Breaking Through the State Border as an Art Project

Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University for a presentation by Nazar Kozak (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine).

An example of border art, a politically motivated mode of art production, which is staged directly in site on state borders or has them in its primary focus, Maria Kulykivska’s endurance The Raft Crimea (2016) emerged as the artist’s personal reflection on migration politics and on the social tensions they produce. For Ukraine, this theme has a special connotation because of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula and hybrid invasion in the country’s east, which resulted in the displacement of more than a million people. The artist planned to undertake a 700-mile journey on a safety raft down the Dnipro river from Kyiv to the European Union’s border and then to cross it illegally. Having in its focus this challenging and dangerous project, which did not run according to its initial plan, this presentation attempts to explore how art can contribute to the praxis of resistance against the world’s biopolitical divide

Nazar Kozak is a senior research scholar in the Department of Art Studies at the Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Previously he taught art history at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Kozak’s primary research is on Byzantine and post-Byzantine art in Eastern Europe. More recently, he has begun to work on contemporary activist art. His article on art interventions during the Ukrainian Maidan revolution was published in the Spring 2017 issue of the Art Journal; it received an honorable mention as a finalist for that year’s Art Journal Award.