CBEES Advanced Seminar with Maria Silina, Adjunct Professor at the Department of History of Art at UQAM, Montreal and a Visiting Fellow at CBEES

Speaker: Maria Silina, Adjunct Professor at the Department of History of Art at UQAM, Montreal and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University

Discussant: Irina Sandomirskaja, Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University

Chair: Dmitrii Dorogov, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University

Abstract: This paper exposes museums of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as creations of the intersection of key imperial infrastructures: geopolitical hierarchies, administrative governance, and the production of universal knowledge through academic institutions and scientific communities. It lays out the history of different forms of Russian imperialism such as nationalization, mass alienations of objects, as well as a radical remaking of museums into a centralized State Museum Network. The frame of knowledge production in the context of international relations appears emancipatory today when Russia leads the war in Ukraine; it offers a perspective where the imperial frame is only part of the much wider postimperial structural development of contemporary museums. As I argue in the closing sections of the paper, we need to work towards new legal, conceptual, and infrastructural apparatuses that need to take into account the longer history of Russian imperialism to facilitate the postwar transition for museums once labelled soviet.

Maria Silina, PhD, is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of History of Art at UQAM, Montreal and a Visiting Fellow at CBEES, Södertörn University, Stockholm (2023). They participate in several research projects that address Communist culture and media, museum studies, and contemporary art activism. