(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 3

11:00-12:00 Polina Baitsym: Assembling and Dismantling: Monumental and Decorative Arts in Post-WWII Ukraine
This lecture, while offering a concise historical account of monumental and decorative arts in Soviet Ukraine, foremostly underpins the meanings and implications behind Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda for the Ukrainian art scene. We shall trace its translations into practices along two intertwined perspectives: the notion of “synthesis of arts,” as developed by Ukrainian artists and art experts, and the post-war spatial economy. Bringing institutional, political, and architectural dimensions together, this lecture posits the Soviet production of monuments, reliefs, mosaics, and stained-glass windows at the intersection of memory, art, daily life, and creative labour studies.

12:10-13:10 Oksana Trypolska: The Brief History of Unofficial Ukrainian Art of the 1960s Under the Soviet Regime
For several decades, the Ukrainian unofficial artistic culture has developed in the shadow zone of the artistic domain. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, “other arts” came out of hiding, but national state art museums could not replenish their collections due to a lack of funding. Today, the works of Ukrainian artists who worked in the field of unofficial art are scattered all over the world and are mainly stored in closed private collections. These circumstances created a vacuum of information around this phenomenon and slowed down the development of his research. The lecture will give a brief account of the period known as the sixties extends from 1956, the date of the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, during which the cult of the personality of Stalin was exposed, until the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets in 1968. For Ukraine, this is one of the most legendary and unresolved periods of art in its teachings.

Polina Baitsym is an art historian and curator specialising in the history of Soviet art criticism, with a focus on socialist realism in Ukrainian visual arts. Currently, she is a PhD Candidate in Comparative History at Central European University, Budapest/Vienna. In 2018 Baitsym launched a research initiative dedicated to Ukrainian children’s illustrations of the 1960-90s, within which she curated two exhibitions in 2019. Recently, she has co-authored a book on Ukrainian Soviet mosaics — Art for Architecture. Ukraine. Soviet Modernist Mosaics from 1960 to 1990 (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2020).

Oksana Trypolska is a curator and researcher based in Paris. She gained her MA degree in Art History from Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV). Oksana is currently a PhD Candidate at the Centre Georg Simmel of the High School of Social Sciences. She works on her thesis dedicated to creating an alternative reality in Non-figurative art of the sixties period in Ukraine under Soviet totalitarianism.

For the participaton online via Zoom, please follow this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYoc-ygpj0uG9a9Dhbj6ET2O_VqO-ygFJsa

Scientific Organization: Oleksandra Osadcha