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Kishko, Sandra (2025)

Why Have There Been No Ukrainian Avant-Garde Artists: The deconstruction of the colonial concept of the “Russian avant-garde”

Bachelor thesis | Kunstgeschiedenis (BA)
Despite the recent significant political and social transformations of the post-Soviet space, the Western art history discourse still presents a rather substantial gap in the study of this region, specifically the Ukrainian context. Due to the lack of a critical reflection on East Central European postcoloniality, the exhibition called A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde, organised at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2016, exemplifies the lack of awareness of regional complexities of the West. Representing the verticality of Western art history, Revolutionary Impulse exhibited art produced in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire and the post-revolutionary Soviet Union under the umbrella term “Russian avant-garde”. This thesis argues that the myth of “Russian avant-garde” represents both Russian colonial oppression and the verticality of Western art history, and analyses the term through the prism of Ukraine’s postcolonial lens.
verticality
postcoloniality
canon
Ukrainian avant-garde
Russian avant-garde
Author
Kishko, Sandra
Faculty
Faculty of Humanities
Specialisation
Arts, Media and Society
Supervisors
Yang, P.Y.
ECTS Credits
10
Language
en