Coinciding with the final stop of the touring exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (29 June – 13 October 2024), this international conference will bring together established and emerging scholars for a first-ever discussion dedicated exclusively to Ukraine’s visual culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be held outside Ukraine.
For decades the modernist art production of Ukraine has been viewed through the imperialist lens of the so-called ‘Russian avant-garde’, with scholarship dedicated specifically to the local Ukrainian context remaining marginal and mostly a purview of home-produced historiography. The Russian Federation’s brutal and unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has finally prompted a reassessment of the existing art historical canon, posing uncomfortable questions regarding the complicity of western academia and institutions in overlooking the Kremlin’s neo-imperialist pretensions. The current conference seeks to harness this unprecedented moment to redress historical injustices, invest in epistemic reparations and reclaim names, events and institutions for Ukraine’s cultural space. At the same time, by recognising and celebrating the country’s multicultural dimension and pluralism of local artistic practices, the conference will go beyond the established national paradigm to investigate cultural transfers and intercultural exchanges.
With a programme of academic papers and panel discussions dedicated to visual arts in a variety of media, the conference seeks to address the following questions: How did artists engage with indigenous pictorial traditions to construct Ukraine’s modern cultural identity? How did this engagement evolve under the changing political and ideological regimes? What intercultural and transnational encounters had informed the development of modern art in Ukraine? What is the legacy of Ukraine’s artistic modernism and what vision of the future can it offer?
Organised by Dr Maria Mileeva, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art , The Courtauld, and Dr Katia Denysova, co-curator of In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s.
