SESSION: Art, Activism, and Power in the Contemporary Post-Soviet Space

This session invites artists, curators, and researchers to reflect on the evolving role of art and activism across the contemporary post-Soviet space, including former Eastern Bloc countries framed by Soviet political, cultural, and ideological influence.

Across much of this region, these legacies intersect with various forms of social and political subjugation that continue to shape post-Soviet states to differing degrees. Freedom of expression remains fragile, public space is intensely politicised, and artists are often compelled to navigate a narrow path between resistance, self-censorship, and co-optation. At the same time, many post-Soviet regimes have become increasingly adept at instrumentalising art to advance nationalist, militarist, or neo-imperial narratives—whether through state-sponsored commissions, urban ‘beautification’ programmes, or selective cultural diplomacy abroad.

Analysing these dynamics is particularly urgent in the current climate of social instability and escalating repression, in which subversive artistic strategies are frequently appropriated, neutralised, or rendered politically safe by institutional powers. By foregrounding shared experiences across post-Soviet Europe in this way, this session deliberately moves beyond reductive binaries of censorship and creative freedom. It opens a critical dialogue on how power is negotiated, contested, and reimagined through visual culture in societies still marked by shared and deeply traumatising pasts.

Note on the Format: Although the session is scheduled as a half-day event, it has been agreed with all speakers that presentations will be delivered within a concise five-minute framework, close to a PechaKucha format. These short presentations will be followed by brief Q&A exchanges. The speakers will then come together in a round-table discussion, during which they will publicly address questions relevant to all participants’ research. These questions will be prepared by the convenor and supplemented by questions from the audience, encouraging collective reflection, dialogue, and exchange.

Session Convenors:

Anastasiia Korableva, University of Essex (England, UK)

Speakers:

Denisa Tomková, Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic)

Empowering Aesthetics. Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe

In the context of post-socialist Central Europe, we are witnessing a tangled global phenomenon where artistic practice and critical theory are appropriated by conservatives in defence of national interests. The individuals belonging to LGBTQI+ community have been experiencing rising politically induced conditions of vulnerability, furthermore protectionist mindset of the nationalistic right-wing politicians is also seen in the protection of the national body, the traditional family, and demonstrates in women’s reproductive obligations. Art, critical thinking, literature, academic lectures, and museum exhibitions are no longer perceived as an insignificant sector without influence but are seen as a potential threat that needs to be censored, controlled, and influenced by the political representatives in power. In such a climate of heightened heroism of national history and forced idea of victorious individual and collective national body, artistic practices of empowering aesthetics, highlighted by this paper perform an important function in challenging these narratives while contributing to building an inclusive collective memory that empowers systematically marginalized individuals and communities by their everyday non-heroic vulnerable gestures. Empowering aesthetics follows the lineage of conceptualization of weak resistance (Majewska 2021), queer art of failure (Halberstam 2010), and the politics of vulnerability (Butler 2020). The empowering aesthetics employed by the artists in the region are not only urgent and critical, but also vitally personal. This paper highlights a shift in the understanding of the artwork and aesthetic experience that is durational rather than immediate, drawing attention to a given community.

Monika Drożyńska, Independent Visual Artist and Activist (Kraków, Poland)

I Was Convicted for Embroidery

Embroidery in Transit was a project I carried out between 2015 and 2025. During numerous journeys, I created hand-embroidered texts on small pieces of fabric that separate passengers’ heads from the seats in trains and airplanes, leaving them behind for other travelers. I embroidered poetry, activist slogans about women’s rights, and anti-war and anti-capitalist statements. These subtle interventions in public space provoked a wide range of reactions—from admiration to outrage. In May 2024, the Polish State Railways charged me with “damaging 58 seat headrest covers by applying embroidery,” estimating the loss at 110 euros. I admitted to making the embroideries but appealed the verdict, treating the court process itself as a performative, post-artistic gesture and as a platform for debating artistic freedom. In 2025, the District Court in Warsaw found me guilty of creating three embroideries and ordered me to pay 6 euros in damages. In the justification of the verdict, the judge stated that “artistry does not abolish the unlawfulness of an act.” In my presentation, I analyze this case through the lens of the relationship between art, law, and ownership in public space. Embroidery in Transit raises questions about who owns shared environments, where artistic freedom ends, and who has the authority to decide whether an act is art or vandalism. The verdict, which valued my art at exactly 6 euros, exposes a broader tension between artistic gesture and the logic of late capitalism, in which private—or state-corporate—property is placed above symbolic and artistic value.

