Soli-Veranstaltung für ukrainische Künstler*innen

The full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine on February 24 have shaken the whole world. All of a sudden, the discussions about the cold war, confrontation between NATO/West and Russia have shifted aside and previously marginalized discourses about the neocolonial and imperial Russian politics in Eastern Europe gained stronger meaning. What is the history behind these politics? Why has Ukraine been a target of Russia’s military aggression for the past 8 years? Why is it wrong to talk about NATO and West provoking Russia’s invasion, taking the agency away from Ukraine? The panel aims to provide historical, political and cultural background of the war in Ukraine and decolonize knowledge about its context. Speakers are artist and researcher Anna Engelhardt, journalist Anastasia Tikhomirova and historian Jörn Happel. The discussion will be chaired by Social Scientist and Curator Mariia Vorotilina. The event has been organised in cooperation with ZEIT-Stiftung. The Foundation will provide residencies for Ukrainian artists and the audience will be asked to also donate for those scholarships.

After the discussion we’ll screen the award-winning documentary THE EARTH IS BLUE AS AN ORANGE by Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk. Outside, the streets echo with the sound of gunfire and exploding grenades. Inside their house, four siblings, together with their mother, cats and turtle, attempt to maintain some semblance of peace and normality in their everyday lives. War has been raging in Ukraine’s Donbas for five years. Nastja says it has made her easily irritable and angry. Her sister Myroslava, who dreams of studying cinematography, remarks that war is like a void. To fight back against the black hole, she decides to make a film, one about her family’s life in wartime, about the fears and small joys. Director Iryna Tsilyk observes everyday life under the shadow of war and one family’s collective creative response in a testament to resilience and the power of cinema. Iryna Tsilyk was born in 1982 and studied film and theatre in Kiev. She has made documentary and fictional short films; is also a book author and writes poetry, prose and children's books. Her feature debut THE EARTH IS BLUE AS AN ORANGE (2020) won the Directing Award in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

Speakers in the panel discussion are:

Anna Engelhardt, a Russian researcher and artist whose main topics are decoloniality, logistics, and feminist politics in post-Soviet space. She has recently written an Essay »The Futures of Russian Decolonization« that is problematizing the current colonial Russian politics with regard to the former Soviet states, its origins and influences on society, arts and academia (read HERE).

Prof. Dr. Jörn Happel is Professor of the History of Eastern Europe and East Central Europe at Helmut Schmidt University/University Hamburg and is currently working on a project on Europe's primal fear of the East, among other things. His research interests include the history of Russia/the Soviet Union, Central Asia, Siberia, and Poland, as well as the history of intercultural relations between Eastern and Western Europe.

Anastasia Tikhomirova is a journalist, moderator and editor and works for taz, ZEIT ONLINE, Jungle World, Analyse & Kritik and »Der Volksverpetzer«, among others. She is also an alumna of the Marion-Gräfin-Dönhoff Fellowship of the International Journalist Programmes 2021, as part of which she interned at Novaya Gazeta in Moscow. She was born in Waiblingen near Stuttgart in 1999 and grew up between the opposites of Moscow and Allgäu.

Mariia Vorotilina will chair the panel. After graduating in Social Sciences from the University of Kyiv in 2016, she worked in various artistic projects and for international aid organisations active in Eastern Ukraine, among other things. Since 2018, she has been working in public relations at Kampnagel and also curates her own projects. In the winter semester 2021/22, she was one of the organisers of the seminar »Decolonising Eastern Europe« in a collective.