The Politics and Poetics of Protest Art: A Roundtable with the Ukrainian and Russian Artists

This roundtable will bring together like-minded artists and activists from Ukraine and Russia to reflect on the role of art in organizing political resistance during and after the 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution. The Ukrainian artists Serhiy Zhadan and Asia Bazdireva seek to define what the Maidan revolution means for cultural workers in Ukraine - an evidence of the epic defeat of culture given the number of armed people on the streets, the scores dead, and the escalation of violence in Eastern Ukraine, or, on the contrary, a historical moment when cultural practitioners can plug into the social process directly and help move society forward? Zhadan and Bazdireva will be joined in conversation by two Russian poets Pavel Arseniev and Roman Osminkin. For these Russian artists, the period of intense nationalist mobilization, authoritarian reaction, and aggressive, neo-imperial foreign policy that followed Maidan in Russia marked the formal end to the already waning optimism of the 2011–2012 protest movement. But during this period of disenchantment and critical self-reflection, Maidan came to encapsulate the enduring potential for grassroots political and cultural resistance to challenge and topple an unjust political order.

Taking place in Russian.