Jurgita Staniškytė, Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania)

Moving Target: Performance as a Tool of Political Activism

In the last decades the heightened interest in performance as both an artistic medium and an effective tool of political activism has become increasingly visible in Lithuanian culture and society at large. Because of high degree of instability, which is embedded in performative actions, they appear particularly worth investigating as they constantly define and re-define the meanings of politics and activism as well as demonstrate the tensions and links between appropriation and creative innovation, theatre and performance art. Protests, which are often described as ‘rituals of rebellion’, are particularly worth analysing as performative actions that temporarily disrupt the established order and open up space for alternative meanings.

The history of performance art and theatre provides protesters with a repertoire of behaviors that can be cited, sampled, duplicated, appropriated and reassembled for various purposes and occasions. Consequently, art is instrumentalized as a tool for enacting political agency and achieving social visibility.

One example particularly relevant to disrupting the contemporary carnival of power is comic tactical performance, which infiltrates official discourse through playful imitation and comic exaggeration. These activist practices aim to disrupt the public sphere and challenge dominant narratives using methods such as performance, cultural jamming, street art, flash mobs, urban guerrilla tactics, and clowning, among others.

In my paper, I will analyse recent Lithuanian examples as well as historical development of performative interventions in public space as tools of civic protest, while also addressing the performativity of protest as a form of civic theatre, its effectiveness and limitations.

Kitty Brandon-James, Courtauld Institute of Art (London, England, UK)

The Night Movement: Camouflage, Play and Countervisual Resistance in Putin’s Russia

In Let’s Sharpen Our Optic Nerves (2022), Sergei Oushakine identifies a “recognition problem” in Russian visual studies – a political overdetermination that dictates what can and cannot be seen. Vlad Strukov (2022) calls this a “geopolitical scotoma,” describing how knowledge gaps distort perceptions of the post-Soviet region. This view from the outside is compounded by domestic conditions, where systems of reward, discipline and punishment shape artistic visibility, forcing artists to navigate resistance, self-censorship, and co-optation, forming a grey zone where artistic expression must see itself through the eyes of the state and adjust accordingly.

This paper examines how artists critically engaged with these dynamics between 2015 and 2022. It takes as a case study The Night Movement, a self-organised “engine of collective activity” that emerged in Moscow following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Amid tightening repression, the group devised “Nights” – collective, ludic nocturnal gatherings that drew on Moscow Actionism and Conceptualism to forge affective networks and flatten hierarchies between subcultural outsiders, institutional actors, and established artists.

By playing with visibility and legibility, The Night Movement rendered perceptible what is often unseen: politics of intimacy, informal solidarities, and bureaucratic-artistic entanglements. Combining Joseph Brodsky’s paradox that “the more invisible a thing is, the more certain it is that it once existed” with Roland Penrose’s notion of camouflage as defence, the paper proposes opacity and play as counterstrategies within Putinist visuality, reflecting on how camouflage itself becomes a mode of resistance, and on the ethical tensions of documenting what must remain partially unseen.

Jon Blackwood, Robert Gordon University (Aberdeen, Scotland, UK)

A Revolution Delayed: Contemporary Art and Activism in the Belarusian Diaspora

In this paper, I shall consider visual activist strategies in relationship to the democratic uprising against the authoritarian rule of Aliaksandr Lukasenka in Belarus, in the summer of 2020, and how arts activism has mutated since. The paper seeks to deal with questions on the consequences of authoritarian repression of civil society, the departure of much of the country’s contemporary art scene for exile, and how and in what ways artists have sought to analyse and respond to the operation of power in a dictatorship.

