Join us on 03.22.2022 2:30 pm (ET)
Register: bit.ly/YaleREEES-March22

The fourth edition of The Humanity Dialogues includes the participation of artists, researchers, and curators from Ukraine, Poland and Belarus—Olga Kopenkina, Yulia Krivich, Kuba Szreder, and Asia Tsisar who will share
the modes of agency and action that have emerged across artist networks in Central-Eastern Europe as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Amid the military struggle for democratic self-determination and an escalating humanitarian crisis, not witnessed in Europe since the second World War, what does this international solidarity of artists and cultural workers entail? What kind of organizational formats do these initiatives assume? How are existing models of artistic interdependency altered, ruptured, or reinforced in the face of military aggression, war crimes, and the displacement of over two million people? How do the roles of existing cultural or art institutions change in the context of war and the dissolution of an open and tolerant civil society? The speakers will discuss these and other topics, referring to the emergent artistic practices, such as activities of the Sunflower House of Culture (a bottom-up initiative affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw) that provides direct aid to Ukrainian refugees, an international bureau devoted to raising the awareness of the decolonial history of the region, and artist initiatives working within the opposition in Belarus—in an effort to reevaluate and to rethink the role of art and artists in the time of war.

Speakers—
ASIA TSISAR is an Ukrainian curator and anthropologist. Graduated from the Department of Cultural Studies of State Academy of Culture in Kharkiv, Ukraine, her topics of interest include artist and art archives, memory and
modes of commemoration after the fall of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Tsisar is also the curator of the Secondary Archive—a platform for women artists from throughout Central and Eastern Europe,
Ukraine and Belarus. Currently, she cooperates with the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation (Poland). Tsisar lives and works in Warsaw.

OLGA KOPENKINA is a Belarus-born independent curator and art critic with an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, NY. She had been the curator in the gallery 6th Line in Minsk, Belarus from 1993–1998. Her recent exhibitions include The Work of Love, The Queer of Labor, at Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT, 2017; Feminism is Politics! at Pratt Manhattan Gallery; Lenin: Icebreaker Revisited at Austrian Cultural Forum
NY (2015), Sounds of Silence: Art during Dictatorship at EFA Project Space (2012), and others. Kopenkina is a contributor to publications such as Art Journal, Artforum, ArtMargins, Moscow Art Journal, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, and others. She lives in New York City and teaches at New York University and Fordham University.

YULIA KRIVICH is a Ukrainian artist who resides in Poland. A member of Za*Grupa (*expatriate artists living in Poland), Krivich is an activist and photographer who graduated from the Department of Architecture of the State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture in Dnipro (2010) and from the Faculty of Media Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2013). In her work, she explores issues related to identity through activism and personal histories. Her research centers on topics related to Eastern Europe and migration. Krivich lives in Warsaw and works at the Academy of Arts in Szczecin in the Photography and Postartistic Activities Studio. She is a co-founder of the Sunflower Solidarity House of Culture.

KUBA SZREDER is a researcher, interdependent curator, and a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw. He actively cooperates with artistic unions, consortia of postartistic practitioners, clusters of art-researchers, art collectives and artistic institutions in Poland, UK, and other European countries. Editor and author of books and texts on the political economy of global artistic circulation, art strikes, modes of artistic self-organization,
instituting art beyond the art market and the use value of art. His most recent book The ABC of the projectariat: Living and working in a precarious art world, was published by the Whitworth Museum and Manchester University Press in December 2021.

Moderated by MARTA KUZMA
Professor of Art at and the former Dean of the Yale School of Art

This series is organized and supported by REEES: The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program of the Yale MacMillan Center.

Art Design by: Milo Bonacci, Yale MFA ’21