THE HUMANITY DIALOGUES: #1 TYRANNY, ARTISTS AND AGENCY: UKRAINE NOW!
Held virtually on Friday, March 4, 1:00 pm ET at Yale University
Featuring:
Vasyl Cherepanyn, Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC, Kyiv)
Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University
Moderated by Marta Kuzma, Professor of Art at and the former Dean of the Yale School of Art
In the face of tragedy, there comes a time when any semblance of future is deemed impotent. Stripped of the ability to calibrate or anticipate cause and effect, we face ourselves naked, humble, and without pretense. In the void of any ability to configure, to draft, to fathom, we reflect on human integrity, individuality, collective responsibility, and their preservation amid the dissolution of the tenets of a civilized way of life. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Humanity Dialogues is a series of events that reflect on contingency as existence and address art and politics critically intertwined within societies at war. This serves as the first in the series that will continue in the days and weeks ahead.
VASYL CHEREPANYN is Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC, Kyiv). He holds a PhD in philosophy (aesthetics) and has taught at University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), University of Helsinki, Free University of Berlin, Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, University of Vienna, and the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Political Critique in Warsaw, Greifswald University. A former visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Cherepanyn co-edited Guidebook of The Kyiv International (Medusa Books, 2018), ’68 NOW (Archive Books, 2019) and curated The European International (Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam and Hybrid Peace (Stroom, The Hague). VCRC is the organizer of the Kyiv Biennial (The School of Kyiv, 2015; The Kyiv International, 2017; Black Cloud, 2019; Allied, 2021) and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance. VCRC received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award for Culture (2015) and the Igor Zabel Award Grant for Culture and Theory in 2018.
TIMOTHY SNYDER is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His is the author of numerous books that include The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Tony Judt, 2012); Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018). He was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, where he earned his D.Phil., and has received the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships. Among other distinctions are the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Foundation for Polish Science prize in the social sciences, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, the Dutch Auschwitz Committee award, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought.
MARTA KUZMA is a Professor of Art at and the former Dean of the Yale School of Art. She is also the former Chancellor of the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, Sweden. Kuzma arrived in Kyiv in 1990 to found the Soros Center for Contemporary Art where she remained as director through 2000. Kuzma has curated numerous exhibitions including Alchemic Surrender in the Crimean port of Sevastopol in 1994. Her curatorial and academic practice centers around the art’s position within the larger economic and political landscape as reflected in her postgraduate research in aesthetics and art theory from the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy in London.
This event was introduced by Molly Brunson, Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of the History of Art and Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program, Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.
This series is organized and supported by REEES: The Yale Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program at the Yale MacMillan Center
Graphic Design by: Milo Bonacci, Yale MFA ’21