the project is supported by SPIN
Supporting Principal Investigators 2024
Session I
Literature & Music / Theatre
12 March 2026
13:00–17:00
Maria Gatti Racah
Writing Elsewhere: Cultural Geographies in Motion
in the Contemporary Russian-Speaking Diaspora
Prof. Dr. Denis Ioffe
He holds the Chair of Russian Studies (Titulaire de la Chaire de langue et littérature russe) at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium. Since 2016 he has served as coeditor-in-chief of Slavic Literatures, published by Elsevier Science. Since 2017 he has also been a Senior scientific evaluator for the European Commission’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation in Brussels. Prior to joining ULB, Ioffe served in the Department of Languages and Cultures (Slavic and East European), Faculty of Arts at Ghent University. He has additionally held teaching and research appointments at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Memorial University (Canada), and the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Dennis Ioffe is the author of more than 150 scholarly articles and the editor or coeditor of numerous academic collections published by major presses in Western Europe and the United States. Over the past decade he has delivered more than 100 conference presentations and invited lectures at leading international venues in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Diasporic Afterlives of the Russian Avant-Garde: From Kandinsky and El Lissitzky to Kabakov, Yankilevsky, Shemiakin, Bulatov, Grobman, and Vasily Klyukin
This paper-presentation reconstructs the Russian Avant-garde less as a closed ‘historical’ formation than as a transnational, migratory epistemē whose most durable operations -- anti-mimetic abstraction, the laboratory ethos of experiment, and the modernist aspiration to a synthetic Gesamtkunstwerk -- are repeatedly reactivated in conditions of exile, displacement, and post-imperial cultural translation. Moving from Wassily Kandinsky’s spiritualized formalism and El Lissitzky’s Constructivist projectivism to the late- and post-Soviet diaspora (Kabakov, Yankilevsky, Shemiakin, Bulatov, Grobman) and to the recent work of Vasily Klyukin, the argument foregrounds creative diaspora as a generative medium: a virtual space in which avant-garde devices are not merely preserved but strategically re-coded, commodified, and re-instrumentalized across divergent ideological climates and art-world infrastructures. Methodologically, the presentation combines genealogical mapping with a ‘device-based’ analysis of formal procedures -- dematerialization, tectonic construction, installation as world-model, and allegorical dramaturgy -- to show how the avant-garde’s foundational grammar survives precisely through mutation. A special emphasis falls on Klyukin as a symptomatic endpoint of this longue durée: his ‘all-in-one integrated art-object’ logic and his radicalized abstraction (notably the ‘Embryo’ series) disclose a Constructivist afterlife (with Naum Gabo as a salient precursor), while his infernal civilizational scenarios transpose the avant-garde’s utopian world-project into dystopian ethical theatre. The paper proposes a periodization of exilic avant-gardism in which ‘cultural fashions’ (from spiritual abstraction to Constructivist project culture, from Moscow Conceptualism’s institutional critique to global spectacle-installation) are perceived as historically variable interfaces mediating a remarkably stable experimental imperative. Ultimately, diaspora appears not as the avant-garde’s epilogue, but as its most productive mode of continuation: a mobile archive that persistently converts historical rupture into formal innovation.
Daria Apakhonchich
She is a Russian artist and feminist activist, author of several books. In 2020, due to her activism, she was among the first to be designated a "Foreign Agent" in Russia. After several arrests and house searches, she fled Russia. In 2025, she was placed on the Russian wanted list. She currently lives in Germany
Between art and life, between the personal and the political
Between 2010 and 2020, Russia underwent significant transformations: in my report, I will discuss how protest art responded to state repression and how a distinctive style of protest expression developed.
Sergei Morozov
He is a stage director who lives in Germany since 2023. Currently, he works as an assistant director at Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden. His productions of Zara Ali’s «What Joy» (2025) and Nicola Porpora's "Arianna in Nasso» (2017) were well received in Berlin and Vienna. Morozov is dedicated to promoting contemporary music in theatre and alternative spaces. He has collaborated with several theatres including Deutsche Oper Berlin (Germany), Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden (Germany), Theater Heidelberg (Germany), Theater an der Wien (Austria), Schauspielhaus Graz (Austria), Vaba Lava (Narva, Estonia) and others.
