Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen
Apparatus Press published their first physical book at the end of April 2024. This volume opens new avenues for understanding decolonisation in two significant ways. First, it explores the ambivalent legacy of the Soviet Union through a cinematic lens, applying decolonial perspectives. Second, it demonstrates how decolonial viewpoints can enhance our understanding of what constitutes ‘Russian’/’Soviet’ culture, prompting a thorough reevaluation that extends beyond cinema to encompass the entire cultural realm.
This edited collection of essays assembles an impressive diversity of authors who examine how filmmakers throughout the Soviet era and beyond have engaged with and contested complex identities within imperial and national landscapes. Highlighting films from regions often considered ‘internal colonies’—from the Sakha Republic to the Baltics and Central Asia—this collection illustrates the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and knowledge production. Authors from Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Georgia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Estonia and Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan) unearth anti-colonial resistance within the rich heritage of Soviet and Russian cinema.
Structured in four sections –(Post-)Soviet Orientalisms and Internal Colonies, Echoes of Empire, Intersecting Ecologies and Ideologies, and Resisting Genres – the volume is bookended by a prologue by Heleen Gerritsen and an epilogue featuring reflections by Nana Janelidze, alongside striking images from Tengiz Abuladzé’s Repentance (1984).
Particularly timely in the context of Russia’s recent full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, this work showcases cinema as a critical tool for dissecting and challenging lasting cultural and political hegemonies.
Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen emerged from a partnership between the goEast Film Festival and the Apparatus journal.
This volume is indispensable for scholars in film studies, postcolonial studies, and East European and Eurasian cultural studies, presenting a new model for analysing the cinemas of the Russian Empire, USSR, and post-communist Central and Eastern Europe.
“Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen makes a welcome and timely intervention in the rethinking the cinema of the former Soviet states. Precipitated by Russia’s 24 February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the collection questions the title by which we designate these countries, the conceptual tools with which we analyse their culture, and the russo- and eurocentric geographical focus of much analysis. Its essays, that include contributions by filmmakers as well as academics, enjoin readers to reappraise industrial and curation practice no less than scholarship, and to revise film history as much as film criticism. The geographical scope of the articles enacts these aspirations and sets a positive example for others to follow and expand on. The collection is an important step towards decolonising the field.”
Professor Jeremy Hicks, Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture and Film, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Doing Performance Art History
Performance art has written its own history. This history took shape in the West from the 1970s onwards, through publications by RoseLee Goldberg, Lucy Lippard and others. In Central and Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the history of the performing arts was shaped by a variety of small, isolated scenes, which thrived behind the Iron Curtain, As a result, countless narratives of their own history emerged, collected and unified in Doing Performance Art History
This publication by Apparatus Press reconstructs the art history of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II and describes how much the practices of socialist societies in the era of the Soviet bloc and their ideological constraints influenced cultural production.
Doing Performance Art History tells numerous stories of the consequences and strategies in the face of a lack of official support from institutional art bodies. It was always about maintaining creative freedom and a sense of identity as an artist in the face of political repression and disinterest on the part of established art institutions. To maintain control over their own narratives, telling alternative histories, and challenging the official art institutions and their canons they looked for strategies which included practices of self-archiving and self-historization as crucial tools for artistic survival in opposition.
Led by the renowned Slavist Sylvia Sasse from the University of Zurich, Doing Performance Art History offers an invaluable insight into this creative resistance of artists working under the constraints of censorship and limited recognition.
The particular significance of this book for both East and West lies in how much it reminds us of the ability of artists and performers to challenge prevailing narratives and to preserve cultural heritage through resistance. These experiences from the other Europe are all the more poignantly recalled at a moment when Moscow is lowering the very curtain that had risen in the late 1980s to allow a few decades of free exchange of artistic ideas and practices.
Doing Performance Art History, edited by Sandra Frimmel, Tomáš Glanc, Sabine Hänsgen, Katalin Krasznahorkai, Nastasia Louveau, Dorota Sajewska and Sylvia Sasse, published by Apparatus Press. With Nikita Alexeev, Judit Bodor, Ion Grigorescu, Daniel Grúň, Marina Gržinič, Tibor Hajas, Roddy Hunter, Julia Klaniczay, Barbora Klímová, Sofia Kulik, Claus Löser, Anna Molska, Andrei Monastyrski, Pavlína Morganová, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Gabriella Schuller, Sven Spieker, Tamás St. Turba, Vadim Zakharov