Round table and screening
With Patricia Couvet, Nikolay Karabinovych, Oksana Karpovets,, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Sasha Pevak, Dilda Ramazan, Léopold Lambert
June 28 2023
Cité internationale des Arts, Paris
Round-table is a part of the public program entitled Moving shadows. Colonial outlines and result of the preceding exhibition including Ukrainian artis, who have found refuge at the Cité internationale des arts as the invasion in Ukraine in 2022 started.
In a place of artistic mobility such as the Cité internationale des arts, we would like to address the persisting dependence between colonial violence, exile of cultural workers, and impact that these produce in artistic practice. The round table is conceived as an echo to the exhibition When the Inconceivable Takes Form, which brings together the artists from Ukraine, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Myanmar and Belarus who have witnessed different damage caused to their communities and had to flee their homes and now reflect on these experiences through their practices. The talk Moving Shadows. Colonial Outlines offers a closer look on artistic exile taking the perspective of the (post-)socialist history in Central Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus region and Central Asia. The results of Soviet colonialism—both in time and space—go far beyond the agreed chronologies and borders; one could even probably talk about the Soviet ‘colonial continuum’, to borrow the expression used by Léopold Lambert toward the French colonial timespace. Since its creation, the Cité internationale des arts has offered hospitality to many of those fleeing disturbing events in the countries of their origin, to only quote the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. The shadows of Soviet and Russian colonial violence are thus imprinted in the memory of this place, and the event aims to be one of the first steps to reveal their presence. The invited participants—curators, artists, and thinkers—will share their experience, perspectives, and research on the subject of colonial violence and exile, and present video works. The attentive listener is invited as a third side, an intermediate capable of linking seemingly distant experiences, geographies, and power dynamics. They are invited to react to the contributions and sketch out possible crossings between their field of knowledge and those of the speakers.
