REESOURCES
Rethinking Eastern Europe
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REESOURCES
Rethinking Eastern Europe
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Art

Studying art involves a variety of disciplines – from philosophical aesthetics, to the history of art, or even visual studies. Historical narratives connected to objects of art reflect the diversity of human experience and help us understand cultures, ideas, and traditions that are different from our own. Art history allows scholars to understand artworks as meaningful products of specific time periods and places, to realize how different our lived experience is from that of our predecessors, and yet, how little has changed with regards to our aspirations and values. This theme on our Educational Platform deals with phenomena of urban art and creative spaces (like workshops or galleries) – this includes spaces involved with fine art, other imagery, cinema, documentary or fictional narratives, and theater. Understanding our history through art helps us to make sense of the past and, by analyzing what is represented in the art itself, we can understand what was considered important and valuable. Stories about the lives of artists, their practices, artworks, how they interacted with their cities, and their navigation of society can inform our thinking about history and aesthetic comprehension. It can also help us to understand how our own lives fit into the human experience.

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Documents (3)

Image for Excerpt from a 2013 interview with Lviv Puppet Theater actress: War, Gulag, Space Race
Excerpt from a 2013 interview with Lviv Puppet Theater actress: War, Gulag, Space Race
This is an excerpt from an interview with an actress in Lviv made in 2013. This actress talks about her wartime experience under German occupation and touches on the various cultural institutions she attended during the war. She went to the Lviv Opera Theater, run 1941-1944 by famous actor and director Volodymyr Blavatsky, who had worked with Kurbas’ Berezil and created a name for himself in avant-garde theater in Poland. He left for the west in 1944. She notes Lesia Kryvytska, an actress who worked in interwar Poland, Nazi-occupied Lviv, and then settled at the Maria Zankovetska Theater in postwar Lviv. She also mentions studying ballet at the Opera’s dance studio. Her mention...
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Image for Excerpt from a 2012 interview with a female theater director: from Lviv to Moscow and back again
Excerpt from a 2012 interview with a female theater director: from Lviv to Moscow and back again
This is an excerpt from an interview with a theater director, one of the only women to work her way up through a male-dominated cultural sphere. She worked at several theaters in Lviv and became well-known in late Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. This source tells us about late Soviet theater, and the cultural world in general, and the different circulations and pathways between Lviv and Moscow. She mentions Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” (actually at the 20th, not 22nd Party Congress) and the cultural opening that happened in the 1950s and 1960s. Note that she applied to theater school in Kyiv, but was not accepted - because she auditioned with verse by dissident poet Lina...
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Image for Excerpt from a 2013 interview with a lighting designer: Connections between the military and the theater, and between Moscow and Lviv
Excerpt from a 2013 interview with a lighting designer: Connections between the military and the theater, and between Moscow and Lviv
This is an excerpt from an interview with a lighting designer in Lviv in which she talks about her mother, Tatiana Zorina, who for many years was the zavlit, or literary director, at the Theater of the Carpathian Military District on Horodotska Street in Lviv. This theater, called by locals simply PrykVO, was a Russian-language theater under the management of the Ministry of Defense that operated in Lviv from 1954 until the Soviet collapse. The theater continued, in various forms, under various state institutions, shifting and changing, until becoming today’s Teatr Lesi. Several interviews from the UMA collection linked here reveal the history of this fascinating theatrical institution. Tetiana Zorina, as the source...
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Syllabi (4)

Image for Reading Visual Culture Reading Visual Culture
The aim of the course is to get to know how to analyze examples of visual culture, including: fiction films and documentaries, video, photography. Both contemporary and historical materials will be studied, together with theoretical texts and publications (from the area of film and media studies, anthropology, cultural studies and history. Although images are mostly seen, if you want to really know them and understand them really well, you must not only "see" them but also "read" them, that means to analyze them as a complex message/ text. That is why at our course we will firstly discuss some terms and categories, that would help us to read images such as: composition, convention,...
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Image for Modernism and Pogroms: Culture and the Arts in the East Central European Borderlands, 19th-21st centuries Modernism and Pogroms: Culture and the Arts in the East Central European Borderlands, 19th-21st centuries
In our mini-course we will explore cultural interaction between Jews and non-Jews (Ukrainians, Poles, Russians) in the borderlands of the Habsburg and Romanov empires. This is interaction that may have been conscious or unconscious, and may have involved encounter, appropriation, negotiation, exchange and destruction.
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Technology revolutions and visual/textual rhetoric: Selected Cases in 20th and 21st Century in East Central Europe
The course consisting of five lectures focuses around interaction of text and image in modernist culture in CCE with a focus on Poland and its multicultural milieu. Two lectures break away from this framework, providing on the one hand a historical, longer perspective – and on the other locate the formal achievements of the avant-garde in today’s sociopolitical context.
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Image for How Historians Can Make Use of Visual Materials: Paintings, Photos, Films How Historians Can Make Use of Visual Materials: Paintings, Photos, Films
Historians constitute a rather conservative breed, and of course some historians are more conservative than others. The comfort zone of a conservative historian is a document, that is a preserved text, especially one that has some kind of official provenance. Memoirs, testimonies, oral history — the conservative historian considers them at best to be second-rank sources, too subjective and uncertain. This kind of historian does not even recognize visual materials as sources and makes no use of them. But this is unfortunate, because we live at a time in which all sorts of information is presented ever more frequently by visual means. Our students have become accustomed to acquire information in a form...
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