Art / Knowledge / Politics: Culture and Society in Contemporary Ukraine

Seminar: Art / Knowledge / Politics:
Culture and Society in Contemporary Ukraine
Lecturer: Vasyl CHEREPANYN, PhD

The course aims to introduce to students different social practices of contemporary culture in Ukraine. This aim is to be reached by discussing core concepts and key ideas that are in the center of Ukrainian intellectual and political debates, such as post-Soviet condition, working class in Ukraine, visa system and the question of borders, the Ukrainian radical right, education and knowledge, politics of memory, contemporary art, pornography and religion. The topics are actualized as on the level of everyday practice of Ukrainian society, as also for the theoretical analysis of social, economic, political and cultural processes in Ukraine. The broad multidisciplinary approach is used: arguments and discussions are concentrated in anthropological, philosophical, historical and political economic discursive fields.

Teaching Method
This course consists of 8 lessons. The first lesson is an introductory lecture. Other seven lessons will be discussions of ideas from the reading and visual materials that will be presented during the course.

Topics
LESSON 1. Art / Knowledge / Politics Interactions: Ukrainian Body
In the introductory lecture cultural and political context in Ukraine after closing of the “Ukrainian Body” exhibition in the Visual Culture Research Center is analyzed. The unprecedented act of censorship drew a wide response in the Ukrainian and foreign media. The aggression against socially engaged contemporary art and the institution that represents it showed the extreme right reaction to the politicizing of sexuality. Artistic, academic and political antagonisms that appeared are demonstrated through the optics of an engaged cultural institution and art that became a political subject.

LESSON 2. Post-Soviet Condition and Working Class
1. Post-Communism, post-Socialism, post-Sovietness.
2. The (re)building of the state and the coming of neoliberal capitalism.
3. From socialist production to capitalist consumption: the representations and discursive marginalization of working classes.
4. From post-Soviet transition to Ukrainian transgression.

LESSON 3. The Schengen Wall of Global Capitalism
1. Borders at the age of globalization.
2. Labour migration: mobility for stability.
3. The other (of) Europe.

LESSON 4. The Ukrainian Radical Right
1. Neofascism in search for legitimacy.
2. Right-wing politics in post-Soviet Ukraine.
3. The revival of the radical right in the 2000s: the “Freedom” party.

LESSON 5. Fights for Memory
1. Myth in history and the work of collective memory.
2. The centrality of the Holocaust.
3. The competition of victims: Holodomor as a political strategy.

LESSON 6. The Politics of Education and Knowledge Production
1. The commercialization of education.
2. Ukrainian higher education reform: bureaucracy a la Bolognaise.
3. Corporation or autonomy: post-Soviet university in search for its social status.

LESSON 7. Contemporary Art Scene
1. Art after the fall of the USSR.
2. The shift of artistic tendencies from the 1990s to the 2000s.
3. The strategies of politically engaged contemporary art.

LESSON 8. Faith, Porn, Love
1. Body in art and politics.
2. The coalition of state and church: censorship in action.
3. Pussy Riot vs. Femen.