Thursday, 23 January at 6 pm.
In his lecture Anton Polsky will tell a breif history of street, political, activist, and socially engaged arts in Russia in the 2010’s—from the second wave of Moscow Actionism and urban DIY-activism to commodification of street art and social impact of feminist art.
He will show different examples of artistic campaigns, useful tools and tactics, successful cultural appropriations, epic failures, hypocritical manipulations, double standards, and power relations in contemporary Russian art and society.
Polsky speaks of Russia as a subaltern empire (in terms of Vyacheslav Morozov) to show that too often art activists and independent art institutions in order to emancipate certain groups and individuals tend to uncritically copy-paste western concepts, establishing thereby new hierarchies, as becomes apparent from the successes and failures of contemporary art museums in Russia to educate people in paternalist or participatory ways.
Anton Polsky is an artist, researcher, co-founder of Partizaning.org and co-organizer of the Media Impact art and activist festival. He is a university teacher at the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow) and Far Eastern Federal University (Vladivostok), currently working on a research project at Tallinn University.
The event is in English.
Check the event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/773353286483014/