The Belarusian democratic uprising of summer 2020 was intensely visual, both in terms of street art and performance, and in the use of digital strategies on social media. The initial uprising marked the inability of a repressive regime still using analogue tools of control to maintain a foothold in the digital space. The use of public performance and demonstration not only marked a growing confidence in citizen “control” of public space but also undermined regime narratives based on “cleanliness” and “public order” of those same spaces.

This paper will offer a close analysis of the work of Ales Pushkin (1965-2023), the canonical exhibition Every. Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance (Mystetski Arsenal, Kyiv, 2021), and durational activism in exile, and how that may be quantified in terms of works of narrative, testimony, cartography and archival strategies (Kalektar, VEHA). It is suggested that these strategies are in themselves forms of resistance in articulating alternative future visions of the country beyond the lifespan of the Lukashenka regime.

Anton Polsky, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin & Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (Berlin, Germany)

Beyond the Centre: Peripheral Post-Soviet Street Art as Resistance to Authoritarianism and Neoliberalism

Street art is a significant global phenomenon and a major artistic movement of the 21st century. Its intrinsically political and independent nature has, however, been widely co-opted by governments and corporations, often leveraged within the framework of the “creative city” discourse. My research aims to reclaim and demonstrate the political potential of street art by examining the under-researched material from peripheral post-Soviet (and broader post-socialist) contexts.

Moving beyond canonical Western examples, I focus on bottom-up, contemporary folk, and outsider urban creative practices that actively resist both entrenched authoritarianism and the pressures of neocolonial neoliberal institutions in peripheral cities. Methodologically, the work relies on Marxist, post-colonial, and feminist theories to provide a multidisciplinary analysis of these subversive emancipatory practices.

For this session, I will focus specifically on the street art practices of post-Soviet artists following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This analysis is particularly urgent, as it explores how creative resistance persists and develops new strategies of “insurrection, withdrawal, or double meaning” in a climate of escalating repression and surveillance—a key question posed by the session organizers. The presentation will examine how these artists navigate the precarious terrain between resistance and co-optation, challenging state narratives and the co-option of cultural space.

My research serves as a contribution to the fields of street art theory, post-Soviet studies, and art history. While academically rigorous, it is written to engage a wide audience, including scholars, artists, and cultural practitioners across disciplines, facilitating the critical dialogue sought by this session.

Voica Pușcașiu, Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania)

“Bessarabia Romanian Land” – What’s Behind a Graffiti Slogan?

Part of Greater Romania in the Interwar period, Bessarabia first officially became annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940 in the fallout of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact; briefly recaptured during 1914-1944, mainly through the efforts of the National Legionary State, it was then under Soviet control until the Union’s dissolution in 1991, and is now part of the Republic of Moldova.

Starting 2006, large-scale slogans proclaiming either “Bessarabia Romanian Land”, or “Bessarabia is Romania”, mostly written in black lettering, and more often than not flanked by the colours of the Romanian flag started to appear on prominent roadside infrastructure all across Romania. It became a familiar sight, igniting both serious debate and ironic reactions. It even went international and viral, sometimes as stickers, popping up as far as the Faroe Islands.

As it turns out, the initiators were a bunch of (then young) corporate workers and football ultras in Bucharest, raising awareness towards the ultimate goal of reintegration of the province in contemporary Romania. Describing themselves as righteous nationalists, looking to rewrite historical wrongs via adrenaline-filled night outings, they are the embodiment of a growing and problematic sector of population: increasingly religious Orthodox, with precarious and biased knowledge of history gained through a deficient educational system, idolatrizing the legionary leaders as true patriots. Despite graffiti’s usual connotation as a liberal gesture, it was instrumentalizes in these interventions and turned symptomatic of a nation that in 2024 nearly elected a far-right, former football ultra that often wears folk garb as its president.