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Cultures of Protest in Contemporary Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia

Cultures of Protest in Contemporary Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia

This project fostered dialogue among intellectuals and artists from post-Soviet states to improve knowledge of shared histories of totalitarianism, the pursuit of democratic reform, and the critical role of art and culture in historical memory.

This project created a productive dialogue among Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian intellectuals and artists who share the values of democratic governance, human and civil rights, and freedom of artistic expression, as well as among scholars of the recent history and culture of these three countries. An international conference at the Neubauer Collegium helped scholars, activists, artists, and civil society professionals better understand the complex interconnection of culture and politics in the region. A multi-day series of discussions, presentations, and performances showcased the three countries’ attempts to deal with the heritage of totalitarianism and pursuit of democratic reform, as well as raise the question of the role of art and culture in this endeavor.

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Experimental Monumentality

Experimental Monumentality

This project supported an exhibition in Moscow and a related workshop in Chicago at which artists and scholars considered what to do with monuments of the past and how to build monuments for the future.

This project consisted of an exhibition in Moscow and a workshop in Chicago to explore a pressing problem of modern and contemporary societies: what should we do with monuments of the past, and how should we build monuments for the future? Through the reconstruction of a cardboard monument built in Spain and sent to the Soviet Union in 1937, the research team recovered a long-forgotten history of an artistic exchange and initiated a conversation about experimental monumentality from the 1910s to the present. The first part of this project included an exhibition at the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, the final part of the reenactment of a performative monument built and destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. Following the Spanish tradition of Fallas, the monument was built by unions in Spain, sent to the USSR as a gift for the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and burned in a ceremonial bonfire. According to Spanish Communists, this was a model for how the monuments of international Communism should be: built by the community, movable, ritual, transient. The construction, journey, exhibition, and final immolation of the monument was documented. The resulting material was screened at the Neubauer Collegium in the context of a workshop at which invited artists and scholars discussed examples of experimental monumentality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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Imagining a Sanctuary City: Chicago’s New Arrivals in Anthropological, Historical, and Legal Contexts

A painting depicts a person sleeping under a purple blanket.

Imagining a Sanctuary City: Chicago’s New Arrivals in Anthropological, Historical, and Legal Contexts

This project will employ ethnographic research, legal case study, and oral history to record and analyze the experiences of asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants in Chicago as well as the volunteers, city workers, and activists supporting them.

This project emerges from our participation in volunteer efforts to assist some of the nearly 42,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in Chicago since August 2022. Through ethnographic research, legal case study, and oral history, we seek to record and analyze the experiences of both arriving and receiving communities. We will interview asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants as well as volunteers, city workers, and activists. We will observe the formal and informal contexts where community emerges, or fails to emerge. Interviews and observations will help us identify the intersections of municipal policies such as the “Welcoming City” platform and international law, including asylum and refugee conventions, and investigate the barriers that emerge unexpectedly therein. We will seek to capture a dramatic change in the South Side of Chicago, as it grapples with a large, rapid migration from the Global South. Studying Chicago at this moment of change, we will ask: How do new neighbors and locals define “shelter,” “refuge,” and “asylum”? How do they narrate their positionality in historical and geopolitical contexts? How do they experience barriers and opportunities in the swiftly changing neighborhood? To present our findings, we propose to undertake a collaborative research paper as well as conferences and presentations. A gallery exhibition called Imagining the Sanctuary City will enhance our research with visual and textual primary sources.

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Revolutionology

Revolutionology

This project took the centenary of the Russian Revolution as an opportunity to interrogate the links between political and intellectual change, with a focus on the role of media in the dissemination of revolutionary ideas.

Beginning on the centenary of the Russian revolutions, this project questioned the concept of revolution, specifically the link between political and intellectual change. The Russian revolutions in 1917 quickly reverberated around the world, generating revolutions and political changes from East Asia to Latin America and Africa, but also framing a broad paradigm shift in intellectual life. Communist aesthetics, the artistic avant-garde, Russian formalism, the Bakhtin Circle: all were parts of a global intellectual revolution whose causes, ramifications, and impact stretched far beyond the Soviet Union, beyond even the reach of global communism. This history forces us to ask: What constitutes an intellectual revolution? What are its causes and mechanisms? How do revolutionary cultural and intellectual changes relate to political change? What role is played by the disruption of settled populations and by the waves of migration revolution sets off? To what degree can intellectual revolution be translated and re-situated? How do new media change our understanding of these mechanisms and the prospects for future intellectual revolutions? Are we today in a revolutionary moment? The project addressed these questions in collaboration with Visiting Fellows and participants in a series of three workshops that focused on pivotal revolutionary moments (1917, 1968) and key texts in the production and dissemination of intellectual revolution. The project also supported the creation of a publicly accessible digital archive with sophisticated tools of data visualization and produced a special issue of the journal Studies in East European Thought on the theme of "The Bolshevik Contagion."

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Revolutionology II: Media and Networks of Intellectual Revolution

Revolutionology II: Media and Networks of Intellectual Revolution

This project advanced the goals of the Revolutionology project to interrogate the links between political and intellectual change, with a focus on mapping the global circulation of revolutionary ideas.

This project extended an investigation of the media and networks by which ideas advocating radical change have been produced and disseminated by developing and employing a material-based or even materialist version of intellectual history. Over its first fifteen months, the project benefited from three conferences and two visiting scholars, resulting in the establishment of a scholarly network and in one published volume (and two projected), as well as a digital resource that traces the geographic and chronological spread of four key texts of intellectual revolution generated in Russia. The second phase of the project continued this work of tracing the global spread of revolutionary ideas, supplementing it with non-Russian texts including the original Communist Manifesto.

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Slavs and Tatars: MERCZbau

A mannequin displays Slavs and Tatars merchandise

Slavs and Tatars: MERCZbau

MERCZbau revisits the intertwined histories of the Ukrainian city of Lviv and the Polish city of Wroclaw as seen through the prism of a particularly eastern Orientalism. An installation featuring merchandise dedicated to a defunct Department of Oriental Studies offers a reflection on the shifting meanings of our enduring East/West divides and the human drama of migration, made so much more poignant by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The gallery is open to the public Mon – Fri, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm.

MERCZbau revisits the intertwined histories of the Ukrainian city of Lviv and the Polish city of Wroclaw as seen through the prism of a particularly eastern Orientalism. The Berlin-based artist collective have created a speculative range of merchandising dedicated to the defunct Department of Oriental Studies of what was once known as the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwow, acting as if age-old traditions of scholarship and inquiry about “the East” had survived the Polish population’s forcible westward journey after World War II. The installation thereby offers a reflection on the human drama of migration as well as the shifting meanings of our enduring East/West divides, made so much more poignant by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The exhibition was made possible in part through a partnership with the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and Gray Center Fellow Leah Feldman. All proceeds from the sale of the merchandise will be donated to the Scholars at Risk organization.


Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.


Installation photography by Robert Heishman. Event photography by Max Herman.

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