CFP: Radical Art in Transition: Counter-culture, protest, resistance and contemporary art in the Balkans since 1968
Deadline for Paper Proposals: 7 November 2016

Convenors:
Jonathan Blackwood, Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, j.blackwood@rgu.ac.uk
Jasmina Tumbas, SUNY: University at Buffalo, jasminatumbas@gmail.com

‘…this transformation is now openly being challenged by the rise of new social movements and by the return of radical politics in the post-Yugoslav and wider Balkan region. A new generation enters politics via direct democratic actions and the street and not through political channels of electoral democracy and classic party politics…sometimes in unlikely places, such as the post-socialist and post-conflict Balkans, we can see a sudden explosion of original radicalism.’

Igor Štiks & Srecko Horvat, Radical Politics in the Desert of Transition, 2015 Štiks and Horvat’s analysis of recent political protests in the former Yugoslavia, and in the wider Balkan region, focus on the development of ‘parallel institutions’, ‘alternative structures’, and the struggles of a ‘new consensus’ to gain traction in a heavily contested and corrupted political landscape.

Much of this analysis could also be extended to open out intersections between counter cultures, political protest, and contemporary art in the Balkans region since the upheavals of 1968. From the actions of the New Left in the Yugoslav context, to more recent public demonstrations against governments and the effects of neoliberal politics from Slovenia to Turkey, from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Moldova, protest and the cultural and political imagination are vivid threads in late modern and contemporary art in the region.

This panel seeks papers that address the intersections between visual culture and political protest in the Western Balkan space. We are open minded about the approaches you could take; from art-historical analyses of specific moments (eg Serbian art’s response to the rise of radical nationalism at the end of the 1980s and in the Miloševi? years), to essays on the role and future of institutions in a bleak funding landscape, to specific interventions by cultural actors in the political or para-political stage.

We are interested, too, in how visual culture has responded to and developed particular layers of protest; such as LGBTIQ+, debates surrounding minority rights, and self-organised community-based actions.

In opening out debate on the complex inter-relations between visual culture, counter culture and protest, we hope that our joint work will develop new insights into, and understandings of, these difficulties, and contextualise these debates against a broader background of political, economic and cultural hierarchies within the EU.

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Please email your paper proposals straight to the session convenor(s). Provide a title and abstract for a 25 minute paper (max 250 words). Include your name, affiliation and email. Your paper title should be concise and accurately reflect what the paper is about (it should ‘say what it does on the tin’) because the title is what appears most first and foremost online, in social media and in the printed programme.

You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks. Do not send proposals to the Conference Administrator or the Conference Convenor.

Deadline for Paper Proposals: 7 November 2016

AAH2017
43rd Annual Conference and Art Book Fair
Loughborough University
6th – 8th April 2017

ANN: Lecture - Caryl Emerson, On Mikhail Bakhtin and Human Studies

To mark 50 Years of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield the following lecture has been organised by the School of Languages and Cultures, The Prokhorov Centre and the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield.

Caryl Emerson

On Mikhail Bakhtin and Human Studies
(with continual reference to Moscow and Sheffield)

Professor Emerson’s lecture will address some of the following questions:

• What human studies (and in particular the study of literary culture and value) can hope to do;
• How the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin can help us to do it;
• How scholars at Sheffield pursue a “philosophy of the human” through a Russian and Slavonic lens.

Every vital field that is perceived as failing to provide basic services or commercially viable goods is destined to be in a permanent “value crisis.” But repeating the mantra of a “crisis of the humanities” is a sorry way to approach the challenges of one’s job. The task, rather, is to argue for the absolute necessity of certain threatened virtues: serious study of world languages, human dignity as a cognitive value, organic as opposed to mechanical systems, and the empirical benefits of patience and real (deep) time.

About our speaker:

Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She has written on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin in a number of prominent publications including her seminal bookMikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (with Gary Saul Morson, 1990) and The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (1997) and translated texts such as Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984) and the collection The Dialogic Imagination (with Michael Holquist, 1981). She has also written widely on nineteenth-century Russian literature and opera, resulting in such works as The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (2008) and All the Same the Words Don’t Go Away (Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition) (2011).

4pm, Friday 28 October 2016
Followed by wine reception
Humanities Research Institute
Gell St. Sheffield

All welcome!

