Lecture Series: How Can Art Fight Back? Refugee Artists and The Ukrainian Crisis

Nazar Kozak, Senior Research Scholar at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

Friday, February 7th, 2020

7:30 pm

Tickets: $20, Students Free

Tickets Found Here

Coping with the challenges of exile, Ukrainian refugee artists that escaped the Russian invasion in Crimea and Donbas responded to the events with illegal public performance and installations that engaged in an unequal image war with Russia's military visual complex. Based on interviews with the artists, this lecture investigates the impact of displacement and war on modes of artistic expression and problematizes art's relation to propaganda. The discussed examples include Maria Kulykivska's intervention at Manifesta in Saint Petersburg, Serhii Zakharov's guerrilla images on the streets of occupied Donetsk (both 2014), and the Izolyatsia (Isolation) group's mock occupation of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015).