Anfisa Doroshenko, Tasha Arlova, Matthias Schwartz: Eastsplainers #5: Visual arts
Panel discussion as part of the lecture series Eastplainers at the University of Amsterdam
At this session, we welcome multidisciplinary artist Tasha Arlova, who migrated from Minsk to Amsterdam and graduated here from Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and Anfisa Doroshenko, a PhD student in cultural studies at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and senior researcher at the Khanenko Museum for World Arts in Kyiv, who fled to the Netherlands in reply to the Russian invasion in Ukraine and worked as guest researcher at Leiden University.
The recent democratic protests in Belarus inspired Arlova to produce “Dear Revolution” (2021), a short poetic film essay about her personal experience of the protests. For Doroshenko, the Russian attack on the Khanenko Museum – the largest museum of world art in Ukraine and her professional home basis – on October 10, 2022, changed her thinking about instability, fragility, and material renewal. In this panel discussion, Arlova and Doroshenko reflect on their work and on the question: how do geopolitical events and artistic practices interconnect?
Slavist and historian Matthias Schwartz is co-coordinator of the program area World Literature, project World Fiction, Post/Socialist. Eastern European Literatures and Cultures.