Museums as the Locus of Identity Discourse in the Countries of the Former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The overthrow of pro-Soviet totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought liberation to many nations in the region. While the geopolitical and economic situations in the newly independent states differed, their citizens had to (re)negotiate their cultural and national identities. In the post-1990 period, museums and cultural institutions across the region have become major contributors to the projects of identity (trans)formation. The session reassesses individual contexts in which these institutions operated. It addresses the role of art and museums in identity discourses in Crimea, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. What conditioned museum collections and exhibition programming? How did audiences, in particular visual artists and other cultural actors, engage with identity discourses created by those institutions? How was the euphoria of liberation channeled into institutional and cultural debates on identity? This panel’s presentations focus on museums’ strategies implemented to construct specific identity narratives as well as contemporary artworks which deconstructed such narratives.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Mary A. Nicholas, Lehigh U

Papers

• Repatriating Culture: Crimean Tatar Museums, Art, and History after Return - Andrew Dale Straw, Independent Scholar / U of Texas at Austin

• Komsomolka Zoia 100 Years On: Constructing Post-Soviet Russian Identity in Museums Dedicated to Zoia Kosmodemianskaia - Adrienne M. Harris, Baylor U

• Formation of National Identity in Modern Kyrgyzstan as Seen through the Visual Art of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Period - Mariia Pankova, Bard College

• Institutional Critique, or Artists Face-to-Face with Museums in Identity Discourses in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine - Joanna Matuszak, U of Texas at Tyler

Discussant

• Masha Chlenova, The New School