[oberlist] LV* evnt/conf/pol: “Political emancipation of artistic practices in Ukraine” - online discussion

[ober]

Online discussion “Political emancipation of artistic practices in 
Ukraine”
https://lcca.lv/en/exhibitions/online-discussion--political-emancipation-of-artistic-practices-in-ukraine-/

On Wednesday, March 16, at 6 to 8 pm EET / 5 to 7 pm CET, join us for an 
online discussion, where artists, curators and researchers from Ukraine 
will talk about their works dealing with the entanglements of past and 
present, memory and cultural decolonization.

Participants: Svitlana Biedarieva, Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev, 
Nikolay Karabinovich, Olia Mykhailiuk, Lada Nakonechna, Kateryna 
Botanova.

Moderators: Ieva Astahovska and Linda Kaljundi.

The discussion will take place on Facebook: 
https://www.facebook.com/LLMC.LV/

Since 24 February, the world has desparately followed the war started by 
Russian president Putin in Ukraine justifying his aggressive invasion of 
the neighboring country with the need to “defend itself”, “denazify” 
Ukraine and “protect people who have been subject to abuse and genocide 
by the regime in Kyiv”. In his hour-long televised speech announcing the 
attack, Putin manipulated notions of 20th century and especially WWII 
history, denied that Ukraine has ever had “real statehood,” and stated 
that the country was an integral part of Russia’s “own history, culture, 
and spiritual space.” The falsification of history used to invade an 
independent state, assert power, and justify his imperial megalomania, 
has suddenly transformed war in Europe from a thing of the past into an 
urgent catastrophe of unprecedented scale for millions of people in the 
21st century.

The war in Ukraine began in 2014 with Russia’s illegal annexation of 
Crimea, and subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine. Already at that 
time, cultural resistance played an essential role alongside political 
protests. “What the artists did next to the barricades, sandwiches, 
hospitals, and Molotov cocktails was also a form of survival art, 
careful and scrupulous, often anonymous documentation of day-to-day 
activities. It was the art of action, of intervention in the physical 
and political reality to affect the symbolic one,” writes Ukrainian 
cultural critic, curator, and writer Kateryna Botanova. “Artistic 
practices engaged and laid the ground for a different kind of society 
based on a common fight and, at the same time, care and solidarity.”

After the Maidan Uprising (2013), many contemporary Ukrainian artists 
continued to work with difficult, debated and traumatic issues, among 
them searches for identity, memory wars, changing geopolitical 
affiliations, “documenting and empowering the voices of the other, 
telling the stories of those unseen and disempowered, articulating 
history not as a politically curated linear narrative serving the 
purpose of nation-building but as a layered and conflicting array of 
forgotten stories.” Collecting, accumulating, and articulating these 
issues of society’s blind spots, these artists have been building a 
critical mass of knowledge that are essential in building “a political 
nation capable of embracing multiple identities, on the foundations of 
traumatic experiences of the Soviet collectivity and post-Soviet 
aggressive individuality, colonial recasting of identities and 
post-colonial national take-over, Soviet totalitarianism and post-Soviet 
authoritarianism,” as Kateryna Botanova sums up.

The discussion is part of the project “Reflecting Post-Socialism through 
Postcolonialism in the Baltics”, which analyses the imprints of 
post-socialism and post-colonialism in the region. The programme is 
organized by the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art in Riga in 
collaboration with Kumu Art Museum, and it is curated by Ieva Astahovska 
and Linda Kaljundi.

The event is supported by the Nep4Dissent Research Network, an EU COST 
Action Association.

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