Museums in Central Asia, Caucasus, and Eastern Europe: Rethinking Soviet Museum Management

Museums in many countries of Eurasia, such as Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan, have grappled with the institutional, conceptual, material, and legal legacy of Soviet museum management.

Since the 1990s, this legacy has been reconceptualized and evolved in various directions, reframed through different conceptual frameworks.

In response to the need for access to scholarship and practice across the region, particularly heightened by the Russian-Ukrainian war (2014-), we will explore some of the most acute topics, such as the quest for (post)national displays in both the past and the future, the politics and consequences of nationalization, provenance research and restitution efforts, accessibility of archives, contemporary curatorial practices, and the application and limits of concepts such as post-Soviet, epistemological violence, and emancipation in knowledge production, among others.

The invited speakers are practitioners and scholars with first-hand experience in museum work. They will reflect on the process of knowledge creation, accessibility, changing political and research conditions in recent years.

The workshop schedule is indicated in CET and vill be conducted online via Zoom.

The workshop is organized by Maria Silina with the support of the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) at Södertörn University, Stockholm and CELAT-UQAM, Montreal.