The Power of the (An)archive: Art as resistance to (re-)colonial epistemic violence in Ukraine’s industrial East
This paper looks at the ways in which artists from east Ukraine have resisted (re-)colonial epistemic violence, through engaging industrial archives, confronting and dismantling their infrastructures of epistemic occupation. De-occupying archives through critical reworkings of archival photography and video, Oleksandr Kuchynskyi, Anna Pylypyuk & Volodymyr Shypotilnikov, Kateryna Syrik, Elias Parvulesko and Sashko Protyah, among others, raise questions about archival knowledge, epistemic violence and the liberatory potential of contemporary art practice. Considering my own work with the Center of Urban History on the ‘City in a Suitcase’ project, I ask how archives of the occupied and destroyed territories, including heavily industrialised spaces such as Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, and Soledar, can be reconstituted through community-led practice, resisting the recreation of ‘resourcifying’ archival politics and, instead setting free ‘alternative world perceptions’ (Tlostanova, 2019).
Date: 10 May 2024, 15:15 (Friday, 3rd week, Trinity 2024)
Venue: 64 Banbury Road, 64 Banbury Road OX2 6PN
Speaker: Victoria Donovan (University of St Andrews)
Organising department: School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
Organiser contact email address: information@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Anthropology Departmental Seminar Series: Trinity 2024
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Kate Atherton