Visual Culture, Resistance, and the Politics of the Body in Contemporary Ukraine
Date and Time
Location
A lecture by Sandra Joy Russell, Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College
Chaired by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at HURI
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[Image from Roman Pyatkovka's Games of the Naked (1988)]
This event is organized by HURI as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies public event series and Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program.
About the Lecture
Beginning in the 1970s, the Kharkiv School of Photography (KSOP) frequently used nudity, eroticism, and gender nonconformity in their photography to develop a uniquely Ukrainian aesthetic—one that directly resisted Soviet hegemony. Building on KSOP’s creative innovation and rebellion, this talk highlights and historicizes the ways in which contemporary Ukrainian visual culture has instrumentalized the body as a legible site of opposition to Russian authoritarianism and colonialism. By focusing on artists such as Sergey Melnitchenko (1991-), Olia Koval (2001-), and Olia Yeriemieieva (1997-), this talk explores Ukrainian photography’s embodied visual language of resistance to Russian aggression. Such artistic interventions not only serve as a visual reminder of war’s human cost, but they also powerfully reflect the continuity of Ukrainian culture in the face of ongoing occupation and cultural erasure.
About the Speaker
Dr. Sandra Joy Russell is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Trained in Comparative Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, her work explores the material and cultural expressions of gender, sexuality, and race in Ukraine and transnationally, with a focus on the biopolitical entanglements of state and nation-building projects, as well as on contemporary queer, feminist, and anticolonial solidarities in the region. Her recent article, “Intimate Resistance: the Kharkiv School of Photography and the Politics of the Body in Late Soviet Ukraine, 1971-1991,” was published earlier this year in Slavonic and East European Review.