is a big shift in our sensitivity. Now you even don’t have to show war literally, directly—it is in your work anyhow. I still make work about forgotten and interrupted stories of Ukrainian modernism. About stories of local twentieth-century art history. But these stories are read through the lens of war. There is no other way.

IL: Our discussion takes place in the context of The Museum of Modern Art, thus an important issue for us is to understand how your research and artistic practices impact the art historical narratives and museum practices in relation to art from Ukraine. What is your take on that?

ES: It is important not to engage the norms imposed by the Western point of view, which tends to see Ukraine as “Other” and to exoticize the vaguely defined “East” as a continued form of silencing and trivialization by the dominant discourses. Eastern Europe has been an object of the colonial gaze from both the West and Russia, and a certain image of this place has been imposed. Less interest has been given to art from Ukraine or Poland than to work coming from Russia. Such an attitude strengthens the imperial status quo. Artists and researchers decolonize Ukraine by rewriting the story of the land and region from a Ukrainian as opposed to Russian perspective—discerning its uniqueness, and creating narrations distinct from those imposed in Soviet times and earlier, in the times of the Russian Empire—and, at the same time, recognizing the hybridity that emerged due to decades of existence in the frames of both systems.

SB: I agree with Ewa. For example, many artists, particularly those working in the 1920s–30s avant-garde, who were born or worked in Ukraine, are still labeled “Russian,” which of course is being corrected now with urgency but is still a process often flawed or lacking research. So involving Ukrainian art historians and curators can help a lot.

IL: Is there anything that you feel is missing in the discussion about art in and from Ukraine that you would like to raise here?

SB: Everyone’s talked a lot about the war. I believe that what is missing currently in the international discussion on Ukrainian art is taking into account its heterogeneity, development of the classification of its chronological stages, and critical currents linked to the personal position and style of each artist. Otherwise, in trying to develop a Ukrainian “trademark” in terms of art, we risk overgeneralization. But this art historical systematization needs to be undertaken with a certain historical distance, as it is often impossible to grasp the entire panorama while in the epicenter of war.

_{post presents: Art, Resistance, and New Narratives in Response to the War in Ukraine was co-organized with the Polish Cultural Institute New York and co-sponsored by the James Gallery at CUNY. Promotional support was provided by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.}

_{post presents is a series of talks devoted to the cross-geographical consideration of modern and contemporary art. The sessions are an extension of post, MoMA’s online platform devoted to art from a global perspective.}

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The 2022 C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations Part II, was held on Zoom across four panels on May 25 and 26, 2022. Included here are abstracts and recordings of the panels. In order to continue the conversations, written responses from Sarah Lookofsky, current Dean of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and former Associate Director of the International Program at MoMA, and Irmgard Emmelhainz, independent translator, writer and researcher, will soon to be linked on this page. The seminar series was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow; Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow; Madeline Murphy Turner, Former Cisneros Institute Research Fellow for Latin America, and Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow.

The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize seminars, of which Transversal Orientations Part II forms part. These seminars connect the broad research interests of the four groups and enable members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art.

Transversal Orientations Part II was conceived as a continuation of the conversations and possibilities raised in the 2021 seminar. Building on the ideas generated in this first iteration, which invoked transversalism’s potential for envisioning alliances and surpassing oppositions, this year’s seminar sought to explore and annotate the transversal as a methodology for working between geographical borders and beyond disciplinary and epistemological siloes, while also acknowledging the challenges of such an approach in our fractured, solipsistic present.

Some of the questions raised were: what can we learn by looking and speaking across geographies, histories, and epistemes? What patterns, knowledges, currents, and recognitions emerge when we interweave regional concepts and metaphors? What emancipatory worldviews arise or collapse at these unexpected intersections and gatherings? And, finally, how can we utilize a transversal perspective amid our present-day reality, in which right-wing nationalist leaders have come to power, borders have been fortified, and dialogical exchange often seems to be insufficient or even unattainable?

A term that originates in the field of mathematical geometry, the transversal has been taken up by thinkers to destabilize the ways in which relations are canonically accepted. Transversality “implies a desire in interdisciplinarity for knowledge and practices that are in some senses yet to be made proper.”¹ While aspiring towards the transformative potential of the transversal approach, this year’s seminar came to terms with the lived limitations and violences of categorically closed designations.

Comprised of four panels over two days, each panel featured a distinct pair of speakers  who engaged and acknowledged the limitations of transversalism in the historical present through issues of territory, colonial catastrophe, gender politics, and non-human ontologies.

Participants

Pamila Gupta, Daniel Lie, Sophio Medoidze, Nnenna Okore, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Isabel Sandoval, Diana Tamane, Daiara Tukano

Acknowledgements

The Fellows wish to thank the C-MAP Group Leaders (Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Roxana Marcoci, Inés Katzenstein, Stuart Comer, and Cara Manes) and Jay Levenson, Marta Dansie, Michelle Kuo, Josh Siegel, Howard Deitch, Christopher Brown, Mitchell Leitschuh, and Hayna Garcia for their invaluable input and assistance.

Day 1

Panel 1: In Thick Co-Presence

This panel explores the co-dependence and kinship between humans and other-than-humans. Looking specifically at the co-constitutive relationship between care and harm, this panel relatedly investigates the roles that gender and sexuality play in the creation of shared ecologies. The panel title comes from Donna Haraway’s book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, which discusses the importance of eschewing the future in favor of present realities and challenges.

Building on legacies of migration and queer studies, Daniel Lie’s work demonstrates how abjection can be a tool of subversion and expansion. Their practice celebrates natural cycles of transformation and the many interdependent exchanges that structure ecosystems. A fundamental aspect of Lie’s practice is their desire to develop works which decenter human agency and subjectivity. Working in collaboration with forces they term “other-than-human beings,” such as bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, minerals, spirits, and ancestors, Lie creates site- and time-specific works that can be experienced through multisensory channels. By giving visibility to materials that morph, decay, and evolve, Lie’s ecosystems highlight the intimate yet expansive coexistences among diverse beings, acknowledging our shared and continuous participation in the processes of living, dying, and decomposing.

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor of science and technology studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice. She is the author of Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (2018), which received the 2019 Michelle Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology and honorable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize, both from the American Anthropological Association, and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies.

Panel 2: Cycles and Reclamations

Cycles and Reclamations probes the relationship between art and social engagement pertaining to ecological crises and territory disputes. It asks, how do practitioners draw attention to these challenges by transversing professional and cultural silos? When working with the subjects of land and sea, how do creators engage with politics to call attention to the adversities we endure? Finally, what kinds of creative encounters can be proposed as solutions?

Nnenna Okore is an artist-researcher-teacher who uses artistic practice, pedagogy, and social engagements to address ecological issues. She has been involved in numerous participatory art projects and exhibitions designed to produce dialogue, art making, and an awareness of current environmental issues. Working largely with eco-based materials, Okore uses food-based bioplastic materials to create delicate works of art that engender dialogue about waste reduction and sustainable practices in art making. Okore has a BA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholar Award and Creative Victoria Award from Australia.

Daiara Hori Figueroa Sampaio – Duhigô, known as Daiara Tukano, of the Tukano Indigenous people – Yé’pá Mahsã, Eremiri Húusiro Parameri clan of the Upper Rio Negro in the Brazilian Amazon, was born in São Paulo. She is an artist, activist, educator, and communicator who graduated in visual arts and master in human rights from the University of Brasília. She researches the right to memory and truth of Indigenous peoples. From 2015 to 2021 she was the coordinator of Rádio Yandê, the first indigenous Internet-radio in Brazil. Recently, she won the 2021 PIPA Online Award, organized by the PIPA Institute, the most renowned Brazilian visual arts prize. She studies the culture, history, and traditional spirituality of its people together with their family. She lives in Brasília.

Day 2

Panel 3: (Im)possible Returns

Taking up the call for critical (art) geography to think about the complexity of communities, and an awareness of the issue of scales when we discuss and employ a transversal vision, this panel draws on the transversal as an intense interdisciplinary mode whereby different topologies, for instance, colonial or post-Soviet migration, come into communication, bringing newfound understanding and literacy to the consequences of imperialism.

Pamila Gupta is a professor at WiSER, University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. Her research and writing interests include Portuguese colonial and Jesuit missionary history in India; diasporas, islands, tourism, heritage, and design in the Indian Ocean; photography, tailoring, and visual cultures in East Africa; and architecture, infrastructure, and affect in South Africa. She is the author of two monographs: The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India (2014) and Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (2019).