Conference: DADA TECHNIQUES IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE (1916–1930)

October 13-15, 2016
Kassák Museum
1033 Budapest, Fő tér 1, Zichy castle, Hungary

International Conference organized by the Petőfi Literary Museum – Kassák Museum and the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

For the full programme, please see The Kassak Museum website

The conference of the Petőfi Literary Museum – Kassák Museum and the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences marks the centenary of the beginning of Dada in Zurich. The conference concentrates on Dada phenomena in East-Central Europe, especially the Dada techniques that appeared in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states. The avant-garde artists of the East-Central European region felt the impact of Dada at the end of the First World War, when established economic, political and identity strategies were going through crisis and rearrangement. In these years, many borders became blurred: between centre and periphery, between politics and anti-politics, and among genders, artists’ roles and forms of artistic expression.

A distinctive attitude of Dada was the crossing of borders, and this had a uniquely emancipating role: by suspending traditional social norms, it opened the way to artistic self-realization without borders. Dada dispensed with the questions of origin, religious background, women’s role stereotypes or even formal artistic training. It removed the moral barriers to asking previously inconceivable and provocative questions concerning artistic creation and reception, institutions, society and public taste in general. Dada was a symptom of the decomposition of the old world. Its radical language had an impact even on artists who never called themselves ‘Dadaists’.

What did avant-garde artists use Dada for in East-Central Europe during the 1910s and 1920s? Certainly to commit systematic border incursions. The borders were those between languages, majority and minority identities, politics and anti-politics. The sections of the conference discuss these artistic border incursions.

First international scientific conference focused on artistic work of Kazymyr Malevych to take place in Kyiv

Artist of Ukrainian-Polish origin Kazymyr Malevych was born in Kyiv, his artistic work has close ties with Ukraine and not merely in terms of location. Problems of the then-time Ukraine are reflected in his works, for example, the fate of rural population during collectivization. For a long time Malevych same as other avant-garde artists whose life and work were connected to Ukraine, was classified as “Russian avant-garde”. One of the reasons for that was lack of historic documents that would lay ground to research of the artist’s Ukrainian period. Such archive documents were published in the end of 2015. They will become the basis for the first international conference to be held in Kyiv.

Kyiv, September 7, 2016. On October 6-9 Kyiv will host the First International Scientific Conference focused on artistic work of Kazymyr Malevych named “Kazymyr Malevych: the Kyiv Aspect”. The event is to unite leading researchers of Malevych’s artistic activities from France, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Belarus, Israel and Canada.

“Such well-known researchers as Jean-Claude Marcadé and Andrei Nakov accepted our invitation. It is due to them that the term “Ukrainian avant-garde” appeared. […] We have received a total of 30 applications, biggest part of the applicants will take part and make interventions at the conference,” said organizer of the conference Tetyana Filevska, researcher of Malevych’s art work, author of the book “Kazymyr Malevych. The Kyiv Period 1928-1930” at a press-briefing at Ukraine Crisis Media Center. The event is organized by the NGO “Malevych Institute” and is supported at both the state level – by the cultural diplomacy department of Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture, Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre, and by international and national cultural organizations including Polish Institute in Kyiv and Ya Gallery. Ukraine Crisis Media Center also supports the event.

Ukrainian Period of Malevych
The conference aims at discussing the Kyiv period of the artist’s work that comes into the spotlight for the first time in the book “Kazymyr Malevych. The Kyiv Period 1928-1930”. The book contains recently discovered texts that relate to Malevych’s work at the Kyiv Institute of Arts as well as the artist’s articles published in 2015 that had been never published before and that became a scoop right on the 100th anniversary of the “Black Square”. “Kazymyr Malevych is the most researched artist in the world, […] however very little was said about his Kyiv period due to the lack of documents. Documents discovered last year made it possible,” said Tetyana Filevska. “We will be discussing not only the 1928-1930 years because Malevych’s connection to Kyiv is much wider and includes his birth, childhood, family ties, his studies at Murashko art school and constant connection to Kyiv’s artistic community.”

It has been for quite a while that Malevych was referred to as a Russian artist both in post-Soviet countries and in the West, because there was almost no information about his Ukrainian period of artistic work. As a result art experts could not explain why the works of this period differ so much from his other works. “They could not understand why Malevych’s works had no color in Saint Petersburg and suddenly became so colorful; they were wondering where the second cycle of works portraying rural population came from and in which way it should be researched and classified. When the Ukrainian aspect was discovered everything fell into place,” explained Dmytro Horbachov, professor, researcher of Ukrainian avant-garde, honorary head of the conference’s organizing committee. “Malevych liked and sympathized with the rural population a lot, ornaments on the stoves had a huge impact on his art work. […] When they ‘broke the spine’ of the rural population in 1929 (collectivization), it was a personal tragedy to him and started painting helpless peasants choosing yellow-and-blue as a background, formally it was a landscape.”

