The Humanity Dialogues: #4 Rapid Response: Solidarity of Artists in the Time of War: Ukraine Now!

The Humanity Dialogues: #4 Rapid Response: Solidarity of Artists in the Time of War: Ukraine Now! 

Originally recorded on 03.22.2022

More info on the series

The fourth edition of The Humanity Dialogues includes the participation of artists, researchers, and curators from Ukraine, Poland and Belarus—Olga Kopenkina, Yulia Krivich, Kuba Szreder, and Asia Tsisar who will share the modes of agency and action that have emerged across artist networks in Central-Eastern Europe as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Amid the military struggle for democratic selfdetermination and an escalating humanitarian crisis, not witnessed in Europe since the second World War, what does this international solidarity of artists and cultural workers entail? What kind of organizational formats do these initiatives assume? How are existing models of artistic interdependency altered, ruptured, or reinforced in the face of military aggression, war crimes, and the displacement of over two million people? How do the roles of existing cultural or art institutions change in the context of war and the dissolution of an open and tolerant civil society? The speakers will discuss these and other topics, referring to the emergent artistic practices, such as activities of the Sunflower House of Culture (a bottom-up initiative affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw) that provides direct aid to Ukrainian refugees, an international bureau devoted to raising the awareness of the decolonial history of the region, and artist initiatives working within the opposition in Belarus—in an effort to re-evaluate and to rethink the role of art and artists in the time of war.

Speakers
ASIA TSISAR is a Ukrainian curator and anthropologist. Graduated from the Department of Cultural Studies of State Academy of Culture in Kharkiv, Ukraine, her topics of interest include artist and art archives, memory and modes of commemoration after the fall of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Tsisar is also the curator of the Secondary Archive—a platform for women artists from throughout Central and Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Belarus. Currently, she cooperates with the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation (Poland). Tsisar lives and works in Warsaw.

OLGA KOPENKINA is a Belarus-born independent curator and art critic with an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, NY. She had been the curator in the gallery 6th Line in Minsk, Belarus from 1993–1998. Her recent exhibitions include The Work of Love, The Queer of Labor, at Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT, 2017; Feminism is Politics! at Pratt Manhattan Gallery; Lenin: Icebreaker Revisited at Austrian Cultural Forum NY (2015), Sounds of Silence: Art during Dictatorship at EFA Project Space (2012), and others. Kopenkina is a contributor to publications such as Art Journal, Artforum, ArtMargins, Moscow Art Journal, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, and others. She lives in New York City and teaches at New York University and Fordham University. ( https://www.olgakopenkina.org )

YULIA KRIVICH is a Ukrainian artist who resides in Poland. A member of Za*Grupa (*expatriate artists living in Poland), Krivich is an activist and photographer who graduated from the Department of Architecture of the State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture in Dnipro (2010) and from the Faculty of Media Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2013). In her work, she explores issues related to identity through activism and personal histories. Her research centers on topics related to Eastern Europe and migration. Krivich lives in Warsaw and works at the Academy of Arts in Szczecin in the Photography and Postartistic Activities Studio. She is a co-founder of the Sunflower Solidarity House of Culture.

KUBA SZREDER is a researcher, interdependent curator, and a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw. He actively cooperates with artistic unions, consortia of postartistic practitioners, clusters of artresearchers, art collectives and artistic institutions in Poland, UK, and other European countries. Editor and author of books and texts on the political economy of global artistic circulation, art strikes, modes of artistic self-organization, instituting art beyond the art market and the use value of art. His most recent book The ABC of the projectariat: Living and working in a precarious art world, was published by the Whitworth Museum and Manchester University Press in December 2021.

Moderators

MARTA KUZMA is a Professor of Art at and the former Dean of the Yale School of Art. She is also the former Chancellor of the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, Sweden. Kuzma arrived in Kyiv in 1990 to found the Soros Center for Contemporary Art where she had been director through 2000. Her curatorial and academic practice centers around art’s position within the larger economic, social, and political landscape as pursued in her postgraduate research in aesthetics and art theory from the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy in London.

MARIANNE HIRSCH writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010) and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, both co-authored with Leo Spitzer (2020); and the co-edited volume Women Mobilizing Memory (2019). Hirsch teaches Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With a group of scholars artists and activists, she is currently directing the zip code memory project, that seeks justice and repair for NYC communities unequally affected by the Coronavirus pandemic.

This event is introduced by MOLLY BRUNSON, Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of the History of Art and Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program, Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.

This series is organized and supported by REEES: The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.

Art Design by: Milo Bonacci, Yale MFA ’21