Overcoming Timelessness: Survival Strategy
as an Artistic Practice
More than three years have passed since Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, annexed a significant part of its territory, and devalued all principles of humanity both on the battlefield and in the minds of Russian citizens. Self-isolation of the Russian cultural community within the country from the political reality and lack of
the artistic reflection on it creates the conditions for a loss
of identity, a sense of being lost and the feeling of confinement in the ‘eternal yesterday’. The anticipation of civil war is felt on a macro level — family ties are being strained or completely severed year after year. Since February 2022, many artists and art practitioners have found themselves in this temporary gap of hatred and enmity. Almost blocked in the temporary habitat, overcoming numerous barriers
of communication, simply fighting to preserve their health and remain socially sustainable in the territory of the new state, these talented authors and thinkers are trying to resist the timeless situation
in which they find themselves.
Session II
Visual Culture & Artivism
13 March 2026
13:00–17:00
Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans
She is Assistant Professor of Photography and Contemporary Art at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She teaches courses on photography, film, new media, and participation in contemporary art, and since 2023 serves as vice-chair of the Art History and Archaeology Program. Her research explores vernacular and documentary photography and film, image performativity, protest movements, and intersections of art, technology, and activism. In 2022, she co-founded the EUTOPIA Connected Research Community Photography and Dissent, which evolved into an international partnership on lens-based media. She is author of Images Performing History: Photography and Representations of the Past in European Art after 1989 (Leuven University Press, 2015) and numerous articles and book chapters.
Disrupting Memory: The Afterlife of Communist Monuments
Danila Tkachenko
He is an internationally acclaimed artist and exhibition curator based in Milan. His work has been presented in major exhibitions worldwide and featured in prominent international publications. Over the course of his career, he has received several prestigious awards, including the World Press Photo, the European Publishers Award, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the Gabriele Basilico Award, and the Foam Talent Award. Danila collaborates with leading media outlets such as Der Spiegel, CNN, The Washington Post, The Guardian, BBC, National Geographic, and Libération, establishing him as a key figure in contemporary visual storytelling.
Art During War
In my talk I will reflect on my artistic practice and its transformation after February 24, 2022, focusing on how war has influenced my visual language, themes, and working process. I will also present several works connected to this period.
Vlad Strukov
He is Professor of Film and Visual Cultures at the University of Leeds and Visiting Professor of Contemporary Art and Curating at Ca-Foscari University, Venice. He has extensive experience in researching and collaborating with art institutions in the Russian Federation, including serving as curator of research at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (2016-21) and initiating inter-regional artistic and curatorial collaborations in (non-)metropolitan contexts. He has published several books on contemporary Russian arts and culture, examining minority and underrepresented communities such as those of Kabarda and Sakha Republic. His latest major publication is a special issue of Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema on Russian and Russophone queer cinemas. He is the principal investigator on a major AHRC-DFG-funded international research projects examining genders and sexualities in post-Soviet Muslic Republics of Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan (2024-28).