Breakaway from Ukraine’s colonial past
Wide scientific discussion of the artist’s Kyiv period of work is important not only in the scientific dimension but also in the political one – as part of Ukraine’s breakaway from its colonial past, when the country was dissolved in the huge empire. “Malevych theme is an example of how historic justice needs to be restored and decommunization needs to be carried out. It is an example of how art may change everything, that’s why it was of interest that he keeps being considered Russian not Ukrainian,” noted Leonid Marushchak, Arts Department curator at Ukraine Crisis Media Center.

“In such a way we are trying to rediscover our modernist culture that takes us from the 19th to the 21st century. It is a powerful signal for the international artistic community and a power communication occasion for cultural diplomacy,” said Pavlo Bilodid, cultural project manager at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School.

Tetyana Filevska also said that on the conference days the National Art Museum will display its Malevych-related archive. “We are also preparing an exposition of embroidered works from Verbivka village based on Malevych’s sketches. We will also present the (recently found) materials from the Kropyvnytsky archive that we published in the book, so that all interested will be able to see them,” she added.

Conference: The Russian Century: The Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts, 1801-1917

September 30-October 1, 2016
Yale University
Henry R. Luce Hall Auditorium
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT

Organised by Molly Brunson and Bella Grigoryan

Since 1991, the classical Russian literature of the nineteenth century has gone through both eclipse and revival. Modernist and post-modernist accounts of Russian culture that came to the fore in the late 1980s have begun to give way to a reinterpretation of the nineteenth century, one that adds to the Russian classics a wider perspective encompassing music, visual arts, and theater and new methodologies. This process is only beginning and requires a united effort of scholars to succeed.

Inspired by this renewed interest in the nineteenth century and the general shift toward destabilizing disciplinary and historiographic borders, this conference, under the guidance of Molly Brunson, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, brings together prominent senior scholars and emerging junior scholars from Russia, Europe, and the U.S., and from a wide range of fields (language and literature, musicology, art and architecture history, performance studies and drama history).

Click for full conference programme

Sponsored by the European Studies Council, the Russian Studies Program with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

CONF: International Scholarly Symposium: “Gifts and Prayers: The Romanovs and Their Subjects”
Saturday, September 24, 2016, 8AM – 5PM

Speakers from Europe and the United States will discuss the history of collecting Russian art in America. In addition, papers will be devoted to individual works of art featured in the exhibition of the same name. The presentations will include reports on the conservation and restoration of the objects of art as well as detailed findings of a scientific multispectral imaging of a hitherto unknown painting by Aleksei G. Venetsianov (1780–1847), one of Russia’s most significant 19th-century artists. Sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and C.V. Nalley III.

This symposium is free and open to the public. All sessions will take place at the Georgia Museum of Art, 90 Carlton Street, Athens, GA 30602, unless otherwise indicated.

Schedule
Friday, September 23, 2016
4 – 5 PM Tour of the exhibition “Gifts and Prayers: The Romanovs and Their Subjects”

5:30 PM Keynote Lecture: Mrs. Suzanne Massie 
The 2016 Shouky Shaheen Distinguished Lecturer in the Arts
Room S150, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Saturday, September 24, 2016

8 – 8:30 AM Coffee & pastries

8:30 – 8:45 AM Opening remarks, Dr. William Underwood Eiland, director, Georgia Museum of Art

8:45 – 9:30 AM Introductory lecture, Edward Kasinec, Columbia University, “Riddles of the De Basily Collections at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University”

Session One: Russian Icons: Sales and Collections, moderated by Anna Winestein, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University & Ballets Russes Arts Initiative, Boston

9:30 –11:00 AM Elena Osokina, University of South Carolina, “To Sell Icons: Soviet Industrialization and the Founding of the World Market in Russian Religious Art”

Wendy Salmond, Chapman University, “Russian Icons in American Museums”

11 – 11:30 AM Coffee break

11:30 a.m. – 12:15 PM Yuri Pyatnitsky, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, “The Tsars of Russia and the Holy Mountain Athos”
12:30 – 2 p.m. Lunch and gallery tour

Session Two: Russian Paintings in the West, moderated by Vladimir von Tsurikov, director of the Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota

2 – 3:30 PM Anna Winestein, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University & Ballets Russes Arts Initiative, Boston, “Across the Chasm of Foreignness, Across the Chasm of Time: 19th-Century Russian Art in the West Before and After 1917”

Erich Uffelman, Washington and Lee University, “The Scientific Imaging of the ‘Portrait of a Youth’ Featured in the Exhibition ‘Gifts and Prayers: The Romanovs and Their Subjects’” (The paper will be delivered jointly with Dr. Uffelman’s research assistant Ms. Mallory Abramson)

