Current trends in Humanities/Masters’ Academy 29.11.2023 ; 3 p.m.

The Masters’ School Seminar/ Masters’ Academy will be held on November, 29, at  3 p.m.

Our guest is dr Maja Fowkes.

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The Aral Sea in the Socialist Anthropocene

The planetary scale of anthropogenic climate disruption calls for the rethinking of practices, epistemologies and histories to uncover the interconnected roots of the crisis and face up to its magnitude. Situating the unfolding of the Anthropocene across socialist territories entails thinking systemically about the conflicted legacies of the socialist way of organizing nature. In this presentation we will consider the contribution of contemporary art and art history in unravelling the contradictions, revealing the multiplicities and activating the potentialities of the Socialist Anthropocene, with a focus on the entwined artistic and environmental histories of the Aral Sea.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021), The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015) and a special issue of Third Text entitled Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism (2018). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianism at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their Horizon Europe project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant. www.translocal.org