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Post-Pussy Riot: art and protest in Russia today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Lena Jonson Open the ORCID record for Lena Jonson [Opens in a new window]
Lena Jonson*
Affiliation:
The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Drottning Kristinas väg 37, Stockholm SE-102 51, Sweden
*
∗Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article shows that resistance and a critical discourse continue in the arts, especially in visual art, in Russia under the present political conditions when free speech has been seriously circumscribed. When in May 2012 Vladimir Putin was reinstalled as president with a new authoritarian conservative agenda, it was expected that the situation for culture would change. This article addresses the question of whether a critical discourse survived in the arts under the new conditions. It presents the new political context for the arts, and provides examples of various artistic strategies of resistance/protest in Russian contemporary art by applying Jacques Ranciere's concept of dissensus. The focus is on visual art, although references are also made to the world of theater. The first section presents the new official role given to culture and the new state cultural policy as components of a reactionary backlash against the reform policies under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and describes conflicts around art and art productions that followed from the new state policy. A second section gives examples of dissensus in art today by presenting artworks by Piotr Pavlenskii, Arsenii Zhilyaev, Stas Shuripa, and Anna Titova.

Keywords

Russian contemporary artart and protestMedinskii and cultural policyPavlenskii
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 44 , Issue 5 , September 2016 , pp. 657 - 672
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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