Diana Tamane (b. 1986, Latvia/Estonia). In the artist’s works, family albums, documents, and private correspondence are transformed into catalysts, making it possible to reveal not only touching autobiographical stories but also apt portrayals of society and how a complex political history and presence intertwines with the needs and dreams of ordinary people. Tamane graduated from the Tartu Art College, the LUCA School of Arts, Brussels, and HISK post-academic program, Ghent. In 2020, with APE, she published Flower Smuggler, which has received the Authors Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards and been shortlisted in the Paris-Photo Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

Panel 4: Rituals and Rapture

Joyous, occult, or banal, rituals are a part of our everyday lives and imaginations. This panel explores how rituals – religious, social, daily, or otherwise – are depicted in art and film. In particular, the significance of gender in rituals will be discussed to shore up how supposedly fixed borders (material, bodily, territorial, epistemological) can be crossed.

This panel featured screenings of film and moving image works by Sophio Medoidze and Isabel Sandoval that have not been reproduced here. Watch the pre-recorded conversation between Medoidze, Sandoval, and C-MAP Fellows Inga Lace and Wong Binghao in the video link below.

Sophio Medoidze is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in London. Her work has been exhibited and screened worldwide, including at the OUTPOST gallery, Ermes Ermes, LUX, CAC Bretigny, Serpentine Cinema (Peckhamplex), Kunstmuseum Luzern, Tate Modern (upcoming), and others. She was a recipient of Tyneside cinema’s Projections commissions and Feature Expanded development and Sub-ti awards for her latest film Let us flow! (ვიდინოთ!). A collection of Medoidze’s short stories, Bastard Sun, will be published in 2022.

Recognized by the Criterion Collection as “one of the most exciting and multitalented filmmakers on the indie scene,” Isabel Sandoval has made three dramatic features, including Señorita, Apparition and the Independent Spirit Award–nominated Lingua Franca. Her films have played at major international festivals like Venice, Locarno, London, and Busan. She is currently in development on her fourth feature, Tropical Gothic, which won a development prize at the 2021 Berlinale. She recently directed the FX limited series Under the Banner of Heaven, based on Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book, starring Andrew Garfield.

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The title of the program brings to the fore the fact that because of the ongoing war, many of the artists represented are currently under siege—or “on the ground,” to borrow a term used to describe engagement in military activity. Others have recently fled or were already living and working abroad before the invasion. That same “ground” has been a place where discussions occur beyond normative divisions, where ideas germinate and utopias materialize—as will hopefully continue to be the case.

Notes from the Ground is available for viewing from March 30 to April 30, 2022.

No! No! No! by Mykola Ridnyi

The heroes of Mykola Ridnyi’s film are the young people of Kharkiv, a city located in northeastern Ukraine, whose transition to adulthood has coincided with the breakout of war in the neighboring region of Donbas. From an LGBT activist and poet to a fashion model, a group of street artists, and a creator of a computer game, the main characters are artists or working in the creative industries typical of peaceful life in a big city. The proximity to the war, however, affects each one, causing them to react to and reflect on political events through their own personal relationships to the urban space and the realities of social media.

Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina

Letter to a Turtledove is a dreamlike anti-war film-poem that brings together archival footage, amateur video, and the writing and animation of its creator, Dana Kavelina. One of the crucial sources for this work is the anonymous five-hour documentary To Watch the War (2018), a piece of found-footage filmmaking from the war in the Ukrainian region of Donbas. Re-appropriating some of this same material, Kavelina’s work also intersperses animated drawings, mise-en-scènes, and archival footage of Donbas from the 1930s, when under Stalin, the region became a hot spot for Soviet industrialization and class warfare. In its collage-like structure, the film not only evokes the region’s history but also encapsulates the multitude of traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon it since the 2014 Russian invasion. Letter to a Turtledove is an attempt to build an alternative optics in order to examine war from multiple angles, including from a feminist perspective, which points toward the rape of women as an invariable consequence of military conflicts.

Notes from underground by Uli Golub

Uli Golub’s Notes from underground depicts the daily life of a man running away from frustrating reality. Deceived by social roles and human relations, frightened by riots and military unrest, he lives cloistered in his Noah’s Ark–like apartment, which is stuffed with his many belongings—as opposed to with animals. Step-by-step the viewer gets sucked into this world, where objects reign and are the only salvation in a precarious, constantly changing world. This is a collaged narrative, composed of real events, personal stories, media propaganda, and imagined doomsday nightmares. Thus, through what is a very personal story, the traumas and distresses of contemporary society are revealed.

So They Won’t Say We Don’t Remember by Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey 

The video work So They Won’t Say We Don’t Remember by the artist duo Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey is based on events surrounding a 1977 mining accident in the Donbas region that ultimately led to the mine’s closure. In the film, locals, artists, and curators traverse the surface, paralleling one of the underground routes of the Novator mine. The procession ends at the monument to the dead miners, which is located just above the site of the underground accident that led to the death of the workers. Participants walk across the postindustrial landscape of Donbas, over the plowed fields, by bushes and courtyards, connecting the ground and the underground spaces through the choreography of their bodies.

Landslide by Oleksiy Radynski

Landslide by Oleksiy Radynski is about an attempt to build a radically different society. This experiment takes place in a former garage collective in the very center of Kyiv, in the area reclaimed by nature and its forces. Landslides, degradation of urban politics, and disintegration of social ties culminated in the abandonment of this place in the 1990s. In 2016, Radynski was among the counterculture artist collectives, musicians, and avant-garde performers to reoccupy it. The protagonists of the film touch upon the old debate between anarchists and Marxists about whether one should live one’s utopia in the here and now, or create conditions for a better life in the future. The central narrative forms around a queer theater director who has fled eastern Ukraine to seek refuge in Kyiv. The director rehearses a play that culminates in an improvised performance toward the end of the film. As the story of the director unfolds, a different group of inhabitants—an older generation of garage owners—is introduced, advocating a completely different view of the site’s past and its potential future. Gravity, the force that triggers the landslide, becomes a metaphor for this short-lived meeting of urban nature, post-Soviet masculinity, and queer performance.

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Vasyl Cherepanyn is head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC), an institution founded in Kyiv in 2008 as a platform for collaboration among academic, artistic, and activist communities. Since 2015, VCRC has also organized the Kyiv Biennial. The 2021 edition of this international event was curated by the East Europe Biennial Alliance, a group consisting of Biennale Warszawa, Biennale Matter of Art Prague, OFF-Biennale Budapest, Survival Kit Festival Riga, and Kyiv Biennial. Titled Allied, it revolved around a range of past political alliances to imagine viable solidarities in the future—a political imagination and strategy that proved too necessary, too late, to prevent the atrocities of the current war.

Inga Lāce: I would like to start our conversation with the Kyiv Biennial. The first edition, The School of Kyiv, was launched in 2015, right after the Maidan revolution and annexation of Crimea by Russia. And it seems like the 2021 edition was driven by a similar political urgency—by political activism and deep engagement in political discussion. What is the Biennal’s role within the art ecosystem in Ukraine?

Vasyl Cherepanyn: Kyiv Biennial emerged as a side project of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC), which is an unprecedented quasi institution in the Kyiv scene because we have managed to unite and keep together so many formats simultaneously, and to maintain an international dimension. Our intention with the first Kyiv Bienn­­ial, The School of Kyiv (2015), was to show our political practices to the outside world, to make knowledge of Maidan translocal. Our strong emphasis has been on educational and discursive formats—lectures and discussions emerge from the fact that almost all of us at the Center have university backgrounds in cultural studies. We have always thought about a general sociopolitical context and how inter-institutional solidarity can be built up; in fact, in the very beginning, we were partnered with almost every cultural institution in Kyiv but then we scaled back. A significant social feature of the country at war is that many of the institutions that were partners within the Biennial either don’t exist anymore in their previous form or no longer want to collaborate. The war has affected the social fabric of the art ecosystem in Ukraine. The international agenda that the Kyiv Biennial promotes is, of course, not accepted by everyone; however, we have managed to gain public support over the years. Within the context of the Biennial, we ourselves have become the other—or foreign in a way—because the local context is unfamiliar to many participants.

IL: How would you describe the effect of Maidan on the Ukrainian art scene?

VC: Maidan itself was a Gesamtkunstwerk, or a sort of a Beuysian artwork; it was a playground for many art initiatives, including the Open University of Maidan, which we ran on the square. It was only after Maidan that a political focus became compulsory and unavoidable in the art field. It’s a beautiful aspect of democracy—in Ukraine, art can have a political impact, unlike in many countries in the West. Perhaps this is because our cultural institutions are not so autonomous as those operating in the West. That’s why politics and art have been so connected and why what happens in art has the power to impact education, and even politics.

IL: I was in Kyiv for the first time last autumn, during the Biennial, and I could feel the heightened sensibility toward all events in the region—much more than I have ever felt before in the Baltics. It was also a lively meeting point for the Belarusian artists and curators in exile, who were facing persecution in their own country. Coming from Latvia, which is under the protective wing of the EU and NATO, I could not fully relate to the alarm at the time. Now I see the grave difference between having that political privilege and not.

VC: First of all, the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian territories is actually in its eighth year, as it started with Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. The horrendous situation we are in right now was spoken about for months beforehand. The threat of imminent military invasion put the whole population in Ukraine under a lot of pressure. However, neither the people in Ukraine nor those elsewhere believed it would really happen. We can compare it to the situation in the American movie Don’t Look Up—we received so many warnings and yet did not take them seriously enough. The ongoing war became urgent to the wider Western and global public when the military threat grew to the extent that it began to endanger the whole European region in an unprecedented way.

IL: There was a lot of speculation regarding what Putin wanted when he started the recent escalation. Before it began, common assumptions were that he wanted attention and to be taken seriously by the West. This sounds extremely cynical to me, coming from a smaller country within Eastern Europe.

VC: It is unprecedented how much we have heard about this one person—about what he thinks, what is on his mind, what he really wants. I am skeptical of this sort of pseudo-psychoanalysis, this so-called Putinology. It may be part of his strategy to keep everyone busy thinking about what it is that he wants. And I have always wondered whether there is, in the West, a hidden, obscene admiration for this Russian “strongman.”

The current situation is also connected to Russia’s national agenda. Ukraine represents an alternative that is not welcome, that in Putin’s mind should not exist. In Western Putinology, however, everybody imagines that Putin is trying to reconstruct some type of Soviet Union, but, in fact, Ukrainians managed to get their statehood before and also within the Soviet Union—so he is actually doing the opposite. Russia’s politics throughout the last twenty years have been about disregarding and breaking the borders set in Soviet times. The war is basically driven by the fear that uprisings in Ukrainian Maidan, Belarus, or Kazakhstan could become too powerful to change what has become status quo in the region and in Russia itself. The biggest problem for Russian authorities is that they don’t have a mechanism for the transition of power. That’s why any kind of revolution, or even its proximity, creates panic. With Maidan, we in Ukraine toppled a corrupt and bloody president. You can compare it to the Arab Spring or any of the other “square-occupation” movements across the world that have created alternatives, and are unpredictable.

Already in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donbas, people wondered, “What is the limit of the West? To what extent will the West be waiting on and discussing whether or not to intervene?” There was even a joke that while the European Union was taking its time to make a decision, Russia took Crimea. In that case, we saw clearly that the EU was not willing to intervene until Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian Buk missile over eastern Ukraine. It was only when EU citizens had been killed that sanctions were introduced. When it only concerns Ukrainian citizens, their lives appear not so valuable to the West. To paraphrase American philosopher Judith Butler, whose lives are grievable? As it turns out, Ukrainian lives are not grievable enough.

IL: The pragmatism of global geopolitics.

VC: Well, your willingness to engage changes depending on how close you are to what is happening—and whether or not you are directly affected. Otherwise, it’s just about imposing trade sanctions and not about real counteroffensive steps to stop whatever it is that is going on. That’s why I think the situation is much more dangerous—because of this unfortunate attitude.

IL: I would like to circle back to the Kyiv Biennial. The 2021 edition looked at alternative models of solidarity and analyzed Cold War alliances between the Global South and Eastern Europe, among other issues. Notions of post-socialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization were also incorporated through lectures and exhibitions. How do you see the relevance of these discourses in the context of Ukraine and the region in general?

VC: The problem here is that the discourses around postcolonialism and decolonization are perceived as a way to criminalize Ukraine’s socialist past, which is, historically, a false idea. I also think that such discourses have to take into account the variety of conditions in post-Soviet countries, from the Baltics to Tajikistan to Ukraine. The Kremlin’s attempt to include Ukraine in its orbit has nothing to do with socialism per se, but rather with toxic imperialism. The post- or decolonial trend in the West is about the past prior to the emergence of the nation-states. With regards to Eastern Europe, paradoxically, decolonization is about the past and the present during the existence of the nation-states. The best remedy to treat postcolonial impact in Eastern Europe is to study revolution. It’s a super-revolutionary region—here, the political developments are defined predominantly and fundamentally by the revolution, and almost everything that has taken place in the post-Soviet space after the collapse of the USSR has been defined by fear of revolution or by revolution itself—by the Singing Revolution in the Baltics, the Orange Revolution and Maidan revolution in Ukraine, and by recent events in Belarus and Kazakhstan. I’m here in a revolutionary position—to aid in facilitating better understanding of this region and what’s at stake.

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The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize a seminar among all four groups that connects their broad research interests and enables members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art. Hinged on the transversal as a means to engage with and envision new networks and ways of thinking about modern and contemporary art, the 2021 edition offered an exploration and interrogation of the intertwining of multiple coeval life-worlds through concepts of “extending across.”

Over the course of two weeks, transversalism was offered and considered as a third, enabling term. To transverse is to surpass bipolar socio-historically constructed oppositions such as traditional and modern, male and female, man and nature, local and foreign, theory and practice, etc. Rather than adopting a center-periphery dyad or adhering to “mainstream” canonical standards, changing our perspective of looking at art opens up a way to account for different philosophies and nuances of comparison. This seminar series made reference to the methodology of “minor” transnationalism, to think and relate along other scales of knowability.

In addition, the seminar considered what it means to penetrate, exceed, and undermine geopolitical borders that have been set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe; accessible and inaccessible; to construct an “us” and a “them.” A border, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.”

By considering the transversal in its temporal, geographic and/or directional dimensions, as simultaneity, the seminar series elucidated the implications of the adoption of this operative term to art history, the museum, exhibitions, collections, philosophy and/or artistic practice. In doing this, new relational terms, stories, and people can be thought of together again.

Panel 1: Looking Sideways

This panel examined the processes of migration and contra-flows connecting regions while examining their artistic legacies. Looking at particular geographies, artists, and their stories across time, it aimed to challenge mainstream conceptions of the directionality of exchange within modern and contemporary art. How can minor positions weave a fabric of their own links directly, bypassing the centers of power and information? How can these transnational shared stories be acknowledged and told in a context that recognizes their complexity within history and display systems largely guided by national or global presentations?

Introduced by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA and moderated by Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Chairat Polmuk, Lecturer, Department of Thai, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. You can read it here.

Panel 2: Acts of Transfer and the Repertoire

This panel was organized around the idea of the transversal as transfer between disciplines, geographies, the performer, audience and participants, and/or the professional and nonprofessional. By looking at and considering the “repertoire” and acts of transfer through, for instance, translation and embodied dialogue, “hidden” processes of transnational contact and local histories, new cartographies, and unseen relations come into evidence.

Introduced by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA and moderated by Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Laine Kristberga, Assistant Professor and Researcher, Institute of Philisophy and Sociology of the University of Latvia, Riga. You can read it here.

Panel 3: Entangled Terrains

This panel is the outcome of an invitation to Sandra Benites, Black Athena Collective, and Chie Ikeya to reconsider or remap regions. Thinking about people who cross borders and borders that cross people, the session presented perspectives that acknowledge multidirectional histories of migration, colonialism, and the destabilization of current geographical perimeters. Panelists were tasked with reconsidering territorial logic and place vis-a-vis the mobility of individuals; how our relationship with the inhabited terrain might reformulate imposed delimitations. In this session, borderlands and the spaces in-between were examined, and the manifold ways in which art and visual culture entangle terrain.

Introduced by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA and moderated by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Hlonipha Mokoena, Associate Professor, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. You can read it in English here and in Portuguese here.

Panel 4: The Politics of Position

This panel explored the particular conditions of locality and the productive tensions between local and global contexts. How do the languages, values, and histories of art and its attendant sociopolitical conditions differ from place to place? Can they be translated, communicated, and made legible, if at all, on a global scale, and what are the stakes of this transfer? Invited speakers discussed the specificities of their local or regional positions or punctuated a pristine map of universality. These discussions aimed to generate understandings of art and culture that are not uniformly appraised and consumed, as well as a sensitivity and humility when encountering art from unfamiliar contexts.

Introduced by Inés Katzenstein, Director, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, and Curator of Latin American Art, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA and moderated by Madeline Murphy Turner, C-MAP Latin America/Cisneros Institute Research Fellow, MoMA; Ph.D. Candidate, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Response by Riánsares Lozano de la Pola, Researcher and Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico City. You can read it in English here and in Spanish here.

View the past event page here. 

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Inga Lāce: The V—A—C Foundation was planning to open in 2020 with a new building in the converted former site of GES-2, a power station right in the center of Moscow overlooking the Kremlin. How have you reshaped your current programs, themes, and the inner institutional workings in response to the global pandemic?

Katerina Chuchalina: Indeed, the global pandemic caught us by surprise as we were finalizing the opening program for GES-2, which was supposed to launch in September 2020. By March 2020, however, it was clear that this would not happen as the construction was inevitably delayed by the crisis. Like everyone else in the world, we began to recognize the destructive and generative potential of the virus, and we used the delay to analyze the state of our community and the ways in which the institution might support it. We used this continuous momentum to rethink the opening season. Our rapidly growing team has spent several years planning, designing, and creating the range of directions and disciplines encompassed within GES-2: dance, cinema, theater, music, a publishing program, community-based artistic practices and events, the urban studios and residency program, inclusivity and public programs, and of course, the exhibition part. This sort of planning is schizophrenic and exhausting. You need to be thinking several years ahead—imagining and designing in detail projects that will take place in a space that has not yet been built for people unaware of your existence—and then travel back to now, and amend all the projects over and over again to adapt them to the present.

This process has never been easy, but when the crisis broke, we had the time and space to rethink. As a result, we came up with the program preceding the opening of the first season of GES-2 and instigated by our desire to support local living artists and musicians, to introduce GES-2 as both a new, local venue and institution, and to show Renzo Piano’s architectural project in a never-to-be-experienced-again bare state—before it is used for programs and exhibitions. A series of newly commissioned site-specific works by Russian contemporary composers created and recorded in the aftermath of the global lockdown will play for a limited period of time as a sound accompaniment to the meeting between the city and its new institution. I hope that the conditions of the pandemic and the construction of the building will allow this pre-opening program to come true.

IL: Before undertaking a building plan for the V—A—C Foundation, your curatorial practice was more nomadic in that it involved working on-site within different museums. How would this reexamination of the existing museum collections and knowledge manifest in the work that is undertaken at GES-2?

KC: Indeed, in the ten years since its creation, the V—A—CFoundation has been engaged in mapping artistic processes focused on contemporaneity, the synchronization of present and past through dialogue, and the location of codes and tools to investigate important themes. For a long time, we did not have a building of our own and so operated outside the existing art infrastructure—doing projects, for example, at the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, Museum of Contemporary Russian History, Institute for African Studies, and GULAG History Museum, among others. We were able to occupy an unconventional position, one that allowed us to make a break in the continuous and undifferentiated history while also establishing new historical narratives through interventions involving contemporary artistic research. GES-2 will undoubtedly inherit this attention to thresholds and connections, and as such, aim to function as a storytelling institution—one that is fully immersed in the narratives surrounding Russia’s history and contemporaneity.

We have already designed a cycle of five seasons of programming, each including many exhibitions, performative, cinema, music, theatre and public programs entitled Holy Barbarians: Both Are Worse. Unfolding over the next three years, this incremental narrative is intended to engage critically with clichés and cultural tropes associated with Russia, mainly those projected from the outside, though also present within: great Russian literature, tyranny, the mother archetype, a propensity for melodrama, moral relativism, cosmos as an emblem of geo-cosmo-political superiority, etc. Among the clichés that will be explored—and the one that has inspired the title of the series—is the contradictory notion of “holy barbarism,” which embodies opposed phantasmal projections. This dilemma embodies, on the one hand, the age-old myth of Russian savagery and backwardness; and on the other, the (equally orientalist) idea of Russia’s irreducible uniqueness, “chosen-ness,” or even holiness. The format of a narrative in five parts, like a five-volume novel, is in itself a performative acting-out of the stereotype of so-called Russian literature-centrism. The choice of themes is guided by the fact that the clichés, in spite of (or, perhaps, thanks to) being deeply entrenched, raise questions that are relevant in a global context.  

The first exhibition in the cycle, Santa Barbara. How Not to Be Colonized?, will feature a large-scale commission by Ragnar Kjartansson (Icelandic, born 1976), who is known for his interest in the emotional power of music and drama, in combination with contemporary Russian works exploring the carnivalesque in Russian culture from the 1990s onward. An attempt to travel back in time thirty years, this exhibition will reimagine the foundational myths of post-Soviet Russia and look at the images, cultural values, and ideas that have ingrained themselves in its collective consciousness since then. The starting point of this conversation is Santa Barbara, the first Western soap opera to be broadcast in Russia and the most enduring on post-Soviet television. Airing from 1992 to 2002, the show not only presented different cultural models and inspired an urge for self-determination, it also sparked resistance to Western homogenization, a movement in which Russian artists played a role. The Santa Barbara decade was a time for the reinvention of the self—at once emancipatory and carnivalesque—with myriad consequences, both intended and unintended.

Next, we will look at the conception of truth and realism, which translates in Russian as “istina,” or scientific truth or truth as a religious category, and “pravda,” which is an ethical concept related not only to theory, but also to actions and deeds. Mother: Why Motherland? continues the inquiry into cultural representations of Russia via questions related to motherhood, such as care, labor relations, family, gender dynamics, and kinship; Kosmos Is Ours will explore the universal cosmological impulse as well as the colonial drive behind it; while, finally, Barely Audible will focus on a shift in tonality rather than in the cultural landscape, and reflect on the possibility of an institutional space as one of genuine intimacy that is free of transactional uses.

IL: Museums are also important as they are fostering communities centered on learning and discussion. Are you working on that aspect prior to the opening of the building?

KC: We started to work on that the very moment we started to develop programming for GES-2, and in the process, one thing was fundamental: the program should be conceived together with educators and community builders, and not only by curators. Exhibitions, educational programs, discussions, and community programs are proposed and debated by the larger group of curators and educators in the framework of the season. Through this back-and-forth, we intend to break the hierarchical structure of exhibitions, concerts, and education. We want to make sure that the community-building and educational programs are conceived of and thus perceived as equal to and complementary components of the narrative—as opposed to accessory or merely illustrative of the main program of exhibitions and live events.

IL: You mention that one part of the program will focus on the dynamic surrounding the Western cultural colonization of Russia in the post-Soviet period of the 1990s. Do you also envision examining the Soviet Union as a colonial project, and the historical and still present cultural, infrastructural, and political interconnections therein—that is, to think about how Russia relates to post-colonial and decolonial debates?

KC: Absolutely. The fourth seasonal program Kosmos Is Ours will look at who we are if we continue to expand our presence in time and space, and identify the local and pluriversal cosmologies currently in place and now forced to unite in a seemingly possible universality by various geopolitical regimes. This conversation cannot happen without meticulous investigation of the Soviet colonial impulses and structures, which is of course not possible without inviting participation of artists and curators from the states within the former USSR. 

IL: Earlier this year, large-scale demonstrations broke out across Russia against the arrest of Alexey Navalny and the ongoing corruption of the current government, generating a lot of reactions in the local and international media, as well as from Western governments and Russia itself. Are the roots and objectives of these protests adequately represented locally and in the international media, in your opinion, given the complexity of the situation? How do you see the role of cultural institutions in the process?

KC: Both the mainstream Western media channels and the official local ones have oversimplified the situation. Indeed, both sides broadcast news in a predictable way, reaffirming the information warfare in a rather old-fashioned manner. And to be honest, local media channels are not that scarce now and don’t sound unanimously; mostly online, some of them do offer nuanced consideration of the moment, addressing different possible futures and vectors, but this kind of analysis is outside that of the international mainstream and the official local mass media outlets. 

As we all know, culture is a continuation of politics (in the broadest sense of the word) by other means, and I think an institution always aspires to contribute to creating a more nuanced portrait, to offer a mirror reflecting society’s fears, biases, and internalized clichés as well as its strength and common futures. But of course, an institution is not only aiming at representation but also at creating a platform for active engagement, polemics and debates.

IL: Some of the artists you have commissioned through the V—A—C Foundation, such as Kirill Savchenkov (born 1987) and Arseniy Zhilyaev (born 1984), have been referencing visionary futures or science fiction from the past. What do you think we could draw from this sort of work in terms of thinking about the future of our museums, art ecosystem, and the planet?

