Intimate Resistance: The Kharkiv School of Photography and the Politics of the Body in Late Soviet Ukraine, 1971-1991

• In Event: Contested Memory and Resistance to Neocolonialism in Ukraine’s Culture II

Abstract

This paper explores how Kharkiv School of Photography artists used the domains of intimacy and sexuality to push the boundaries of political and artistic innovation, thereby shaping the anticolonial and anti-Soviet cultural resistance crucial to Ukraine’s development post-1991. I focus especially on the photography of Boris Mikhailov, Evgeniy Pavlov, and Roman Pyatkovka, whose subversive representations of nudity, sexuality, and childbirth from the 1970s and into the 1990s express an erotic visual language of resistance to state symbology. In so doing, I reframe Ukraine’s “unmaking” of state socialism as a gendered and sexual project—one that “re-formed” bodies, identities, and national consciousness in opposition to Soviet hegemony.

Author

• Sandra Joy Russell, Mt Holyoke College