32. De-Erasing Connections between Kyivan Rus’ and the Rest of Medieval Europe

As Stefaniia Demchuk and Illia Levchenko argue in “Decolonizing Ukrainian Art History” (2024), imperial Russian, Soviet, and contemporary Russian narratives have attempted to erase Ukrainian cultural and historical continuity. The retrospective appropriation of the history and culture of Rus’ by the Russian imperial narrative, accompanied by a displacement of its political and cultural centre from Kyiv towards Novgorod and, subsequently, Moscow, was instrumental in this process. As a result, Ukrainian art and cultural history have often reached international audiences through interpretative frameworks inherited from Russian and Soviet scholarship.

This contribution examines how Ukrainian art history might be repositioned within a broader European chronology by recovering connections that imperial and national historiographies have omitted or marginalised. As a comparative point of reference, the exhibition MESSOLONGHI 1826: 200 Years since the Exodus at the Benaki Museum demonstrates how Western European philhellenism connected modern Greek aspirations for independence with the cultural authority of ancient Greece. Of course, the historical circumstances of Ukraine are quite different, and Rus’ cannot be treated as an equivalent “cradle of civilisation”. Nevertheless, Kyivan Rus’ was deeply embedded in the political, religious, dynastic, and artistic networks of medieval Europe. Recognising these connections challenges narratives that isolate Ukrainian history within an allegedly exclusively Russian cultural sphere.

The consequences of the imperial historiographical framework remain visible in contemporary museum and gallery practices. As Kateryna Botanova observes in “Decolonizing Knowledge Production” (2024), international institutions continue to subsume artists from Ukraine under a homogenising Russian label. Despite sustained efforts to correct such classifications, Kazymyr Malevych, for example, continues to be misidentified as Russian by some prominent Western galleries.

Without doubt, the decolonisation of Ukrainian art history requires more than correcting individual labels. Bringing together scholars working across different periods and media, the roundtable will ask how Rus’ can be disentangled from the retrospective national narrative of Russia, how the relationship between Kyivan Rus’ and later Ukrainian cultures should be conceptualised without imposing a simplistic continuity, and how Ukraine can be restored to the interconnected histories of European art.

Themes: Decolonisation, Intercultural connections, Epistemic justice

Lead Convenor: Alina Rozanova, Independent Researcher, Georgia

Co-convenors: Stefaniia Demchuk, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.