3 – 3:30 PM Coffee break

4 –4:45 PM Asen Kirin, University of Georgia, “Angels on Earth: Portraits and Icons in Russian Art and Literature During the Early 19th Century”

5 – 5:30 PM Discussion and Adjournment

Announcing the programme for the 4th Workshop of the Russian Art & Culture Group
Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany
September 22-23, 2016

For the full programme, please click here

ANN: New Lecture Series:
‘Social Histories of the Russian Revolution’
Birkbeck, University of London
October 2016 - November 2017

For further information, please visit: https://socialhistories1917.wordpress.com/

Full Programme
2016
Oct 27 – Steve Smith (University of Oxford): The Social History of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921
Nov 24 – Brendan McGeever (Birkbeck, University of London): Antisemitism and Revolutionary Politics in the Russian Revolution, 1917-1919
Dec 15 – Andy Willimott (Reading University): Living the Revolution: Urban Communes in 1920s Russia and the Invention of a Socialist Lifestyle

2017
Jan 26 – Sarah Badcock (Nottingham University): The 1917 Revolutions at Local Level
Feb 23 – Katy Turton (Queens University, Belfast): Women in Revolt: the Female Experience of the 1917 Revolutions
March 16 – George Gilbert (Southampton University): The Radical Right and the Russian Revolution
March 30 –Dimitri Tolkatsch (University of Freiburg, Germany): The Ukrainian Peasant Insurgency in the Revolutionary Period
April 27 – Chris Read (Warwick University): The Social History of the Revolutionary Period
May 25 – Barbara Allen (La Salle University, USA): Alexander Shlyapnikov and the Russian Metalworkers in 1917
June 29 – Don Filtzer (University of East London): The Working Class and the First Five-year Plan, 1928-32
Sep 28 – Wendy Goldman (Carnegie Mellon University, USA): Taking Power: Remaking the Family, Levelling Wages, Planning the Economy
Oct 12 – Lara Cook (University of York): Local Soviets in 1917-18 and their Relations with the Central Executive Committee
Oct 26 – 1917 A Century On: A Debate (Speakers TBC, including Simon Pirani (author of The Russian Revolution in Retreat 1920-1924)
Nov 23 – Gleb Albert (University of Zurich): Early Soviet Society and World Revolution, 1917-27

All are welcome.

ANN: The Russian Century - The Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts, 1801–1917

Yale University, September 30 - October 1, 2016
More information coming soon - save the date!
Contact: Molly Brunson and Bella Grigoryan

ANN: ASEEES Conference in LVIV-Panel on 28 June

Panel on Social Memory: “Identifying Wartime Losses and Displaced Valuables: Eyes on Ukraine”
Session 9, Tuesday, June 28, 2016, 4:30-6:15PM

Presentation Languages: English, Russian, Ukrainian

Location: Room 05
Many specialists estimate that two-thirds of the cultural losses of the Soviet Union during the Second World War were from the territory that today in independent Ukraine. But even after 25 years of independence, Ukraine has still not compiled a complete, or even partial, register of its war losses. More attention to such a register, to be sure, would aid in the identification and possible recovery of lost treasures that might surface abroad. The Khanenko Museum in Kyiv is the only museum to have published an English-language catalogue (1998) with limited illustrations of paintings lost during the war. With German coordination all of the listings were entered in the lostart.de Internet database in Magdeburg. Thanks to that listing and the Art Loss Register (London), in April 2015 a 17th-century Dutch painting that surfaced on auction in the Netherlands returned to Kyiv the first to have returned from abroad in 70 years. This panel will discuss the progress during Ukraine’s quarter century of independence to identify more of its war losses so they will be known abroad. And will present the newly published book about war losses and postwar holdings in the Simferopol Art Museum, the first published account and catalogue of ‘trophy” paintings from Germany in Ukraine.

Chair: Wesley A. Fisher, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc.

Discussants ● Konstantin Akinsha, Independent Scholar

Presenters: Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Harvard U (US)/ International Inst of Social History (Netherlands)
“Tracing Pan‐European Looted Art in Russia and Poland: The Erich Koch Collection as Example”

Sergei Kot [Сергей Кот], Institute of History of Ukraine, NASU (Ukraine)
“Ukrainian Cultural Losses: ‘Displaced’ Valuables, and the Long Road to Retrieval”

Irina Tarsis, Ctr for Art Law (US)
“One‐track Mind: Polish Lessons for Art Restitution Claims and Dispute Resolution Alternatives”

For the full programme of the conference, please see ASEEES-MAG Summer Convention