Andreas Schönle (Queen Mary University of London)
This talk will explore representations of ruins in the poetry of Alexander Kushner, the films of Kira Muratova, and the art of Komar and Melamid. It will highlight how within the context of a neo-modernist revival in the Soviet Union, these artists elaborated a kind of countercultural temporality through an exploration of transitional spaces and tropes of contingency, which all articulate the absence of any teleological transcendence. The ruin is here primarily deployed as a trope that disrupts the categorial differences that underpin the Soviet notion of progress. This alternative sense of history also underpins the articulation of a new disbelieving ethic that accepts contradictions.