KC: Both artists that you mention indeed engage with different modalities—not necessarily referring to science fiction from the past, but rather different systems. Savchenkov deals with knowledge systems and practical skills—from various cosmological systems to paramilitary, meditative and new media practices—that human intelligence can navigate and use to survive in the world bombarded by crises, global instability and in the potential conditions of the posthuman future. Zhilyaev explores existing intersections, or creates new ones between art, philosophy, and science; often these encounters take place in an imaginary institutional space, a museum, but at a moment in time that is unreachably remote from the present. It is always a reinvention of an art institution, rearranging the system components of knowledge and practice to get to some common future beyond geographies and prescribed functions. I know how difficult it may be for an institution to follow and trust artistic intuition while building a new museum, but I believe that doing so is the only way for all of us to get there.

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Inga Lāce: Anna, when I was in Minsk in the summer of 2019, I visited the Ў Gallery, an independent contemporary art space devoted to critical reflection on sociopolitical issues, which you were running at the time but that has recently closed. What happened during this past year that led to the gallery’s closure? 

Anna Chistoserdova: Over the course of its eleven-year history, the Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art evolved into a space focused on the professional development of the cultural community of Belarus and the presentation of projects by international artists and curators. It nurtured creative freedom and the exchange of ideas, as well as forged connections between Belarusian intellectuals and representatives of the international community. The year 2020 was incredibly challenging, starting at the end of March with the pandemic-related cancellation of programs, which put the institution on the brink of collapse and ultimately resulted in its unfortunate closure in November. In the beginning of the pandemic, we were approached by the charity organization ByCovid-19, which provides much-needed aid to hospitals and doctors in Belarus. For more than three months, the gallery space served as a warehouse and headquarters for the distribution and delivery of medical supplies and equipment to clinics around the country. For us, this was the only right way to use the space during the pandemic, and it was fully in line with the social focus of our activities as a cultural institution. 

In early August, we began to return to our usual rhythm of work, including organizing the group exhibition Touchable Distance. However, the contested presidential election and the wave of protests and repression that followed it quickly necessitated a change in plans. We decided to postpone the opening of the exhibition to a more appropriate time, and in mid-August, launched #заЎтракожныдзень [#tomorroweveryday]—a project space where visitors could safely share their worries and concerns with artists while taking part in collective embroidery-making. The meditative process of sewing eased the stress of trauma and anxiety, at least for a while. At the end of August, a politically motivated criminal case was brought against one of the co-owners of the gallery, and as a result, the gallery office and all of our homes were searched. We ended up opening Touchable Distance in late October despite this crisis, with twenty-eight artists from eleven countries participating. Sadly, it was the Ў Gallery’s last exhibition. Now, in this time of relative standstill for the institution, we have started building an archive that traces the development of the Belarusian art scene over the last two decades.

IL: Aleksei, we met last September in Vienna, where you are currently based. How has it been to witness the mass protests unfold from a distance? Are there international networks or organizations outside of Belarus that are set up to help?

Aleksei Borisionok: I, like many of my colleagues, have worked between “here” and “there.” I have been active in the cultural scene in Belarus, but also living and working abroad. Because of work and visa-related issues, it has been difficult to travel and so I have not been able to be in Minsk as much. But I remember that just before returning to Minsk in October, I perceived the Belarusian uprising in a temporal way—that is, from a distance, with feelings of escalation, patience, acceleration, and exhaustion in turn. In late August, I wrote for Spectate magazine that revolutionary theory is also a theory of time.

It was only after living through the physical space of the city, after the riots that I was able to experience the events more spatially—as my body remembered the maneuvering through, rallying in, running down, and moving along the streets.

Together with other members of the Minsk collective platform Work Hard, Play Hard, I have been testing and developing modes of engagement that transgress notions of belonging, hospitality, and isolation. Actually, the last edition of the event [June 2020] was dedicated to the question of how to be together despite being physically distant. 

To answer the second part of your question, we prefer to use our preestablished international networks to connect to and intensify media coverage and representation rather than to activate diasporic ties. However, many of the diaspora communities worldwide have been actively supporting initiatives, for example, donating parts of their salaries to You Strike, We Work, and organizing and funding art exhibitions such as Belarus / Art of Resistance, which was held in Amsterdam. 

IL: The protests have been underway for a long time. What kinds of shifts have you noticed in the protests themselves and in Belarusian society as a whole?

AB: I prefer to look upon the protests in a temporal way, as a series of singular moments that can potentially unfold in many different ways. Politically, the situation is still open, and thus can take many directions—but that said, I would like to cite Nadzeya Husakouskaya and Alena Minchenia, who have expressed the idea that there are many things that the protests have permanently changed no matter what happens next: “These bonds and networks, this new sense of meaningfulness—as well as a shared experience of living through grief and pain—cannot be undone in Belarus.” The political experience of self-organizing; creating networks of solidarity and political action; testing the creative, technological, and political models of direct democracies; and participation definitely influences the way society will function in the future. 

I also admire how creative and smart the expressions of the protests, which are leaderless and self-organized, have been. For example, after the excess of police violence and many arrests, after huge weekly marches, a new protest form has emerged: the so-called Neighbourhood March. People meet in their yards [dvory], join together on their block, and then unite as a whole district with those from other blocks. Coordinating through Telegram chats, they are able to assemble and disperse depending on the situation. Because there are thousands of participants, the police cannot navigate the crowd in a normal way. 

AC: I would like to stress the fact that the protest movement in place for five months in Belarus has remained peaceful on the part of civil society. The process of this consolidation of society, which began in the summer of 2020 and continues to this day, is very new for our country—and it includes the previously marginalized and systematically invisible. There have been marches in Minsk of people with disabilities. Many who used to be apolitical have also participated. One of the most striking aspects of the fight against the dictatorship in Belarus has been the presence of women: there were three female leaders in the election campaign. Women took part in the protest marches in Belarus right after the violent events of August 9–11, and they continue to be active today.

IL: Strong visual language is usually part of the protests, slogans, performativity, and other gestures. How do you see your role as art producer and curator in this context?

AB: In my opinion, the creativity of the streets could be sharper, more expressive, and smarter. There is no need to demarcate the clear borders of professional and nonprofessional artistic practice in this situation. Even though I am working on several projects, I see how important it is not to create hierarchies and not to instrumentalize or decontextualize the manifestations of the protests.

I see the role of curators and producers in their administrative capacity: to self-organize; build solidarity networks; facilitate education, lectures, auctions and other benefit events; pursue media coverage; engage in agitation; and maintain archival records. I also see the roles of cultural institutions and individuals as support structures. Regardless of the precarious situation, some art spaces have been able to present strong artistic responses to the situation—for example, the KX space in Brest featured a group exhibition Faceless, which dealt with issues of anonymity, masking, and opacity; while Konserva art space, which is also in Brest, presented a strong statement from Mikhail Gulin titled (Non)Truth, which explored the absurdity of Belarusian official politics and aesthetics in a playful way.  

It is also amazing how many organizations have changed their programming because of the political situation: instead of inaugurating “business as usual,” DOTYK Queer Festival has initiated a series of self-help workshops and programs for local queers; while Minsk Urban Platform, which previously organized projects dedicated to yard self-management, has set up online lectures for yard activists. The yard movement to revitalize and repurpose small public spaces with performances, murals, and gatherings began in the residential neighborhoods, or yards, and has become an essential element of the broader protests and demonstrations.

We also have to care for those who are in danger, under constant threat of arrest, or undergoing complete burnout and stress. Many institutions and residency programs have been responsive—for example, Artists at Risk is dedicated to creating opportunities for artists by launching open calls.

AC: Due to the political situation, it is difficult to delineate the framework of curator/citizen, artist/citizen. Given the unprecedented state violence and number of detainees—now more than thirty thousand—Belarusian society is deeply traumatized, and I think it is important to address this collective trauma through art. 

IL: Aleksei, I’ve noticed that you are collecting examples of expressions of dissent in Belarus—militant and otherwise—looking at artistic practices that relate to archiving not only the recent protests in Belarus but also protests in general. Could you tell us more about this project?

