Surmounting Chernobyl: Artistic Responses to Ecological Disaster
SEEELC lecture by Nazar Kozak, Art Historian and Getty Scholar. Cosponsored by CERS.
Wednesday, November 13, 20194:00 PM - 6:00 PM
348 Kaplan Hall
For more information about this event contact slavic@humnet.ucla.edu or call (310) 825-3856.
The 1986 crisis at the Chernobyl nuclear plant caused devastating consequences for the global ecosphere producing long-lasting radioactive contamination of soil and water as well as diseases and malformations of biological life. With a focus on the worldwide artistic response to this event, from that time until today, this lecture explores the issues of art's agency towards the nuclear disaster. The art historical perspective, specifically in the Chernobyl case, raises the following question: How can we consider an artist's role and art's potentiality in surmounting ecological disasters, when, as in 1986, these disasters are mingled with the politics of denial?
Nazar Kozak currently serves as a Senior Researcher in the Department of Art Studies at the Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine. Kozak has also taught in the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. He specializes in two fields simultaneously: medieval and contemporary. His medieval studies especially concerns political iconography as well as artistic exchanges in Byzantine and post-Byzantine cultural sphere. In contemporary art, Kozak explores aesthetics' entanglements with politics and activism. His article on the art interventions during the Ukrainian Maidan revolution received an honorable mention as a finalist for 2017 Art Journal Award. Spending this semester at the Getty Research Institute as a Getty Scholar, Kozak works on a book about global artistic responses to the Chernobyl disaster.
Cost : Free and open to the public. RSVP not required for admission.
Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures