Svitlana Biedarieva
Dr Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian, artist, and curator. She received her PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She is the editor of the book Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991-2021 (Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2021) and co-editor of At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013-2019 (Mexico City: Editorial 17, 2020). In 2022/23, Svitlana was selected as the George F. Kennan Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Wilson Center, and the Non-Resident Visiting Fellow at the George Washington University for her research, the CEC ArtsLink International Fellow for her curatorial work, and the Prince Claus Seed Award Laureate for her artistic work. Svitlana has published her texts in such academic journals and media outlets as October, ArtMargins Online, Space and Culture, post at MoMA, Revue Critique d’Art, Financial Times, The Burlington Contemporary, Hyperallergic, and The Art Newspaper, among others. Currently, Svitlana is working on two books: on Ukraine’s decoloniality for Palgrave Macmillan and art and resistance for Routledge.
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Papers by Svitlana Biedarieva
Contributors explore how transformations of identity, the emergence of participatory democracy, relevant changes to cultural institutions, and the realization of the necessity of decolonial release have influenced the focus and themes of contemporary art practices in Ukraine. The chapters analyze such important topics as the postcolonial retrieval of the past, the deconstruction of post-Soviet visualities, representations of violence and atrocities in the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine, and the notion of art as a mechanism of civic resistance and identity-building.
The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, Eastern European studies, cultural studies, decolonial studies, and postcolonial studies.
https://lcca.lv/en/events/on-decolonisation-narratives-in-context-of-ukraine---an-introduction-by-svitlana-biedarieva/
For many years, Ukraine has experienced a growing need for a Museum of Contemporary Art that would function as the first state-run collection focused on acquiring and exhibiting the work of contemporary Ukrainian artists. The attempts to create such an institution began in the early 2000s, but thus far have been unsuccessful due to political and sociocultural factors. In 2020, a nonprofit association was created to work in an applied way on the development of theconcept of the museum, with the involvement of key experts in contemporary art and culture. In this interview, art historian and artist Svitlana Biedarieva speaks with Olya Balashova and Yuliia Hnat, representatives of the initiative group for the creation of the museum.
This interview was conducted as part of the author’s research for a doctoral dissertation entitled “Challenging the Legacies of the Olympics: Cultural Afterlives of Mexico 1968 and the USSR 1980.” One of its reference sources was the exhibition The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997, co-curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Olivier Debroise, Pilar García de Germenos, and Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón, and presented at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (MUCA) in Mexico City in 2008. Age of Discrepancies was one of the first shows to present a panorama of all the art movements and tendencies that existed in Mexico between the late 1960s and the 1990s, exploring the changing face of a country that during these years experienced three devaluations of the peso (the most significant in 1982) and entered into a trade agreement with the United States in 1994.
In the interview, co-curator Medina focuses on one important facet of the exhibition: the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City and their impact on Mexico’s politics and the arts. He also addresses the political crisis brought about by the year 1968 in Mexico and the radical changes in the artistic scene during the 1970s and ‘80s that ensued. The 1968 Olympic Games made an innovative proposal in terms of urban design, but the success of its international presentation was undermined by the long summer of student protests, culminating in the Tlatelolco massacre of students on October 2, 1968, ten days before the opening of the Olympics. Politics in Mexico also changed in the decades following the Olympics. While the aftermath of 1968 forced artists like Felipe Ehrenberg to emigrate, the cultural situation in the 1970s shifted toward experimental countercultural practices pursued by a number of artistic collectives that received the general name of Los Grupos.
Our main aim is to interrogate changes in the field of Ukrainian identity as these are being expressed in visual and conceptual terms. If, for decades, Ukraine lacked new symbols with which to integrate its two major language groups and to accommodate an expanded variety of cultural perspectives, the new mythologies emerging from the flames of the uprising suggest that Ukrainian culture is now breaking with the post-Soviet symbolic model, moving towards new forms of self-identification. Contemporary art's enormous potential as a vehicle for representing and analysing these processes makes it a crucial point of reference for any consideration of current affairs in the region.
The symposium addresses the following questions: How have contemporary artists in Ukraine reacted to the social critique that caused the unrest, prompting radical social transformations? To what extent have artists been critical in their engagement with recent political tensions? What visions of internal and international relations have they proposed? We explore how artists have negotiated the trauma of recent violence, and consider how the doubts and hopes played out in the protests are being expressed in contemporary Ukrainian artistic practices.
