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Looking into Art

POSTPONED - Margarita Kuleva and Natalia Samutina: The Right to Be Creative and Invisible Russia

Mon Mar 30, 2020 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

**This event has been postponed to a later date. More details on the re-scheduled date will be announced soon. Please check back on our website at artsdesign.berkeley.edu for updates. Thank you for your understanding.**

Presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media; cosponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, the Department of History of Art, and the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley.

What is fair in contemporary society, and how do people negotiate fairness when there is a lack of clarity and governmental regulation? This question urgently needs to be answered in our time of uncertainty, economic austerity, and political crisis. The answer, Margarita Kuleva and Natalia Samutina argue, can be found in the regimes of fairness devised by innovative digital creators in post-Soviet countries such as Russia. A new generation of YouTube revolutionists holds records of cultural innovation and excellence in animation, video games, and music. At the same time, existing policies of culture and creativity in Russia neglect these achievements and impose constraints on digital sectors of artistic production. With their right to be creative contested, this bright and talented group seeks alternative means of social inclusion by revising notions of profession, social contract, and solidarity.

Margarita Kuleva is a senior lecturer at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, where she is chair of the Department of Design and Contemporary Art. Natalia Samutina is Head of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture at the Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

Margarita Kuleva, PhD, Sociology, received her BA in Liberal Arts from Smolny College, the joint program of St Petersburg State University, Russia and Bard College, NY. She graduated with an MA in Sociology from the Higher School of Economics. Currently she works as a senior lecturer at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, where she holds the position of chair of the Department of Design and Contemporary Art. She also is a fellow of the Centre for German and European Studies at St. Petersburg State University–University of Bielefeld and the Centre for Art, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR). Kuleva has collaborated as a researcher and curator with a number of Russian and international cultural institutions, including Manifesta Biennale, Garage MoCA, Goethe Institute, Street Art Museum, Ural Industrial Biennale and New Holland St. Petersburg. One of her main research interests is creative labour. She also adopts a network approach and feminist theory to the sociology of the art sand clothing consumption/fashion production. In 2012-2016, she studied post-Soviet creativity, looking at the example of the careers and professional identities of young cultural workers in the hybrid cultural economy in Russia. Some findings from these studies are presented in recent journal publications for example, Cultural Studies and International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Natalia Samutina is Head of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture at the Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Her fields of research are diverse and include sociological and cultural analysis of fan fiction and Russian fan communities, manga and anime reception in Russia, street art and the multiple contexts of contemporary urban changes. She has published two books in Russian and numerous articles in Russian and in English (in Continuum, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Digital Icons, Urban History) and is currently working on a book on participatory cultures in the Russian context.

Natalia Samutina has been researching Russian participatory cultures for many years, writing actively about fan fiction communities, graffiti and street art, manga enthusiasts and publishers, etc. She is going to talk about the scope and main characteristics of Russian participatory cultures and pose some questions related to our knowledge of this underrepresented cultural layer. What are we missing in the general picture of contemporary Russian culture when we omit participatory cultures from it and concentrate only on the production recognized by cultural elites? What kind of invisible practices participatory cultures perform? How should we talk about social and cultural value of their production? What is important to know about people involved into different online communities, participating in creative battles, leaning languages while translating manga illegally and discussing censorship in relation to amateur porn texts? While showing unusual and maybe unexpected Russia, Natalia Samutina hopes to provoke a broader discussion about the role of amateur (fan) creative cultures in the contemporary world.

For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu