At this session, we welcome multidisciplinary artist Tasha Arlova, who migrated from Minsk to Amsterdam and graduated here from Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and Anfisa Doroshenko, a PhD student in cultural studies at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and senior researcher at the Khanenko Museum for World Arts in Kyiv, who fled to the Netherlands in reply to the Russian invasion in Ukraine and worked as guest researcher at Leiden University.

The recent democratic protests in Belarus inspired Arlova to produce ‘Dear Revolution’ (2021), a short poetic film essay about her personal experience of the protests. For Doroshenko, the Russian attack on the Khanenko Museum – the largest museum of world art in Ukraine and her professional home basis – on October 10, 2022, changed her thinking about instability, fragility, and material renewal. In this panel discussion, Arlova and Doroshenko reflect on their work and on the question: how do geopolitical events and artistic practices interconnect?

Matthias Schwartz

Matthias Schwartz is deputy director and head of the program area World Literature at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Berlin, Germany. His research interests involve Eastern European contemporary literatures, memory cultures and popular cultures in a globalized world; documentary aesthetics and Socialist travel literature, the cultural history of Soviet and post-Soviet adventure literature, science fiction, science popularisation and space travel. Recent publications include After Memory. World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures (co-edited, 2021); Sirens of War. Discursive and Affective Dimensions of the Ukraine Conflict (co-edited, 2020; in German); Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context (co-edited, 2016). 

Anfisa Doroshenko

Anfisa is a PhD student in Cultural Studies from The National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine) and senior researcher at the Khanenko Museum for World Arts in Kyiv. Doroshenko’s research interests include modern and contemporary graphic arts (1880-today). She is particularly interested in the representation and conceptualization of ‘glimmering’ light effects, in relation to thinking about instability and insecurity. In response to the Russian invasion in Ukraine, she fled to The Netherlands. Since December 2022, Doroshenko has been affiliated to the University of Leiden’s Centre for the Arts in Society as guest researcher.

Tasha Arlova

Tasha Arlova is a multidisciplinary artist from Belarus working on the intersection of film, photography, poetry, and performance. Her work is driven by personal experience that connects to bigger themes, such as gender, immigration, and civil disobedience. Arlova graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) with her short film “Dear Revolution” (2021), a poetic essay about her memories and experience of the crucial democratic protests in Belarus. From 2020, Arlova organized and co-curated a number of events dedicated to art as a form of protest such as the Belarus // Art of Resistance exhibition in Arti et Amicitae, Freedom Lecture at De Balie, and others.