Speaker(s): Konstantin Akinsha (Curator, New York, Guest Fellow Max Webber Kolleg, Erfurt); Susanne Clausen (Artist, London); Pavlo Kerestey (Artist, London); Alisa Lozhkina (Curator and Editor-in-Chief of Art Ukraine, Kiev); Roman Minin (Artist, Kharkov); Nikita Shalenny (Artist, Dnepropetrovsk)
Organised by: Svitlana Biedarieva and Klara Kemp-Welch (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
Friday, 27 February 2015, 13.00 – 18.00 (with registration from 12.30)
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN
Contributors explore how transformations of identity, the emergence of participatory democracy, relevant changes to cultural institutions, and the realization of the necessity of decolonial release have influenced the focus and themes of contemporary art practices in Ukraine. The chapters analyze such important topics as the postcolonial retrieval of the past, the deconstruction of post-Soviet visualities, representations of violence and atrocities in the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine, and the notion of art as a mechanism of civic resistance and identity-building.
The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, Eastern European studies, cultural studies, decolonial studies, and postcolonial studies.
https://lcca.lv/en/events/on-decolonisation-narratives-in-context-of-ukraine---an-introduction-by-svitlana-biedarieva/
For many years, Ukraine has experienced a growing need for a Museum of Contemporary Art that would function as the first state-run collection focused on acquiring and exhibiting the work of contemporary Ukrainian artists. The attempts to create such an institution began in the early 2000s, but thus far have been unsuccessful due to political and sociocultural factors. In 2020, a nonprofit association was created to work in an applied way on the development of theconcept of the museum, with the involvement of key experts in contemporary art and culture. In this interview, art historian and artist Svitlana Biedarieva speaks with Olya Balashova and Yuliia Hnat, representatives of the initiative group for the creation of the museum.
This interview was conducted as part of the author’s research for a doctoral dissertation entitled “Challenging the Legacies of the Olympics: Cultural Afterlives of Mexico 1968 and the USSR 1980.” One of its reference sources was the exhibition The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997, co-curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Olivier Debroise, Pilar García de Germenos, and Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón, and presented at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (MUCA) in Mexico City in 2008. Age of Discrepancies was one of the first shows to present a panorama of all the art movements and tendencies that existed in Mexico between the late 1960s and the 1990s, exploring the changing face of a country that during these years experienced three devaluations of the peso (the most significant in 1982) and entered into a trade agreement with the United States in 1994.
In the interview, co-curator Medina focuses on one important facet of the exhibition: the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City and their impact on Mexico’s politics and the arts. He also addresses the political crisis brought about by the year 1968 in Mexico and the radical changes in the artistic scene during the 1970s and ‘80s that ensued. The 1968 Olympic Games made an innovative proposal in terms of urban design, but the success of its international presentation was undermined by the long summer of student protests, culminating in the Tlatelolco massacre of students on October 2, 1968, ten days before the opening of the Olympics. Politics in Mexico also changed in the decades following the Olympics. While the aftermath of 1968 forced artists like Felipe Ehrenberg to emigrate, the cultural situation in the 1970s shifted toward experimental countercultural practices pursued by a number of artistic collectives that received the general name of Los Grupos.
Our main aim is to interrogate changes in the field of Ukrainian identity as these are being expressed in visual and conceptual terms. If, for decades, Ukraine lacked new symbols with which to integrate its two major language groups and to accommodate an expanded variety of cultural perspectives, the new mythologies emerging from the flames of the uprising suggest that Ukrainian culture is now breaking with the post-Soviet symbolic model, moving towards new forms of self-identification. Contemporary art's enormous potential as a vehicle for representing and analysing these processes makes it a crucial point of reference for any consideration of current affairs in the region.
The symposium addresses the following questions: How have contemporary artists in Ukraine reacted to the social critique that caused the unrest, prompting radical social transformations? To what extent have artists been critical in their engagement with recent political tensions? What visions of internal and international relations have they proposed? We explore how artists have negotiated the trauma of recent violence, and consider how the doubts and hopes played out in the protests are being expressed in contemporary Ukrainian artistic practices.
Speaker(s): Konstantin Akinsha (Curator, New York, Guest Fellow Max Webber Kolleg, Erfurt); Susanne Clausen (Artist, London); Pavlo Kerestey (Artist, London); Alisa Lozhkina (Curator and Editor-in-Chief of Art Ukraine, Kiev); Roman Minin (Artist, Kharkov); Nikita Shalenny (Artist, Dnepropetrovsk)
Organised by: Svitlana Biedarieva and Klara Kemp-Welch (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
Friday, 27 February 2015, 13.00 – 18.00 (with registration from 12.30)
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN