Panel discussion: "The essential labor for survival"

Panel discussion

Organized and moderated by Yuliia Elyas, with Misho Antadze (filmmaker, Amsterdam), Tetyana Filevska (Creative Director of Ukrainian Institute, Kyiv) Maria Hlavajova (Artistic and General Director, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht), Robbie Schweiger (Researcher Collections, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam)

The Essential Labor for Survival invites representatives from Dutch art institutions and Europe-based cultural workers to engage in a discussion about how Ukrainian identities are presented, represented, and archived. This exchange comes about amid the ongoing war in and occupation of Ukraine by Russia, and the new-found pressure on Ukrainian cultural workers to produce meaning, or to explain what is happening at home. In recent months, some artists have chosen to suspend their practice and take up arms to fight the occupants, or to do volunteer work to help those who are internally or externally displaced. With all this going on, it is important to point out that this state of emergency is not something new, but part of an ongoing trajectory of imperialism and coloniality in Ukraine as well as other former Russian colonies. The Essential Labor for Survival looks at how Dutch institutions have contributed to perpetuating certain cultural myths or ideologies, and considers whose artistic voices have been selected or prioritized in the past decades. This panel critically engages with existing narratives about Eastern Europe by art institutions of Northern Europe, and asks how these narratives might be complicit in the circumstances that lead to this moment. Along with discussing strategic steps for cultural institutions to apprehend the coloniality of the war in Ukraine, space is also given to think about the role of the radical imagination in times of life-threatening emergency.