S.M.A.K. Museum, March, 2024
Disentangling Eurasia: Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and their Successors
Third Tallinn Summer School in Soviet History & Culture, July, 2023
I attended the Third Tallinn Summer School in Soviet History & Culture where the Scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet history gathered for a week-long programme in an attempt to reassess and critically examine the field at a time of great upheaval in the region. Through keynotes, workshops, and a stimulating cultural program, participants gathered questions about the conventional approach to Soviet multinationality and disentangle the various trajectories of the nations and groups belonging to the Soviet realm.
Why Remember?: Reframing Trauma
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, July 2024
The ‘Why Remember?’ conference 2024 addressed the complex and contested questions that face post-conflict societies. What should we remember, what should we forget, and, ultimately, why? How can traumatic pasts be engaged with in the present in productive ways? It will explore the role of publicly visible memory and its potential impact on issues such as reconciliation and healing in the wake of conflict and how, either consciously or unconsciously, memory processes shape the present and the future. These questions of memory (and forgetting) are intensely political and have far-reaching consequences, and thus these debates are vital to institutions of cultural memory that engage with the past to make sense of the present and build a more peaceful future.
University of Arts, London, March, 2024
How do we understand the dynamic between practice/ing research and theory, and research in or as practice? Are there clear overlaps, or does the matter remain ambiguous? We wish to untangle various perspectives around research in the arts—both practice as research and theory as practice—and uncover perspectives on how research in the visual arts works in practice through readings, discussion and collaboration.
I co-organised this symposioum in collabotion with Caterina Albano and Northeastern University, Boston. In addition to being an co-organiser, I was also a participant and presented my paper.
University of Arts, London, March, 2024
Founded in 2004, the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) investigates historical, theoretical and practice-based research in art, architecture, craft and design.
This research is driven by the desire to critique dominant ideas of 'globalisation' and to open up new perspectives that address questions of how art and design can respond to social (in)justice, decolonisation of institutions and the creation of more diverse global art histories.
As part of this forum, I talked about my PhD research and presented my progress.
TrAIN Research Centre, 2021
Presented my paper titled An Underground Bridge to Free Collective Memory: Exhibitionary Practices in Georgia 1985–1995. Postsocialism Art was organised by the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) Research Centre, with support from the British Society of Aesthetics and the Association for Arts History.
University of Arts, London, 2024
Gave a presentation about my PhD research and its progress at the student-led spring symposium which aimed to build conversation and community.
Tbilisi Bristol Association talk, March, 2024
I gave a presention to the Bristol Tbilisi Association members my research in progress titled: ‘Collective art practices n Georgia 1985-95: Collaborative strategies for addressing political turbulence’
Precarious Art: How Do We Make Art in a World on Fire? NAFA and ADPRex Conference
University of the Arts, Singapore, 1 -2 August 2024
Presented a paper at the The Arts & Design Practice Research Exchange (ADPRex), which is Southeast Asia’s first annual conference dedicated to practice research. ADPRex positions NAFA, University of the Arts Singapore as the leading centre of arts and design practice research in this region, where artists and thinkers come together to share ideas and insights at the apex of arts and design practice and innovative thinking. This year, ADPRex is delighted to be partnering with NAFA’s Southeast Asian Arts Forum.
University of Arts, London
Slavs & Tatars, December 2024
Slavs and Tatars is an internationally renowned art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institution across the globe, including the Vienna Secession; MoMA, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Albertinum Dresden, amongst others. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. The collective has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently their first children’s book, Azbuka Strikes Back with Walther und Franz König. In 2020, Slavs and Tatars opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in the Moabit district ofBerlin as well as a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from the region.
I led the seminar that looked at Slav & Tatar’s extensive work on language and how this informs our understanding of regionalism.
Kateryna Botanova, February 2025
Becoming local: decolonial practices in visual arts in post-Maidan Ukraine
In the book Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime, Bruno Latour underlines the acute need for “carrying out two complementary movements that the ordeal of modernization has made contradictory: attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other.” Even though Latour’s message was primarily addressed to the Global North, which needed to reattach itself to the localities that were uncomfortably changing due to the climate change and global migration, it has its urgency when read from outside the power node of the Global West.
The decolonial ‘reattachment to a particular patch of soil’ is a fight for regaining agency and voice, which is in the heart of owing one’s knowledge and imaginary, a fight for owning epistemologies that go against the universalization of globalization and the hierarchies that are implied within. However, these movements are often seen (and blamed) as nationalistic and driven by exclusive identity politics in the West.
The presentation by Kateryna focused on changes in visual art practices in Ukraine after 2014 that instead of attempting to be ‘global’ and ‘universal,’ focused on localities and personal histories, on the meaning of being rooted, connected, caring, and responsible for them, and inquires about their invisibility for the Western eyes.