How to Look at Soviet Art Without Hatred. A lecture by Ekaterina Degot

Date

Schedule

Tuesday, 19:00–21:00

Place

Garage Auditorium

DESCRIPTION

Ekaterina Degot examines retrospective appraisals of post-war art and the negative reactions associated with them.

This lecture, organized as part of the Garage Field Research project If Our Soup Can Could Speak... Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties, will consider art historical perceptions of official art under communism and Mikhail Lifshitz’s aesthetic program as seen today. Degot raises the following questions: “Mikhail Lifshitz was a pointed critic of western Modernism, whose observations and critiques are still relevant, even productive. But how should we react to a positive program? How can we look at Soviet official art of the post-war period without feeling disgust? Which aesthetic assumptions do we need to change? And how can we do it now, when all things Soviet seem like an endless nightmare?”

ABOUT THE LECTURER

 

Ekaterina Degot is an art historian, writer, and curator based in Cologne and Moscow. She is Artistic Director at the Academy of Arts of the World, Cologne, where she curates Pluriversale, a bi-annual program of interdisciplinary events, and professor at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography. Her work focuses on aesthetic and sociopolitical issues in Russia, predominantly in the post-Soviet era. From 2008 until 2012, she was senior editor of openspace.ru/art. In 2013, she co-curated Monday Begins on Saturday, First Bergen Assembly, Bergen, Norway (with David Riff). Degot co-edited Post-Post-Soviet?Art: Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade with Marta Dziewanska, Ilya Budraitskis (Warsaw and Chicago: Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej and University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Moscow Conceptualism with Vadim Zakharov (Moscow: WAM, 2005). She was the recipient of the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory in 2014

how to take part

Free admission, advance registration is required.

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