Aleksei: I was invited to lecture on the politics of archiving at a seminar organized by the Goethe Institute in Minsk as part of the international program “Cultural Management in Digital Age.” In this keynote address, I spoke about how protest art could be collected, and how such an artistic and militant record would not only function as a representation of struggle, but also, be a vehicle of protest in itself. The preservation of a (counter)memory, one that resists state-sanctioned narratives, is extremely important. In the recent protests in Belarus, there were several people killed by police. Yet instead of opening a criminal investigation of the police, state officials brought charges against the people who painted the phrase “Never Forget, Never Forgive” at the site where the protesters were killed. Moreover, the memorial to the young artist and educator Raman Bandarenka, who defended one of the rebellious yards and died in November after being kidnapped and injured by paramilitaries, was destroyed by Minsk police and city representatives. In this latter situation, to remember really means to fight—as one anarchist banner claims—as the (counter)memorial and the effect of mourning mobilize political action. The archive can likewise trigger and preserve memory in order to reshape the past into scenarios for possible futures. Among the vernacular archives and collections of protest songs, gestures of solidarity, and radical objects developed, there have been projects such as cultprotest, which was initiated by artists Maxim Tyminko and Sergei Shabohin; Social Marble by Sergei Shabohin; and the archive of Chrysalis Mag. 

IL: What is perhaps misunderstood in the current representation of the struggle?

AB: There is a cliché epitomized by Slavoj Žižek’s article for the Independent. Žižek claims that “the ongoing protests in Belarus are catch-up protests, the aim of which is to align the country with Western liberal-capitalist values” and so on. Actually, the situation is much more complex: underlying the implicit threat of Western neoliberalism, there is a very tangible attack from the other side: rampant Russian capitalism that is not only theoretically but also practically privatizing state companies and infrastructures in Belarus. Therefore, Belarusian protests are not simply about catching up: their prefigurative forms of political organizing are actually illuminating the future—and not only the future of a single country, but also of a much broader geopolitical area. 

IL: How has the cultural field survived and reacted to the protests inside Belarus—from the state cultural institutions and museums to smaller NGOs?

AB: The notion of labor unrest took form as a set of various activities of disruption—strikes, picket lines outside of institutions, and the publication of statements and open letters. The voice of the state cultural institutions was notably loud, questioning the lack of autonomy and the instrumentalization of culture and arts in the official cultural policies. A powerful manifestation was the protest action “The Art of Regime,” in which different groups united in protest of the violence following the announcement of the election results. Organizers saw exhausted defiant bodies as a biopolitical raw material, where power was inscribed through violence in order to coerce, rule, and control—practicing, namely, a specific “art of governing.” [To learn more, see Aleksei Borisionok’s article “Arresting Images, Arresting Bodies” in L’Internationale Online.]

Many of the protestors have experienced backlash in the form of firings and detentions, among other retributions, and even though the beginning of 2021 feels like a moment of recomposition for both the state apparatus and the protest movements, the energy has not vanished.

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Inga Lāce: The Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź is one of the oldest museums of modern and contemporary art in the world. Thus, in the history of the institution, one can potentially see traces of its survival and resilience through previous crises. The current global pandemic, however, is unprecedented in its scale and impact, at the same time exposing the inequality and vulnerabilities that exist in the health, education, and cultural sectors. How have you been rethinking the role of the museum within the art system and society throughout COVID-19? What has been your institution’s response?

Daniel Muzyczuk: The Muzeum Sztuki went through World War II under Nazi control and then through Stalinism. During these periods, the museum suffered huge losses in its collection, and the most progressive art was suppressed. It also underwent a transformation in the 1990s that proved economically challenging. It is important to see the history of the institution as one of both continuity and rupture. Some historical moments have been decisive in terms of its future and its ethos. The historical crises, in particular, have influenced the way we understand the museum’s mission and identity. In fact, the work of the “a.r.” group, which is the cornerstone of the collection, is to a certain degree, the fruit of the collapse of the art market in the late 1920s. This side effect of the Great Depression opened up the possibility of reshaping the idea of art and its practice as well as making more communal use of works that could not be sold anyway.

It is hard to predict how the present crisis will alter the way we think about the role of institutions in the long run, but some effects are already clear. When scheduled exhibitions and conferences were postponed, our team was forced to refocus. We had to consider the impact of the current state of affairs on our immediate environment. On a basic level, the effects of the epidemic, lockdown, and social distancing do not differentiate. Any project that requires in-person engagement has been postponed, as have all indoor presentations. Even Hollywood productions are being rescheduled till late 2021. Though some events can afford to be delayed, this is not always the case. The art community is vulnerable to the fluctuations of the global economy, and the crisis has left a lot of people without their source of livelihood.

We implemented a number of initiatives that have redirected funds to artists and researchers. Building online content has provided a way to commission new pieces. We also decided to buy more works by artists living in Poland. The profile of the collection is the international modern art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Acquiring more work by living Polish artists is changing the balance of our holdings.

Education is the museum’s most pressing mission. Those programs involving participants of different ages have led us to find new tools and ways to make our collection more accessible. Our team wanted to restructure our offerings in order to provide a more mediated experience. The situation has demanded that we try new methods of outreach as well as test new formats that not only shift from the physical to the virtual, but also take advantage of the context of the virtual medium itself.

IL: Many institutions have strengthened their digital presence in reaction to the pandemic, but at the same time, remained acutely aware of how important physical encounters with art—and with one another—are to building strong communities. Also, the idea of “international,” which has been an essential part of the art scene, has been challenged by border closings and travel restrictions. How have you been rethinking the museum’s relationship with different communities—with audiences, artists, workers, and other partners—in relation to the digital context as well as to the idea of the international versus local?

DM: It is interesting to see how film festivals are making use of online distribution. I have not seen attendance numbers, but for me, as someone who does not have the time to participate in an intensive festival schedule, the move toward making films available for a designated period on a paid website has enabled me to actually watch more films. The difference between me and a large part of the festival crowd is that I am an amateur, and as such, do not rely on gathering and meeting with other professionals in the field. By moving online, festivals have become more accessible to and directed toward a nonprofessional audience.

The comparison to the field of visual art is valid only to a certain extent. While making film and video works available online and streaming online shows and talks provide good opportunities to produce new content, they cannot replace the physical experience of an exhibition. New means of spectatorship will be developed, but museums and galleries will still be needed, because art that offers a spatial, sensorial, and immediate experience will continue to be produced—and to warrant exhibition. 

Hence, the effect is twofold: on the one hand, net content offers the feeling of being connected, but as with seeing a show online, it is an ersatz for traveling and meeting up in person. This state of affairs enforces more grounded, ecological, and economical models of practice. Indeed, it is a paradox that allows us to be more global, while at the same time, to work within our immediate environment. Producing online content has enabled us to remain in touch with international artists, and to preserve our broader connections. However, it has also led us to work more within the local context and to collaborate more with Łódź-based artists than we have in previous years. In line with this, we have invited an artist-run space from Łódź, Galeria Czynna, to install an exhibition on the ground level of our building. This work is on view from the street through the windows—even while the museum is closed.

IL: Over the course of this conversation, massive protests against the court decision to ban most abortions have grown. What do you think is the role of a museum in terms of civic protest?

DM: Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance opens with an image of young socialists in 1937 discussing the fight against National Socialists while looking at the Pergamon frieze. There is no direct relation between the ancient work of art and current events, and yet the narration of the book is built on a familiar tension—how can art teach us resistance?

If we see art as an instrument of emancipation, then a museum becomes a site in which different views of social engagement can be reconfigured and studied in constellations. By necessity, museums should represent diversity and be spaces where differences can meet. Collecting, preserving, and exhibition-making of art of this century and the one before it could be understood as constant care for the memory of dissent, as an inventory of powerful images—such as Legality of Space by Ewa Partum or Consumer Art by Natalia LL . . . these works have already been used as symbols of protest. For example, Natalia LL’s famous 1973 video of a young woman eating a banana was removed from the institution’s permanent collection exhibition by the former director of the National Museum in Warsaw. This decision caused a wave of Polish artists and opposition politicians to post photographs of themselves eating bananas. The works from the past are proof that such struggle is not new, but they also invite a critical distance. Being able to decode visual communication is crucial in times of post-truth. Museums should foster this ability.

On another level, art registers social dissent, and thus building a collection becomes a way to shape collective memory and to express solidarity. Minority struggle is reflected in the resources of the public institution, which should, if necessary, release official statements if the rights of a specific group are under attack. After all, this support can be understood as part of the public mission.

IL: You have done extensive research on the alternative art and underground music scenes and communities in Eastern Europe. Their work manifests creativity under oppressive political regimes, and I wonder if there is something we can learn from it in this moment?

