The Actuality of the 20s: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet Avant-Garde.
Organized by: Dr. Natalia Ganahl nataliaganahlgmail.com; Prof. Dr. Sebastian Egenhofer.

The new materialist philosophies and social practices prompt us to revisit the transdisciplinary endeavors of the early Soviet period, where a materialist shift was realized not only in scientific and philosophical thought but also in art and social production. This shift involved integration of production into systems of energy and information exchange, the dissolution of entrenched epistemological binaries and the development of new practices in form-building that focused on the exploration of earth resources, industrial technology, physiological processes. Also new modes of institutionalization emerged, characterized by horizontal principles of workshops and laboratories. Within this highly active intellectual landscape, transdisciplinary initiatives began to emerge, that go beyond the boundaries of the classical cogitatio universalis. Some of the artistic and theoretical challenges are only now becoming fully apparent, as new epistemologies emerge. As Pavel Florensky remarked in a letter about his own project of "concrete metaphysics", some concerns take 100 years to gain academic validity. Soviet modernism received its first productive reception in Western Europe and the USA as early as the 1970s. More recent editions and research show the new round of attention, which seems to be symptomatic. Ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Caucasus and new dictatorships are once again sharpening the contrasts between light and dark in this new exploration of the past. What can we learn today from the discussions and experiments of the 1920s?

Program:
Room 1, Garnisongasse 13, Сampus Hof 9, 1090 Wien
25. 9
9.00 - 9.45 Introduction round
9.45 - 10.30
Ekaterina Ivanova (Lotman-Institut, Ruhr Universität Bochum)
State Institute Of Artistic Culture: Establishing a new Discipline.
10.30 - 11.15
Maria Silina (Université du Québec à Montréal, Ruhr-Universität Bochum).
Creative Beholder in Soviet Museum: Anatoly Bakushinsky's museum seminars and bodily practices of art perception.
Coffee break
11.30 – 12.15
Boris Stepanov (Centre for Central and Eastern European Studies (Eur'Orbem), University of Sorbonne, Paris)
The city as a laboratory of new pedagogy: Educational experiments in Russia in the 1920s
12.15 – 13.00
Alla Vronskaya (Universität Kassel, Professor of Architectural History and Theory)
Monistic Modernism: Soviet Architecture and the Philosophy of Life
Lunch break
14.00 - 14.45
Tobias Dias (School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Berlin)
Bogdanov in Berlin: Deskilling, Artistic Research, and the International Constructivists
14.45 - 15.30
Alexander Dmitriev (Prague, Charles University)
“October of Thought”: Intellectual modes of early Soviet modernity in the 1920s
Coffee break
15.45 - 16.30
Stefanie Kitzberger (Universität für Angewandte Kunst, Wien)
From Work to Frame. Universalizing Artistic Production in Early Moscow Constructivism
16.30 - 17.15
Jacob Stewart-Halevy (Tufts University, USA)
Deindustrializing Productivism
Coffee break
18.00 - 19.30 Keynote Lecture, Discussion
Alla Mitrofanova (Independent Researcher, St. Petersburg)
Can reality be different? Philosophical forks of the period of the Russian Revolution and their echoes in the 21.century.

26.9
Master Students Panel:
10.00– 10.40.
Martina Gratl (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
„Art into technology!” The concept of technique by Vladimir E. Tatlin.
10.40– 11.20.
Polina Tumanova-Litke (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
Tatlin and «Tatlinism»: The reception outside Soviet Russia in the 1920s
11.20-12.00.
Sophie Wagner (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien):
Production of dictatorship: The leader portrait in the context of the photographic design of the USSR in Construction.
Lunch 12.00-12.45
13.00-13.45
Natalia Ganahl (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
The new hylomorphism by Pavel Florensky in the 1920s.
13.45 - 14.30
Anna Montebugnoli (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA), Rome)
Materialising the Metaphysics of Light. For an Archaeology of the Cinematic Image at the Intersection of Florensky’s “Concrete Metaphysics” and Russian Avant-Garde Cinema
Coffee break
14.40 - 15.25
Sebastian Egenhofer (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
From General to Restricted Suprematism: Malevich's Second Peasant Cycle and the Politics of Collectivization.
Final discussion
16.00 End of the conference