Celebrating the book launch of ‘In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s’ in a roundtable conversation with Dr Klara Kemp-Welch, Reader in 20th Century Modernism at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Dr Maria Mileeva, Lecturer in Soviet and Post-Soviet Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the book’s co-editor Katia Denysova.
‘In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s’ is an edited volume published by Thames & Hudson in November 2022 to accompany the eponymous exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid (November 2022 – April 2023) and Museum Ludwig in Cologne (June – September 2023). Co-edited by Konstantin Akinsha, Katia Denysova and Olena Kashuba-Volvach, the volume features seventeen essays by twelve internationally renowned scholars and presents the ground-breaking art produced in Ukraine in the early 20th century by such artists, among others, as Alexander Archipenko, Oleksandr Bohomazov, Mykhailo Boichuk, Sonia Delaunay, Alexandra Exter and Vasyl Yermilov.
In the most comprehensive survey of Ukrainian modern art to date, the book explores a range of topics associated with the art production in Ukraine, set against a complicated socio-political backdrop of collapsing empires, World War I, the revolutions of 1917 with the ensuing Ukrainian War of Independence, and the eventual creation of Soviet Ukraine. While celebrating the diversity and dynamism of the artistic scene in Ukraine, the publication also addresses the questions of national identity, imperial legacy and historical memory.
Dr Klara Kemp-Welch works on intersections between modern and contemporary art and politics. She was educated at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and University College London, where her doctorate (2008) was supervised by Professor Briony Fer. She is the author of Antipolitics in Central European Art. Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956-1989 (London: IB Tauris, 2014), Networking the Bloc. Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1989 (Cambridge Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 2019) and co-editor of A Reader in East-Central European Modernism 1918-1956 with Beata Hock and Jonathan Owen (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2019). She is now writing a monograph on contemporary art, migration and mobility in the European Union.
Dr Maria Mileeva is a specialist in Soviet and Post-Soviet art and culture. Her research and teaching focus on the production, circulation, and consumption of socialist art practices across the globe during the late Imperial, Soviet, Stalinist, late Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. She received a BA in History of Art at the University of Cambridge (2005), and MA (2006) and PhD (2011) at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Maria’s current research project interrogates the linkages between the cultural policies of socialist realism and socialist internationalism in the former Soviet Republics, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Katia Denysova is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Her research investigates the influence of socio-political factors on early 20th-century art in Ukraine. She has contributed to the H-SHERA, ArtHist, and The Week in Art and Dash Arts podcast series. Her articles have been published in the peer-review journals Arts, Art & the Public Sphere and Immediations.
Organised by Dr Klara Kemp-Welch (The Courtauld)
