In the context of Mykola Ridnyi’s solo exhibition The Battle over Mazepa, Pushkin House is excited to welcome the prominent contemporary philosopher and cultural theorist Keti Chukhrov, ScD, who, over two days, is going to share her thoughts on decolonial and anti-imperialist agendas; first giving a lecture on Thursday, November 16, and after facilitating a workshop on Friday, November 17. You can attend one or both events.
This is an exciting opportunity for anyone interested in questions about the legacy of modernity, the diversity of contemporary geographical axes of decoloniality, and imperialism’s essence with a fresh perspective. These complex issues will be deciphered engagingly by Chukhrov with the facilitation of Denis Maksimov, our Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programming.
The workshop Can Culture Exceed Empire in Which It Emerged? will bring concrete examples from poetry, music and film to open up the discussion further.
Recent decolonial theories and cultural practices insist on stepping out of the time of modernity, as it is equated with the time-space of colonial expansion. Modernity is understood as a period of the West’s optimistic reliance on progress, which fueled its economic and political domination, historically conditioning imperialist ambitions. The attempt to reach the temporality of the expanded present is usually made to re-store non-modern practices and indigenous ways of life. However, the question remains if the Global South or the East are necessarily traditional. Didn’t these countries themselves produce their own modernities? Are the indigenous forms of life free from hierarchies and discrimination? Finally, what should we do about the similarities between the decolonial and the right-wing critiques of Western modernity?
Posing these questions, the talk will go through the anti-colonial critique of Modernity and its satellite concepts – such as the Enlightenment, the Reason, the Universal, culture, and revolution, and provide comparative inquiry on each of them with the juxtaposed views by Walter Mignolo and Theodor Adorno, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant and Vladimir Bibler, André Lepecki and Chantal Mouffe.
About the speaker
Keti Chukhrov is ScD in philosophy; she is currently a guest professor at Linkoping University.
In 2022-2023, she was a guest professor at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe. Until November 2022, she worked as a professor at the School of Philosophy & Сultural Studies at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). In 2012-2017, she was the head of the Theory and Research department at the National Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow. From 2017-2019, she has been a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow at UK Wolverhampton University.
She has authored numerous texts on art theory and philosophy—her latest book, Practicing the Good. Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) deals with the impact of socialist political economy on the epistemes of historical socialism.
Her full-length books include To Be—To Perform. ‘Theatre’ in Philosophic Critique of Art (European Un-ty, 2011), Pound & £ (Logos, 1999), and a volume of dramatic writing: Merely Humans (2010). She authored the film plays Afghan-Kuzminki (2013), Love-Machines (2013), Communion (2016), Undead (2022) which were featured at the Bergen Assembly (2013), the Specters of Communism (James Gallery, NY, 2015), the Ljubljana Triennial U-3 (2016, cur. Z. Badovinac, B. Groys), Steirischer Herbst (2022), etc.