Christina Kiaer on Soviet Art History in the Age of Putin

FORART Lecture 2025

In this lecture, Christina Kiaer (Northwestern University) will discuss the complex conditions of art and art historical research in Russia during the 30-year window between the fall of the Soviet Union and the restrictions imposed at the start of the current war.

Report from an Undesirable: Soviet Art History in the Age of Putin

On June 5, 2025, the government of the Russian Federation declared the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) to be an “undesirable organization,” defined as “posing a threat to the foundations of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation, the country’s defense capability or state security.” Membership is punishable by “forced labor for a term of up to four years or imprisonment for a term of one to five years.” ASEEES serves as the primary professional organization for historians of Soviet art in the US, with members from the UK, Europe and beyond. This de jure designation of “undesirable” cements the de facto experience of most scholars, as well as members of the broader art world, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022: we can no longer travel to Russia to carry out our work. My lecture will reflect on “the thirty-year window” that opened for art historical scholarship from the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991 to the outbreak of the war. This window enabled a blossoming of collaborative scholarship and international exhibitions, but also complex entanglements with oligarchs and increasingly autocratic state institutions as President Putin tightened his grip over culture. My book Collective Body (2024) and exhibitions Revolution Every Day (2017-18) and Collective Threads (2024-25) will serve as my examples as I discuss the demise of the collective ideals of the Soviet Union, the rise of authoritarianism in Russia and across the globe, and possible paths forward for resistant scholarship and art.

Christina Kiaer is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. She is the author of Collective Body: Aleskandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (Chicago, 2024) and Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT, 2005). She curated the recent exhibition, and edited the catalogue for, Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory (Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki; catalogue published by Scheidegger & Spiess, distributed by Chicago, 2025), and co-curated the exhibition Revolution Every Day (Smart Museum, 2017-18) with Robert Bird and Zachary Cahill, and also co-authored the accompanying publication Revolution Every Day: A Calendar (Mousse, 2017). She was co-editor with Eric Naiman of Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Indiana, 2005) and has consulted on exhibitions of Soviet art at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; the Tate Modern, London; the Fundación Juan March, Madrid; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Time and place: Sept. 5, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM, Amalie Skram-salen, Litteraturhuset, Oslo