Partic-
ipants
In order of appearance in the program
Yvette Brackman
Artist and Mads Øvlisen Novo Nordisk Postdoc Fellow at SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
Yvette Brackman works with sculpture, performance and text, making works about the body, space and culture. Her art is represented in public collections including the National Gallery of Denmark. She was professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 2000-2007.
Christina Kiær
Novo Nordisk Visiting Professor, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2021-2022; Arthur Andersen Teaching and Research Professor in the Department of Art History, Northwestern University
Christina Kiær is the author of Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press) and Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT Press), and co-editor of Revolution Every Day: A Calendar (Mousse Publishing with the Smart Museum of Art) and Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Indiana University Press). Her current research project is “Aesthetics of Anti-racism: Black Americans in Soviet Visual Culture.”
Katia Denysova
Ph.D. candidate, Courtauld Institute of Art in London
Katia Denysova’s research focuses on the link between socio-political factors and the early twentieth-century art in Ukraine, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the country’s multi-layered identity and preservation of its historical memory. Prior to starting her PhD, Katia spent eight years at the international auction house Christie’s, where she worked, among other things, on the strategic development of the East-Central European region. She acted as an associate editor for the peer-review journal immediations in 2020-21, and has contributed to H-SHERA, ArtHist and Dash Arts podcast series. Her articles on Ukrainian avant-garde art are due to be published in the forthcoming special issues of Arts and Art & the Public Sphere (both in 2022).
Michał Murawski
Anthropologist of architecture; Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Area Studies, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
Michał Murawski’s first book, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed, was published by Indiana University Press in 2019. He is now working on a book about architecture, politics and violence in post-Soviet Moscow. Michał is Director of the FRINGE Centre at UCL SSEES and Co-Convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East), an art and research platform based at UCL. More information about Michał’s research and teaching can be found on his website: www.michalmurawski.net
Maria Mileeva
Associate Lecturer in Soviet and Post-Soviet Art, Courtauld Institute of Art in London
Maria Mileeva’s current major research project interrogates socialist realism and its legacies in the former Soviet Republics, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. She is Co-Convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East), an art and research platform based at University College London.
Ievgeniia Gubkina
Architect, historian of architecture, and curator of architecture and art project and educational activities
Ievgeniia Gubkina is co-founder of the NGO Urban Forms Center and the avant-garde women’s movement “Modernistki”. Her work specializes in architecture and urban planning of the 20th century in Ukraine, and multidisciplinary approaches to heritage studies. Her first book Slavutych: Architectural Guide was published in 2015 by DOM Publishers in Germany and was dedicated to the architecture of the last Soviet city of Slavutych, built after the Chornobyl disaster for workers of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. Her second book, Soviet Modernism. Brutalism. Post-Modernism. Buildings and Structures in Ukraine 1955–1991 was published in 2019 by Osnovy Publishing and DOM Publishers. In 2020 she curated the “Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Architecture” multimedia online project. After the Russian war against Ukraine started in 2022, she was forced to leave Kharkiv and temporarily move to Latvia.
Tom Hermansen
Ph.D. candidate, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen
On a PhD-scholarship from The New Carlsberg Foundation, Tom Hermansen is working on his dissertation project: “‘Art for the Masses’: Monumental Wall Painting in Interwar Denmark.”
Tania Ørum
Associate Professor Emerita, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen
Tania Ørum has written on feminist theory, modernist literature and avant-garde art, especially on the avant-garde of the 1960s in Denmark. She is the chief editor of A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900-2020, vols. 1-4 (2012-2022).
Kristoffer Ørum
Visual artist and researcher
Kristoffer Ørum’s interdisciplinary practice revolves around the digital spheres in which we interact and construct our identities. Based in Denmark, he holds an MA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art. He has served as a professor at the Funen Academy of Art and was artistic researcher at Uncertain Archives, Copenhagen University.
