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theses

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of the historical turn in contemporary Eastern European art as evinced in the cross-media works of Olga Chernysheva (b. 1962), Deimantas Narkevičius (b. 1964), Paulina Ołowska (b. 1976), and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (b. 1933, 1945). Acknowledging the heterogeneity of the communist experience, I focus my study on these five artists who have worked since 1989 both inside and outside the region in Russia, Lithuania, Poland, and the United States, respectively. Looking back at and mining the recent past through artifacts, archives, reenactments, and reconstructions, they trace the afterlives of communism by actively questioning the histories of its lived experience across the former Eastern Bloc today. They use strategies of interruption to breakdown temporal barriers and redirect the course of official and unofficial, personal and collective, national and transnational narratives that demand our renewed attention. In doing so, their many films, paintings, photographs, installations, performances, and works on paper deconstruct representations of precarity, memory, gender, and identity that are intrinsic to our global condition and respond to widely held concerns regarding regional integrations into the art historical canon. Extending the context-focused methodology of a social history of art and the object-based rigor of formal analysis, I argue that contemporary Eastern European artists engaging in the historical turn are not merely re-presenting the empty signs of their communist pasts or post-communist presents but are proactively shaping future histories of Eastern European art for decades to come.

ETD_9327

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Ksenia Anastasia Nouril

doi:10.7282/t3-afeq-2v40

ETD doctoral

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