Strategies of (dis-)engagement: Russian and Russophone artists in new contexts
Two inter-connected developments—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Kremlin’s campaign against so-called ‘non-traditional’ genders, sexualities and lifestyles—have prompted an exodus of artists, curators, collectors and cultural entrepreneurs, which has become particularly visible over the past five years. Those leaving the Russian Federation include both its citizens, including individuals from its numerous republics, and people who had previously migrated there from Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and other countries. The trajectories of their recent migration are diverse and often shaped by their legal, social and economic status within the Russian Federation. Some have returned to their countries of origin, while others have established new bases in locations such as Argentina, India and Thailand. Within the art sector, new centres of Russian and Russophone cultural communities have emerged in cities such as Berlin, Barcelona, London, New York, Paris, Riga and Venice, largely following and re-enforcing pre-existing geographies of Western art markets and cultural institutions. At the same time, several cities—most notably, Baku, Istanbul, Tashkent and Tbilisi—have emerged as transitory hubs: temporary centres through which migrants pass on their way to what they imagine to be their more desirable and more permanent destinations. For some, this transitory mode of existence has become a lasting feature of their professional lives as they have in effect settled in these cities. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, artists and curators based in these alternative cultural hubs often maintain professional ties with institutions in the Russian Federation and, in some cases, continue to travel there. These city-hubs also function as liminal geopolitical spaces in which Russian and Russophone migrant artists and curators encounter colleagues and family members who remain based in the Russian Federation. As a result, these city-hubs have emerged as new routes and contexts for contemporary art, thus (dis-)forming geographies of Western art. In my presentation, I will focus on Tbilisi and examine how Russian and Russophone artists and curators have (dis-)engaged with local cultural contexts. I will analyse their practices, modes of self-representation both online and offline, the exhibitions and creative spaces they have established in the city, and their relationships with Georgian art networks and institutions. I will situate these dynamics within broader migrant discourses on Tbilisi, including the city’s longer history of Russian-speaking migrations to and from the region. My choice of Tbilisi is informed by Georgia’s volatile political climate and the de facto occupation of the Georgian republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by the Russian Federation. I will focus on a particular community—artists, critics and curators who originate from, or closely associate themselves with, the city of Rostov-na-Donu and the south of the Russian Federation. My analysis is based on sustained research conducted in Rostov-na-Donu between 2001 and 2022, and in Tbilisi between 2010 and 2025. I will examine artistic and curatorial practices of (dis-)engagement with local contexts, drawing on theories of migration, labour and precarity, symbolic capital, and knowledge economies. My discussion will inform curatorial practices and contribute to theories of cultural heritage, cultural economies and globalisation.
Polina Kanis
She works with various media including installation, performance, and video. Her artistic practice investigates the questions of hidden power formations, politics of affects, and new traumas acquired within the various spheres of production, experience, and culture. Inherent to her practice is to examine the function and embodiment of ideological orders. Recently, Kanis has focused on the transformative power of imagination in relation to sex work, considering how sexuality is shaped by exposure to ideological and political discourses. Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions and film festivals, including a solo exhibition at the Haus der Kunst Munich (2017), the parallel program of the Manifesta 10 and many others. Her works are in the collections of numerous museums and foundations, including the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Bretagne, Fondazione in Between Art Film, Kadist Foundation, etc. Kanis was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten programs in Amsterdam (2017–2018) and ISCP New York (2020).
Rule No.6. The Libretto of a Private Dance
Politics of Rotation is a durational performance in which artist Polina Kanis works as a pole dancer. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the very possibility of artistic practice was put on hold for Kanis. Her search for a personal and artistic response led her to a strip club, marking the start of a long-term performance that culminated in the project Politics of Rotation. The performance spans a year of rigorous training, preparing Kanis’s body to enter the closed, strictly regulated system of the strip club. After passing a casting, where conformity to the idealized female body under the male gaze is scrutinized — Kanis began working as a pole dancer in the club. Сonfronted daily with rigid yet ambiguous rules, power hierarchies, repressive gender policies, and the regulation of women’s bodies, Kanis investigates the ideological, social, and personal transformations of the female body in Russia under the oppressive normalization of war. Through her work, the artist reconstructs the club’s unwritten but universally understood rules, guidelines that govern every aspect of a strip club employee’s existence. Politics of Rotation is not only an exploration of the strip club as a microcosm of authoritarian society but also a study of movement itself. The rotation around the pole becomes both a metaphor for authoritarian regimes and a means to transcend them. The project includes photographs taken by Kanis during her three-month stint in the strip club, reimagined rules of conduct for strippers, and a re-enactment of dance movements performed in the club’s interior. Key to the project are not only the precision and continuity of the stripper’s movements but also the moments of failure and imperfection that disrupt the idealized dance. As Kanis rotates around the pole, twisting and bending, she momentarily disrupts the vertical hierarchy, suggesting the potential for rupture — of the body, of the world, and with it, the possibility of change.
