Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Madina Tlostanova, "What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire" (Duke UP, 2018)
Description: In What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), Madina Tlostanova traces how contemporary post-Soviet art mediates this human condition. Observing how the concept of the happy future—which was at the core of the project of Soviet modernity—has lapsed from the post-Soviet imagination, Tlostanova shows how the possible way out of such a sense of futurelessness lies in the engagement with activist art. She interviews artists, art collectives, and writers such as Estonian artist Liina Siib, Uzbek artist Vyacheslav Akhunov, and Azerbaijani writer Afanassy Mamedov who fram...