Birgitte Beck Pristed
Associate Professor in Russian studies, Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University
Birgitte Beck Pristed holds a PhD from the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany. She has authored an illustrated monograph on contemporary Russian book design and print culture, The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History (2017). Her main research areas are book and media history, and visual and material cultures of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Pristed was previously a Danish teacher at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow and a curator in the Workers’ Museum in Copenhagen.
Samuel Rachlin
Journalist and author
Samuel Rachlin is a Danish journalist and author who was born in Siberia in the USSR. His most recent books include Jeg, Putin (I, Putin) and Folket og Magten (The people and power).
Svitlana Biedarieva
Art historian, curator, PhD in History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian and curator with a focus on Eastern European and Latin American art. In 2019-2020, she curated the exhibition At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013-2019 in Mexico and Canada. Her edited books include Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991-2021 (Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2021) and At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013-2019 (Mexico City: Editorial 17, 2020, co-edited with Hanna Deikun). Biedarieva has published texts on Ukrainian art in such academic and media outlets as October, Art Margins Online, Revue Critique d’Art, Financial Times, and The Art Newspaper.
Olexii Kuchanskyi
Researcher, film programmer, artist, and writer
Olexii Kuchanskyi (s/he) is an independent researcher, film programmer, artist, and queer writer in Kyiv, Ukraine whose main interests lie in experimental moving-image art, its ecological impact, and critical cultures of nature. S/he was born in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. S/he lives in Kyiv. His/her works have been published in Prostory, Your Art, TransitoryWhite, Political Critique, East-European Film Bulletin, Arts of the Working Class, Moscow Art Magazine, e-flux Notes, and others.
Maria Kulikovska/Garage 33
Crimean, Ukrainian multimedia artist, architect, actionist-performer, researcher and lecturer in exile.
On March 16, she was forced to leave Kyiv, Ukraine together with her newborn baby, because of the Russian-Ukrainian war. She is the co-founder, with Oleg Vinnichenko, of the international non-binary art space Garage33, Gallery-Shelter and School of Political Performance.
Dana Kavelina
Artist and filmmaker
Dana Kavelina is an artist and filmmaker based in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine (currently fled to Germany). She works primarily with animation and video, but also installation, painting and graphics. Her works often thematize military violence and war, seen from a gender perspective, and especially concern the position of the victim as a political subject, as well as the distance between historical and individual trauma, memory and misrepresentation. Her works have been exhibited at the Kristianstad Kunsthalle (Sweden), Kmytiv Museum, and Closer Art Center and Voloshyn Gallery (both Kyiv). In 2018, the animated film “Mark Tulip, Who Spoke with Flowers” received the Special Jury Prize at the OIFF and the Grand Prix of the KROK festival. In 2020 the film “Letter to the Turtledove” was included in the “War and Cinema” program of e-flux, and in 2022 shown in the MoMA screening program “Notes from the Ground.”
Nikita Kadan
Artist
Nikita Kadan is an artist working with painting, graphics, and installation, often in interdisciplinary collaboration with architects, sociologists and human rights activists. He studied at the National Academy of Fine Art (Kyiv) in the department of monumental painting under professor Mykola Storozhenko. He is a member of the artist group REP (Revolutionary Experimental Space) and founding member of Hudrada (Artistic Committee), a curatorial and activist collective. He lives in Kyiv.
Anti Gonna
Artist and filmmaker
Anti Gonna is an independent filmmaker, actress and trash model who lives and works in Kyiv and Paris. Anti Gonna researches problems of fear, violence, death and a new vision of sexuality, working in the genres of video-art combined with a new film format, experimental documentary, music video, virtual reality, and photography. Works have been exhibited at ESPRESSIONI CON FRAZIONI 2022, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (Turin, Italy); Porn Film Festival Vienna 2022 (Vienna, Austria); International Festival of New Non Fiction Narratives 2021 as a finalist (Condor, Santa Fe Argentina); the solo exhibition Oksana - AntiGonna: 13, Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Andrew Siguntsov (Odesa, Ukraine). Anti Gonna was a nominee for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2020 (Kyiv, Ukraine).