Visualizing the Caucasus: Cultural Identities in Film and Art

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores how film, digital art, and generative AI challenge and reinterpret the visual histories of the Caucasus. Focusing on the intersections of colonial legacies, cultural memory, and modern technological tools, the papers examine how artists and filmmakers reclaim local voices and work on historical narratives. The panel brings together discussions of Soviet-era cinematic experiments, contemporary ethnographic documentaries, and AI-generated visual art, highlighting how visual media becomes a platform for rewriting history, reflecting on cultural trauma, and asserting regional identities. The first paper examines how digital and AI art can serve as an empowering and egalitarian tool for postcolonial knowledge production within Chechen culture to help reclaim visual histories and amplify marginalized voices. The second paper undertakes an analysis of Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia (1933) as both a modernist formal experiment and an artifact of Soviet imperialism, exploring how Soviet modernism critiqued and rationalized imperial dynamics through avant-garde cinematic techniques. The third paper analyzes the representation of the memory of Indigenous ethnic groups of the North Caucasus in contemporary documentaries, which employ the methods of visual anthropology to create nuanced portraits of modern locals and foster self-reflection. Together, these papers provide a multifaceted understanding of different forms of postcolonial memory in the Caucasus, illuminating the complex space between the politics of memory, cultural and national identity, and historical trauma.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Amira Khalid

Papers

• Salt for Svanetia: Pseudo-Ethnography and the Avant-Garde - Daniel Witkin, U of Pittsburgh

• Traditions and Other Forms of Memory by Indigenous Ethnic Groups of the North Caucasus in Documentaries - Amira Khalid

Discussant

• Olga Kim, Williams College

Session Manager

• A. M. LaVey, New York Public Library