Saturday, February 7th 2015, 18:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Centre and “Political Critique” invite you to the lecture by architecture researcher Evgenia Gubkina, which will take place on Saturday, February 7th, at 18:00.

In her lecture, Evgenia Gubkina will talk about the underground as an embodiment of myths about progress and prosperity that exist in the world and Soviet architecture. Why interiors of the stations were developed by the best architects and no expense was spared for the decoration? How the opening of new areas was used as propaganda instrument? By the example of subways in Kharkiv and Dnipropetrivsk Evgenia will show if the attitude to the subway in the 60 – 80s had changed, and how the “underground palace” of the late modernism looked like. What are the main conceptions and characteristics of the underground in the period of “stagnation”? Had the underground become utilitarian and not utopian project?

Evgenia Gubkina – is a scholar and curator, developer and guide of the route “Linear Сity” for the conference by international organization DOCOMOMO. Since 2012, consultant of the project “Ukrainian Weeks of the Constructivism” at Lenin gallery of contemporary art in Zaporizhia. In 2013 she was the co-founder of the project “Ukraine – Germany. 1920 – 1930. Commons” in Zaporizhia (Lenin) and the organizer of the exhibition in Kharkiv (Nürnberger House). In 2014 co-founded the public organization Urban Forms Center that realized such projects as “Atomograds: the planned cities in the contemporary society” (Zaporizhia), “Kharkiv: inventory” (Kharkiv) etc. Lives and works in Kharkiv.

Admission is free

The lecture will take place within the frameworks of the exhibition “Superstructure” going on at the VCRC until February 28th.

Exhibition “Superstructure” takes place within the frameworks of Unrendered Spaces project supported by ERSTE Foundation

unrenderedspaces.tumblr.com

Project partner:

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) was founded in 2008 as a platform for collaboration between academic, artistic, and activist communities. VCRC is an independent initiative, which is engaged in publishing and artistic activities, scientific research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Contacts:

+38096 4929600 (Nataliya Neshevets)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Tuesday, December 30th, 2014, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the lecture by Serhiy Bilenky, which will take place on Tuesday, December 30th, at 19:00.

Today, more than ever, we experience the tension between the democratic potential of Ukrainian nationalism and its “dark” side, both real and imagined threat of neo-Nazism and right-wing populism. Both threats were manifested during the Maidan and in the discourse around it. In his lecture historian Serhii Bilenky will explore origins of the current developments and history of the so-called classical period the Ukrainian national movement (or “Ukrainian nationalism” as it is often called in the West) of 19th – early 20th centuries, its main dilemma, traditions and sources, including roots of its “dark “side.

Serhiy Bilenky is a historian and lecturer at the University of Toronto. He taught courses on Russian, Ukrainian, and east European histories at the University of Toronto (2009-2010) and Columbia University (2009-2012). Prof. Bilenky is the author of two monographs: Mykhailo Maksymovych ta osvitni praktyky na Pravoberezhnii Ukraїni u pershii polovyni XIX stolittia (Kyiv, 1999) and Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford University Press, 2012); also he is the editor of the selected writings of the 19th century Ukrainian intellectuals Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2014).

Admission is free

Supported by ERSTE Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Saturday, December 27th, 18:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center, Political Critique, and Medusa Publishing House invite you to the presentation of gender studies anthology Image, Body, Order and to the lecture by Irina Zherebkina, which will take place on Saturday, December 27th, 18:00.

In her lecture Irina Zherebkina will consider Judith Butler’s thesis about radical equality in philosophy. The paradox of this thesis is in the fact that Butler understands radical equality not as equality of the subjects, which traditionally means equality of identities, but, to the contrary, as their inequality: after all every subject is in the state of becoming the other. It is this inequality, due to which we can speak about absolute equality in philosophy – equality of the ability of becoming the other. Zherebkina will consider polemic of Butler with Deleuze, Foucault, and Agamben concerning the questions of political struggle and political resistance under the conditions of contemporary capitalism.

The lecture will take place within the framework of presentation of gender studies anthology Image, Body, Order, published in the independent publishing house Medusa. Anthology Image, Body, Order is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on gender issues from German and English speaking worlds. The book contains articles on philosophy, economics, history of medicine, psychoanalysis, film theory, art history, and law. The collection represents texts by Judith Butler, Elfriede Jelinek, Nancy Fraser, Kristina von Braun and others.

Irina Zherebkina is the Doctor of Philosophy, Professor at Culture Theory and Philosophy of Science Department at Karazin Kharkiv National University, Director of Kharkiv Centre for Gender Studies, editor of Gender Studies journal. She is occupied with gender and feminist theory, feminist deconstruction of political anthropology of Soviet and post-Soviet societies, philosophical anthropology and contemporary political philosophy.

Admission is free

Organization partner – Medusa Publishing House

The event is supported by Heinrich Böll Foundation in Ukraine

Supported by ERSTE Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Sunday, December 21st, 18:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the lecture by Ekaterina Degot, which will take place on Sunday, December 21st, at 18:00.

