The Birth of Culture from the Spirit of Revolution
Vasyl Cherepanyn in conversation with Kinga Lendeczki. The head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) talks about the previously unwalked path the Kyiv Biennial followed since 2015.
Vasyl Cherepanyn in conversation with Kinga Lendeczki. The head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) talks about the previously unwalked path the Kyiv Biennial followed since 2015.
By Ezgi Sarıtaş. In this essay, the author explores how the illustrations in the Istanbul Ansiklopedisi (encyclopedia) bring together scattered pieces of a visual archive of the urban poor and their marginal labour, while concurrently adopting a voyeuristic interpretation of physical labour and young male bodies as objects of homoerotic desire.
Önder Çelik is a EUME Fellow, whose research explores the material and temporal dimensions constituted by the practices of dispossessed young Kurdish men searching for valuable objects believed to be buried by the victims of the Armenian genocide.
By Burcu Alkan. From Vienna to Cairo cafés have always been microcosms representing the foundational fabric of their respective societies, as well as being distinctive worlds in their own right. They are public spaces where people socialise and groups interact, ideas are born and changes are observed.
By Denys Shatalov. Until recently, when Ukrainians mentioned the ‘pre-war’ or the ‘post-war’ periods or subjects in everyday conversations about the past, no clarification was needed. It was obvious to everyone that this was about World War II, or, rather, a part of it – the German–Soviet War of 1941–1945. War – ‘that war’ – remained one of the main milestones of the past. However, since 24 February 2022, the term ‘pre-war’ refers to another time.
Taisiia Ratushna is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Zaporizhzhia National University. In 2010, she received her PhD in Sociology from the Classical Private University (Zaporizhzhia). Since then, she has been working in the Department of Sociology at the Zaporizhzhia National University and conducts research on communication processes in urban space and in virtual environments.
By Viktoriya Sereda. The unprecedented Russian full-scale attack on Ukraine brought the recent conflicts over memory in East Central Europe and in Ukraine to the attention of an international audience. Mass displacement also exposed millions of Ukrainians to new challenges that triggered intensive reinterpretations of the past – both the distant and the very recent – and a reevaluation of their memory through new experiences.
Eman Elnemr received her PhD in modern and contemporary history (2017) from the University of Tanta, Egypt. Her research interests address hegemonic elite projects and so-called modernization transformations, their effects on society, modes of resistance or responses to them, and public/people’s interventions in shaping them.
By Friederike Pannewick. This essay focuses on a Syrian author who spent most of the 1980s in self-imposed silence: the dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941-1997). This internationally acclaimed author belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose artistic self-understanding was strongly molded by the Palestine conflict. Deeply concerned about the political consequences of the Israel-Egypt unilateral peace treaty on Palestinians, Wannous stopped writing literature for a whole decade after Egyptian president Sadat’s visit to Israel in fall 1977.
By Brahim El Guabli and Aomar Boum. For the millions watching the semi-final World Cup match between France and Morocco, it felt like the ultimate showdown, yet players on both teams fought valiantly and treated each other to hugs and moral support, suggesting a sea change in international relationships between former colonies and their European nemeses (ED).
by Nancy Micklewright. In 1967 a Los Angeles photographer, Harold Van Pelt, took a series of photographs of Mohamed Zakariya in his garage workshop. Today, Zakariya is the foremost calligrapher of the Arabic language in the US and is renowned worldwide, but when these photographs were taken, he had just begun his journey in Islam and had been learning calligraphy for a short time.
#invisiblehousework (#görünmeyenevişleri) first started as an Instagram hashtag and continued with an account of its own under the same name. The hashtag was created by Elif Doğan, or blogcuanne (mom blogger) with her Instagram and blogger handle. She has currently has around 111K followers and lives in Bodrum, a famous touristic town in Southwest Turkey.
Erik Martin is a scholar of Slavic studies and works on conflicting time regimes in Russian literature, ecocriticism, and Eastern European Realisms. He is currently working as a postdoc researcher in the project “Europäische Zeiten / European Times – A Transregional Approach to the Societies of Central and Eastern Europe” (EUTIM) at the European University Viadrina.
Interview with Vasyl Cherepanyn by Paulina Januszewska Vasyl Cherepanyn is the organiser of the Kyiv Biennial, an international forum for art, knowledge, and politics. In this discussion with Paulina Januszewska,…
By Idriss Jebari. In their hearts, historians are first storytellers who seek to offer intelligible narratives of the past. Ever since Hayden White’s Metahistory, the border between history and literature has become less meaningful. Yet, valid questions remain: can a passage from a novel be used with the same factual authority as, say, a newspaper clipping, a police report, or a population register? What about a personal diary or a set of exchanged letters?
By Samad Alavi. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness anthologizes poems that testify to some of the last century’s darkest political tragedies. In her introduction, Forché establishes her basic criteria for selection. First, she includes only poems, as she wishes to demonstrate that the old “arguments about poetry and politics ha[ve] been too narrowly defined” and that it is possible to understand poems as residing between the personal and the political.
By Andrii Portnov. Ukrainian history and literature in the German higher education system are the disciplines whose institutional weakness is more than obvious. Ukraine itself, in the eyes of a large part of German (including academic) society, still does not have enough cultural and historical agency and remains ‘in the shadow of Russia’.