A conference organized by Jonathan Brooks Platt (University of Pittsburgh) in collaboration with Marijeta Bozovic (Yale University) and Artemy Magun (St. Petersburg State University, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences)

With: Maksim Alyukov, Ilya Budraitskis, Chto Delat, Igor Chubarov, Keti Chukhrov, Jodi Dean, Gandhi Group, Ilya Kalinin, Elena Kostyleva, Artemy Magun, Kirill Medvedev, Nikolai Oleinikov, Roman Osminkin, Ilya Orlov, Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (Gluklya), Jonathan Platt, Gerald Raunig, Galina Rymbu, Aleksandr Skidan, and Oxana Timofeeva.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, from the failed international revolutionary tremors of the 1960s to the “velvet” revolutions ending the Soviet experiment in 1989-91, militant politics has been increasingly discredited. The violent excesses of the twentieth century have sullied images of the militant—the striking worker, the partisan, the guerilla, the terrorist—that once shone with a romantic aura. Such images have lost their luster because violence no longer seems capable of enacting genuine change. It is our contention that this state of affairs is as much aesthetic as political. If militant aesthetics is also no longer possible, does art still extend emancipatory promise?

While our topic is of global relevance, demanding comparative perspectives and transcending such categories as East and West, we focus our inquiry on the post-socialist world, and on Russia as its epicenter. Here the revolutionary impulse—profoundly if imperfectly realized in 1917 and then spreading throughout the vast territories of twentieth-century socialism—leaves us on especially fraught terrain. In the past twenty-five years, Russia has witnessed the rapid exchange of varieties of political violence, from the lawless streets of the 1990s to the state repression of activist energies (labeled “extremism”) in recent years. Here more than anywhere else, one is confronted with the disappointment of a militant tradition that never achieved its promised consummation. Is politically engaged art possible after state socialism?

With the support of the Poryadok Slov and University of Pittsburgh, Center for Russian and East European Studies

Full conference program:
http://manifesta10.org/media/uploads/files/Conference_Public_Program_ENG...
http://manifesta10.org/media/uploads/files/Conference_Public_Program_RUS...