In summer 2014 curator and essayist Ekaterina Degot criticized system of contemporary art, which has served as shelter for critical thinking for a long time. According to Degot, association between contemporary art and critical thinking has crashed. This year’s MANIFESTA, which was held in Russia in the midst of Russian military aggression in Ukraine, is one of the symptoms of this collapse. In her lecture Ekaterina Degot will speak about the influence of oligarchic and state structures on the system of contemporary art. Proceeding from the question “what went wrong in the 1990s?”, she will analyze the influence of imperial thinking on contemporary Russian art.

Ekaterina Degot is a curator, essayist, and art historian. She is also an Artistic Director of The Academy of the Arts of the World (Cologne). Among her books: Terrorist Naturalism and Russian Art of the 20th Century. In 2013 she was a curator of the first Bergen Triennale. In 2014 she received Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory.

Further readings:

Ekaterina Degot. A Text That Should Never Have Been Written?

Ekaterina Degot. The List of Failures.Speech at Igor Zabel Award Ceremony.

Admission is free

The event will take place within the framework of “Between Revolution and War” project supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Supported by ERSTE Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Friday, December 19th, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the lecture by an American historian Marci Shore, which will take place on Friday, December 19th, 19:00.

In her lecture Marci Shore will return to some of the metaphysical questions about subjectivity and responsibility once posed by East European dissidents in an attempt to illuminate some of the more essential questions revealed by a wrenching past. This lecture will explore the disenchantment with post-communism, the afterlife of totalitarianism, and the dilemmas of subjectivity—for Marx, for Havel’s greengrocer and Poland’s Solidarność, and on the Maidan.

Marci Shore: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism,” Marx and Engels wrote in 1848. Over a century and a half later, communism is no less haunting as a specter from the past. For many years the communist archives played the role of the Freudian unconscious: that dark psychic closet into which everything too disturbing for the conscious mind was thrown. The process of “accounting with the past” as an attempt above all to distinguish guilt from innocence has often blinded us to the deeper and more essential questions revealed by that past.

Marci Shore is a Professor of History at Yale University. She teaches European cultural and intellectual history. She is the author of the books The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968. Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe”, in which she will explore phenomenological aspects of Maidan protest.

The lecture will be held in English

Admission is free

Supported by ERSTE Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Sunday, December 14th, 18:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to visit the lecture by Pyotr Pavlensky, which will take place on Sunday, December 14th, at 18:00.

Over the last few years performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky became one of the most outstanding representatives of Russian radical art, which fulfills the function of uncompromising critique of the regime, while political opposition in Russia is missing. Such public artistic actions by Pyotr Pavlensky, as Carcass, Fixation, Liberty, and Separation have shocked Russian society and questioned its ability to resist the authorities. In his lecture, Pyotr Pavlensky will speak about the artistic strategies of finding a way out in a political dead end. How to ruin the decorative superstructure, which conceals the violence of the state apparatus, with its own hands? How to use the instruments of the regime against itself?

Pyotr Pavlensky is a Russian performance artist, author of radical actions in the public space. Editor of Political Propaganda magazine and publishing house of the same name. Lives and works in Saint-Petersburg.

Admission is free

The event will take place within the framework of “Between Revolution and War” project supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Supported by ERSTE Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Tuesday, December 9th, 2014, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the lecture by an American philosopher and cultural historian Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, which will take place on Tuesday, December 9th, 2014, at 19:00.

The past few years have produced an increased number of events and situations suggesting that we may have arrived at a “vanishing point of history” and, therefore, at an “end of politics.” Instead of repeating the familiar argumentative turn of denying the value of such impressions and of their radical interpretation, this lecture will try to confirm and to explain the ends of history and of politics in our present, based on a historicization of the concept of “history”. It will thus arrive at a description of the present that offers fresh analytic perspectives and perhaps even some starting points for post-historical and post-political solutions of problems that we have been obsessed with for a long time.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht – American philosopher, cultural historian, and literary theoretician, Professor at Stanford University. He is famous for his books In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, and numerous texts on western philosophical tradition and history of humanities. In addition, he studies media and mass culture, aesthetics and epistemology of every-day life, histories of European literatures. His book In Praise of Athletic Beauty was published in Ukrainian.

The lecture will be held in English

Admission is free

The event will take place within the framework of “Between Revolution and War” project supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Supported by ERSTE Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

December 4th – 17th, 2014

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the series of discussions and screenings “Between Revolution and War”, which will take place from the 4th until the 16th of December, 2014.

During the situation of war conflict, when radical attitudes and hostility grow within the society and the degree of hate speech increases, there is a need for critical thinking and de-ideologized perspective on the reality. The project focuses on the functioning of public institutions in the revolutionary situation, in the conditions of war and occupation, as well as on the connections between symbolic and real violence and its influence on political processes in Ukrainian society after Maidan. Through the implementation of discursive, visual and media instruments the project opposes to the rhetoric of violence and seeks for the strategies of inclusion of emancipatory potential of Maidan into the structural changes of Ukrainian society.