DM: We still don’t know how long the current situation is going to last—or if it will permanently influence how we share and experience art. Indeed, there are examples of past practices that might serve as the basis for what is to come—for example, private art pieces produced for a closed circuit of friends during martial law in Poland. Or mail art networks in which an artist would produce a piece for an audience of one—the addressee (and perhaps also the secret police officers checking the parcel). These practices necessitated different models of distribution because they were undertaken amid political oppression and censorship. The contemporary online culture works in a totally different way. Censorship of the web is not a problem in our hemisphere; however, social media platforms nonetheless create bubbles or groups that do not really intersect. The spread of art content is limited by this framework. In this kind of environment, we can use past models of engagement as references. We are clearly experiencing a form of separation, but it is radically different than it was before the Internet. We cannot travel abroad, yet we remain not so distant.

IL: You are writing a book about the birth of nationalist ideologies mixed with pseudo-religious thinking in Poland and Russia. How did you settle on this extremely timely subject, and what have you concluded in pursuing it?

DM: My book, which is almost finished, looks at a generation of artists who, in the mid-1980s, were responsible for iconoclastic acts of collective creativity undertaken within artist circles in St. Petersburg and Gdańsk. I trace their work over the course of political transformation of Polish and Russian societies. In the early 1990s, these artists became involved with television, which suddenly, when socialist ideology was removed from the public sphere, had a void in programming. Finally, by the mid-1990s, some of them had become active in either radical religious groups or right-wing politics. Their disillusionment with democracy and the transformation of the country led them to extend the scope of their practices beyond art into the social and political. I am tracing the genealogy of this “conservative revolutions” movement and its connections to contemporary politics. My book is an ideological history of the movement, which is rooted in the occult, magic, romanticism, and fascination with the dead body. There are three things that connect this topic to contemporaneity: Current politics in Poland and Russia are built upon that conservative moment and the discord resulting from how the transformation played out. Moreover, there have been clear consequences, such as the rise of [Aleksandr] Dugin as one of the most prominent ideologues of the new right. The methods used by these political groups are in part derived from those used by underground artist circles. There is one more element—the role of irony as first a useful tool of critique of socialist ideology, and then after the transformation, as a more conservative instrument of political relations. My analysis reconnects the political and aesthetic in an unexpected way.

IL: There is a lot of discussion—as well as projects—focused on the future. What is your utopian vision for the museum, the art scene, and the planet?

DM: The utopian ideal seems to be dead. Especially in Eastern Europe, the fall of communism, in combination with neoliberal propaganda, is responsible for the victory of pragmatic thought over a conscious designing of the common future. There is another shadow obscuring the view of what’s to come. How can one imagine any future given that human extinction feels more inevitable than it did in the days when societies lived in fear of nuclear annihilation?

An image made by Simone Forti makes visible how the future and past are interconnected. One side of a sheet of paper bears the word “past,” while the other bears the word “future.” The paper is folded so that both sides are partly visible. This is how we can glimpse the future in the past and see how museums could be useful.

We use the notion of a prototype to speak of this curious type of autonomy of art that Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro had in mind. They were against productivist tendencies. Tatlin’s idea of the direct involvement of artists in the factories rings false. Art should exist within an autonomous sphere, one that allows the artist to work free of bothers from the everyday world. The pieces he or she designs in such a laboratory might become a basis for other solutions, but the transfer is never direct. A museum thus houses an inventory of different instruments that might serve as prototypes for solutions to problems that have not yet appeared. This is not a grand utopian vision, but rather a down-to-earth type of thinking about implementation.

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Past’s Futures: Anthropocene or Capitalocene?

The forecasts for the near future of our planet are bleak. We have entered a new geological epoch, according to which human impact has damaged the Earth’s biological systems to the point that mass extinction is now a real possibility. Humanity—and the rest of life with it—is now on the threshold of an ecological collapse that, as scientists state, could result in 75% of Earth’s species becoming extinct in the next 200 years. This new geological epoch has been commonly termed the Anthropocene. However, the Capitalocene—an alternative term to refer to deleterious human activities—has also been proposed by Jason W. Moore.¹ Defining an inseparability between capital, anthropocentric power, and nature, the Capitalocene has triggered global conversations between scholars, activists and artists who have reached a collective agreement: climate change and its effects are not just the outcome of abstract processes, they are consequences of the world’s capitalist functions. The ecological crisis is “capitalogenic”, as Moore points out in his analysis of the last few hundred years of environmental issues.² However, thinking within the post-socialist era, more questions arise. The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II has reshaped the face of the land, changed the function of natural environments and caused environmental crises. As philosopher and filmmaker Daniel Ross points out, the communist vision of technological progress, industrialization and urbanization was  highly entropic and stands as an illustration of how human dreams can become nightmares.³ Thus, not surprisingly, in many countries under Soviet rule, ecological thought emerges intertwined with nationalist and anti-governmental sentiments. This having been said, it seems fair to ask, can we apply the term Capitalocene to describe the ecological damage exerted by communist regimes? 

In the post-1989 period, video artists from post-socialist countries started to reflect on the environmental legacy of socialist regimes whilst also addressing degradation caused by neoliberalism. The final part of this screening series provides a context-specific look  at how the Anthropocene and Capitalocene apply in the region. The artists and filmmakers presented in this screening reveal how moving image art from 1989 to the present registers changing attitudes toward the environment and exposes environmental damage caused by both socialist modernization and capitalist industrialization. The films presented here engage with ecological issues related to the times that now mark the failed dreams of East-Central European socialism. The futures assigned to the world in the socialist past are not the futures of the present.

Untitled (Time and Space) by Krzysztof Maniak

The return to nature was one of the eco-critical strategies available to the artists during the socialist times. Re-interpreting this tradition, Krzysztof Maniak’s film Untitled (Time and Space) documents actions performed in the vicinity of Tuchów, a Polish backwater. The simple gestures and actions, performed by the artist in the absence of an audience, include stroking moss, tree bark or snow, climbing trees, and estimating the distance between two trees. These actions are linked to the four seasons.

Bambi in Chernobyl by Angelika Markul

Chernobyl has been a desolate land since the nuclear disaster of 1986. Since then, nature seems to have regained its footing: fauna and flora have developed on the site, slowly invading the ruins of a world abandoned by humans. Angelika Markul’s Bambi in Chernobyl, a film based on footage of the artist’s expedition to the exclusion zone, explores a return to nature that is no longer pristine. As the artist has pointed out, the work is supposed to function like a sculpture, not just a projection. The scenography is important as the elements from the film are replicated in wax, resembling parts of a building from Chernobyl. In this structural film, the past and the future, the East and the West, dreams and reality collide in a lengthy shot of the scene of the nuclear catastrophe, extending the perspective of the devastated and toxic landscape from right to left, and from one end to the other. Markul transforms the image of post-disaster into a world suspended between reality and fiction that awakens childish fears. The film’s  score, composed by Franck Krawczyk, was inspired by Bambi, a Disney classic animation movie. Ironically, it contributes to the oeuvre’s  post-catastrophic imagery which is as familiar as it is uncanny.

Aral. Fishing in an Invisible Sea by Saodat Ismailova

Chernobyl is just one of many sites of ecological disasters that bear environmental memories of the socialist epoch. The Aral Sea is another. Fifty years ago, located on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, the Aral Sea was considered to be the fourth largest lake in the world. Now, it has  almost completely vanished. The desiccation of the Aral Sea started in the early 1960s with the expansion of the cotton industry and Soviet irrigation projects. These changes caused profound ecological damage, including the destruction of native fish species, degradation of biotic communities, and climate change which has affected the former shoreline. The disappearance of the Aral Sea represents an ecological disaster of monumental proportions for both the region’s ecosystems and its human inhabitants. A documentary film by Saodat Ismailova, Aral. Fishing in an Invisible Sea, tells the story of three generations of fishermen in the area around the Aral Sea. The work documents the everyday struggle to survive in one of the harshest places on the planet, emphasizing the disastrous aftermath of human expansionist ambitions. By tracing the invisible and lasting effects of what is considered to be one of the largest  human-caused ecological disasters on the planet, the film questions the failed futures of its recent communist past. 

The Most Beautiful Catastrophe by APART Collective

Another film dealing with the overexploitation and extraction of natural resources is The Most Beautiful Catastrophe by APART Collective. The film, shot in the region of upper Nitra, examines the industry of coal mining and its impact on the living environments. The extraction of coal, initiated during the communist era, still remains one of the main industries in Slovakia despite the growing threat of climate change. The film specifically focuses on the Kosovsko-Laskár wetlands that are located in the Central-Western Slovakia. These wetlands emerged as a by-product of the underground extraction of coal, and are probably the first example of a new landscape to emerge in Slovakia. Mining has changed the territory: large sinkholes have been created, affecting both housing and the natural environment. This environmental impact has forced people to move, forming an unusual habitat as nature finds its balance. But after several years, the situation has worsened. A crisis at the still-operational mine caused water to be discharged from its flooded tunnels up to the surface. As miners began to pump this water into the nearby creek, their skin burned. This mixture, of ash and hydraulic emulsion, managed to kill all life in the creek. The film explores the impact of technological progress on global warming and raises the question of geopolitical writing with the planet, not only about the planet. Here, the past’s futures overlap with the future’s pasts.

Landslide by Oleksiy Radynski

Landslide by Oleksiy Radynski is a film about an attempt to build a radically different society. This experiment takes place in the former garage collective in the very center of Kyiv, in the area reclaimed by nature and its force. Landslides, degradation of urban politics and disintegration of social ties culminated in the abandonment of this place in the 1990s. In 2016, Radynski was among the counterculture artist collectives, musicians and avant-garde performers to re-occupy this place. The protagonists of the film touch upon the old debate between Anarchists and Marxists, of whether one should live one’s utopia right here and now, or create conditions for a better life in the future. A central narrative forms around a queer theater director who has fled the Eastern Ukraine to find refuge in Kyiv. The director rehearses a play that culminates in an improvised performance towards the end of the film. As the narrative of the director unfolds, a different group of inhabitants— an older generation of garage owners—is introduced, advocating a completely different view of the place’s pasts and its potential futures. Gravity, the force that triggers the landslide, becomes a metaphor for this short-lived meeting of urban nature, post-Soviet masculinity and queer performance.

This film program is organized by Inga Lāce and Lukas Brasiskis in collaboration with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Lithuanian Culture Institute and Lithuanian Cultural Attaché in New York, Consulate General of Estonia in New York, Polish Cultural Institute New York, and Consulate General of the Slovak Republic in New York. The third screening “Past’s Futures: Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” will be available from August 26 to September 9, 2020. You can read about the first screening here and second screening here.

The post Screening Series Part 3: <em>From Matter to Data: Ecology of Infrastructures</em> appeared first on post.

Specters of Socialist Architecture

Behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union engineered its own version of the modern individual. As social anthropologist Caroline Humphrey has written, “…the fantasy of the socialist infrastructure acquired an overdetermining quality in the Soviet Union in conjunction with the grand industrialization and collectivization programs of the mid-twentieth century”. Wide scale urbanization was one of the most common practices of transformation, leading to the homogenization of socialist everyday life. Urban architecture played a crucial role in this process. The idea of using a residential area for ideological goals was notably prevalent during the Khrushchev era, when the intensive union-wide apartment building program began. As architectural historian Florian Urban points out, political, ideological, social, economic and even technological aspects of architecture were standardized across the Soviet Union in the 1950s and the 1960s. With the advent of large panel prefabricated blockhouse building technology, the housing projects were gradually carried out in every republic of the USSR, and thus, the urban unification of Soviet everyday life influenced large populations.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the socialist housing projects no longer performed their primary ideological function. While some still accommodate millions of people, others  rest in a desolate state. Some have sought to change their profile to adapt to capitalist realities. Stripped of its ideological frame, the specter of socialist architecture nevertheless retains its influence on the geographic, social and cultural landscape of post-socialist life. With the shift to a capitalist system, concepts like development and gentrification have entered the vocabularies of urban development. Today, these hybrid views towards architecture entangle political contexts, ecological consciousness, and the economic progress of the region. The video artworks in this section focus on Soviet architectural infrastructure and its impact on the environment, as well as envisioning its potential future.

A Place (Playground) by Krassimir Terziev

Just as standard residential buildings were designed to synchronize the daily lives of the New Soviet individual, so were the playgrounds and leisure parks that were built next to these apartment buildings. A Place (Playground) (2004) by Krassimir Terziev focuses on one of the playgrounds situated in a typical working-class neighborhood, built in 1983 in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. The environment recorded on video is characteristic of a concoction of preplanned hillocks that are cut across by canals and ponds which are linked by curved footbridges. Terziev highlights the architectural ensemble characteristic of prop-like tanks, rockets, military airplanes and canons—all arranged as if on a battlefield. The metal items painted in the same colors—yellow, red and blue—were manufactured from the materials used in the production of military equipment. Importantly, the film turns to the environment as metaphor, as it documents everyday activities in a space packed with residents who are unaware of the changing ideologies behind their urban surroundings, as communist ideology gradually gives way to capitalist consumerism.

Pirimze by Sophia Tabatadze

Sophia Tabatadze’s creative documentary Pirimze (2015) is another retrospective research study of the socialist architecture vis-a-vis its gradual environmental alterations. This film focuses on social and visual changes affecting Pirimze, a six-floor building  from the Soviet era, once built in Tbilisi to house repair and maintenance services. Tabatadze chooses to narrate the story from the perspective of the building, giving it a character, but also subtly emphasizing the social importance of non-human infrastructural objects in the changing ecosystem of the city. The theme unfolds into a broader picture that reveals the socio-political changes that have happened in Georgia in the recent decades.

As Pirimze emphasizes, the imposed homogeneity of the Soviet everyday was by no means a given phenomenon but rather an aspiration for Soviet architectural projects.  Different nations in the USSR had different cultural and political histories. For some time, the repressive mechanisms and everyday practices functioned as if these differences were non-existent, or at least completely insignificant. But these differences became more notable, until eventually, and inevitably, they came to the fore in the 1980s. It was at this time that  architecture ceased to play its prescribed role. The breakdown of the function of Soviet urban infrastructure is particularly visible when looking at the specters of Soviet architectural projects.

Four Edges of Pyramiden by Ieva Epnere

Ieva Epnere in Four Edges of Pyramiden (2015) focuses on one of these specters. The ex-Soviet mining town Pyramiden, built on the archipelago of Svalbard, stopped functioning in the late 1980s and was finally deserted in 1998, leaving behind a number of empty residential buildings, an abandoned library, and a desolate cultural center that all together form a ghostly memory of life from the socialist past. Svalbard, historically known as no-man’s land, was used for mining natural resources during the Soviet era. As a result, the natural environment of the area has been  altered. After the Soviet Union collapsed however, Svalbard—one of the northernmost places in the world’—has metamorphosed again and become a destination for researchers, escapists and adventurous passersby. In this film, Ieva Epnere performatively presents four human stories about the present state of this spectral place that both implicitly and explicitly reveal previously forgotten non-human worlds.

Concrete and Unclear by fantastic little splash

fantastic little splash, a collective of investigative artists from Ukraine continues to trace the connection between the past and the present as seen through the architectural structures erected in the Soviet times. Concrete and Unclear (2018) is a documentary short film devoted to the Hotel “Parus” in Dnipro, Ukraine. Hotel “Parus”, which was meant to be a grand symbol of Dnipropetrovsk,the homeland of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, never opened— its construction was halted on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This unfinished building became one of the symbols of the city and started to function as a matrix for a spectrum of the present concerns. The hotel symbolizes the impossibility of Soviet claims, the domination of private capital, and the pro-Ukrainian mood of the inhabitants of the eastern city. Hotel “Parus” has become a space of imagination that opposes reality and at the same time reproduces it.

Client’s Day by Flo Kasearu

Flo Kasearu’s Client’s day (2020), the most recent video through which we encounter the specters of the socialist architecture, demonstrates the potential of the ruins of a prefabricated panel block house, located on the fringe of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, just minutes away from the sea. The film reveals the process of gentrification as it reaches the city. It also reflects on the role played by artists within this process, as they are usually the first ones to arrive to previously derelict areas, only to be later ousted  as the spaces acquire higher market value and become too expensive to rent. In this video, the real estate broker speaks about the future as present, ignoring the actual present and the artists who are there at the moment, since they are often seen as temporary residents. Another issue the video tackles is the tension between erecting new buildings and rehabilitating old ones. The 1980s panel block architecture depicted in the video used to be considered ugly. However, as the video ironically points out, it may become more and more appealing as gentrification continues and views on the sustainable development of cities change.

This film program is organized by Inga Lāce and Lukas Brasiskis in collaboration with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Lithuanian Culture Institute and Lithuanian Cultural Attaché in New York, Consulate General of Estonia in New York, Polish Cultural Institute New York, and Consulate General of the Slovak Republic in New York. The third screening “Past’s Futures: Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” will be available from August 26 to September 9, 2020. You can read about the first screening here.

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