Dr Vera Faber | Crossing Boundaries, Challenging Constraints – On Perspectives in Artistic and Curatorial Work

Dr Vera Faber | Crossing Boundaries, Challenging Constraints – On Perspectives in Artistic and Curatorial Work

Date: January 8, 2024, 18:00–19:30

Link: https://meet.google.com/zua-kjtk-ykr

Organization: Austrian Culture Forum and Faculty of Artistic Education and Curatorial Studies

Lecture:
Censorship and the restriction of free speech have taken on a striking new topicality in society today. Accordingly, the rôle of creative strategies to express what may not be voiced is also brought back to the fore. In this lecture, I will focus on artistic strategies and curatorial practices to address and challenge boundaries imposed by censorship and political constraints. The concept of border will thus be conceived well beyond the purely spatial scope, with border crossing be explored, among other things, with regard to symbolic, social, and epistemological dimensions. To this end, I will first give an overview of relevant border figurations. Using examples from the Iron Curtain era in the Soviet Union and the current situation of increased censorship in Russia, I will discuss artistic and curatorial strategies to transgress boundaries and challenge constraints. In doing so, I will consider both the inside and outside perspectives as well as perspectives on immediate border spaces.

Short Biography:
Vera Faber is Associate Professor in Border Studies at UiT / The Arctic University of Norway. She received her doctoral degree in Slavonic Studies from the University of Vienna (2017) with a thesis on the Ukrainian avant-garde of the late 1920s. Her research interests include the history and the theory of the avant-garde movement in Ukraine and in Russia, word-image-relations, photography, border aesthetics, design, intertextuality, intermedia, centre-periphery-relations, cultural networks, multilingualism, the interrelation of art and politics. She has published books, articles and book chapters on Ukrainian and Russian literature and art and has more than ten years of experience in research and teaching in
Austria, Croatia, Germany, Norway, Ukraine, and the United States. She is author of Die
ukrainische Avantgarde zwischen Ost und West (2019) and „Nur der Unsinn gibt der Zukunft
Inhalt.“ Futurismus und Wort-Bild-Kunst in der russischen Avantgarde in Tiflis, 1917–1921
(2018). She is also co-editor of Avantgarden in Zentraleuropa (2023), Grenzüberschreitungen und Grenzüberschreibungen in Theorie, Literatur und Kultur (2021), and Österreichische und ukrainische Literatur und Kunst. Kontakte und Kontexte in Moderne und Avantgarde (2014).