December 4th, 19:00 – Island Crimea

December 5th, 19:00 – Displaced Individuals: War and Internal Migration

December 7th, 17:00 – ATOpia

December 11th, 19:00 – Biopolitics of War: Captivity, Tortures, Lynch Law

December 12th, 19:00 – Nataliya Gumenyuk. “Life after DPR”. Screening and discussion

December 13th, 17:00 – State of Emergency and New Violence in Ukraine

December 16th, 19:00 – PMR (Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic)

December 17th, 19:00 – Between Revolution and War

Admission is free

Events will take place within the framework of “Mutual Understanding” program supported by Ministry of Culture of Ukraine and State Agency for Promotion of Culture of Ukraine

Supported by ERSTE Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
https://www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Saturday, November 22nd, 2014, 18:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

End of the “Deep Concern”:
Ukrainian Topic in Germany

Meeting with the editor of Suhrkamp publishing house Katharina Raabe

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the meeting with German author and publisher Katharina Raabe, which will take place on Saturday, November 22nd at 18:00.

Events of the last year in Ukraine have influenced political consensus of Europe, as well as its intellectual life. In Germany, whose humanitarian politics is largely focused on the Eastern Europe, appeared public intellectuals, who “understand Putin”, on the one hand, and “discoverers of Ukraine” – on the other. In German public sphere “Ukrainian crisis” became not only subject to numerous media debates and political speculations, but also reason for redefining the experience of division, “reunion”, revolution, and civil resistance, particularly, in the context of recent 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. How does Ukraine arise in the German intellectual and media discourses? Who are Ukrainian public intellectuals in Germany? Which narratives are dominant in the public sphere?

Katharina Raabe – editor of one of the biggest German publishing houses Suhrkamp. In 2007 Katharina Raabe, who revealed Yuriy Andrukhovych, Serhij Zhadan, Lyubko Deresh, and Katia Petrovska to the German speaking world, received Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her promotion of Eastern European literature in Germany. Besides numerous publications of Ukrainian authors, Katharina’s newest book is “Euromaidan: What is at Stake in Ukraine”. At the moment she works on the book “Ukraine, Russia, and Europe”.

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) was founded in 2008 for the purpose of creating the interdisciplinary platform for analysis of the Ukrainian post Soviet condition at the intersection of art, knowledge, and politics. Since its inception VCRC has organized over 150 debates, conferences and seminars with the participation of Ukrainian and international researchers, as well as nearly 20 art exhibitions.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Admission is free

Organization partner – Krytyka Polityczna

Visual Culture Research Center works with support from ERSTE Foundation (Austria)

Information partner:

Contacts:
+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua

Friday, November 14th, 2014, 19:00 

Visual Culture Research Center

(44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Moderation – Kateryna Ruban

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the lecture The Democratic Exception: Resistance and the Making of Popular Sovereignty by a philosopher and political historian Andreas Kalyvas, which will take place on Friday, November 14th, at 19:00.

In his lecture one of the leading researchers of the theory of revolution and history of revolutionary thought – Professor Andreas Kalyvas will trace a birth of popular sovereignty during the struggles against absolute monarchy. Referring to the categories of popular sovereignty, democracy, state, as well as revolutionary break, norm, and exception, researcher suggests a theoretical frame for the analysis of Ukrainian revolutionary experience.

Andreas Kalyvas – philosopher, Professor of Political Science (The New School for Social Research, New York), political theorist and historian of political thought, author of the book Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt (2008). In his research he focuses on the problems of popular sovereignty, radical revolutionary break, and constitution making, emergency rule, relations between democracy and constitutionalism, norm and exception in political theory and practice.

Kateryna Ruban – PhD candidate at New York University, member of Visual Culture Research Center, researcher of the Soviet history.

Andreas Kalyvas studies, how the exceptional right of the many to disobey, resist, depose, or kill their (tyrannical) rulers, that is, to break away from the instituted legality, was derived from their sovereign power to determine and establish the political forms of their common life. On the basis of historical reconstruction of the processes, which developed in Europe during the 16th century, Kalyvas defines popular sovereignty as the supreme power to initiate ruptures by instituting forms of government, abolishing, altering, and reforming them. Finally, the author explores the implications of this insurgent doctrine of sovereignty for a theory of the democratic exception against the paradigm of statocentric sovereignty.

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) was founded in 2008 for the purpose of creating the interdisciplinary platform for analysis of the Ukrainian post-Soviet condition at the intersection of art, knowledge, and politics. Since its inception VCRC has organized over 150 debates, conferences and seminars with the participation of Ukrainian and international researchers, as well as nearly 20 art exhibitions.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, 1st floor, Kyiv)

Working language – English

Admission is free

The lecture will take place within the framework of “Between Revolution and War” project with support from Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Germany).

Organization partner: Krytyka Polityczna (Poland)

With support from: ERSTE Foundation (Austria)

Information partner:

Contacts:

+38 096 492 96 00 (Natalia Neshevets)

vcrc.org.ua

vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua