Vladislav Shapovalov will talk about the exhibition projects of the Cold War era that depended largely on visual media in the production of ideological formulations and the dissemination of political narratives.
Exhibition complexes of both socialist and capitalist countries blended together photography, cinema, and experiments in exhibition grammar to promote their political agenda to viewers in the First, Second, and Third worlds. This talk will focus on Vladislav Shapovalov’s long-term project Image Diplomacy, a film and a series of installations concerned with the use of exhibition as political medium. Image Diplomacy draws upon historicized phenomena such as the reconstruction of the photographic exhibition The Family of Man (1955), as well as largely ignored materials from the archives of itinerant photographic exhibitions and films sent by the Soviet Union abroad during the period of the cultural Cold War and now scattered around the world, often neglected and abandoned.