This paper looks at the ways in which artists from east Ukraine have resisted (re-)colonial epistemic violence, through engaging industrial archives, confronting and dismantling their infrastructures of epistemic occupation. De-occupying archives through critical reworkings of archival photography and video, Oleksandr Kuchynskyi, Anna Pylypyuk & Volodymyr Shypotilnikov, Kateryna Syrik, Elias Parvulesko and Sashko Protyah, among others, raise questions about archival knowledge, epistemic violence and the liberatory potential of contemporary art practice. Considering my own work with the Center of Urban History on the ‘City in a Suitcase’ project, I ask how archives of the occupied and destroyed territories, including heavily industrialised spaces such as Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, and Soledar, can be reconstituted through community-led practice, resisting the recreation of ‘resourcifying’ archival politics and, instead setting free ‘alternative world perceptions’ (Tlostanova, 2019).
Departmental Seminar Series Trinity Term 2024
3.15pm, Fridays of Weeks 1-6.
In person in the Lecture Room, 64 Banbury Road.
Convened by the Emptiness team
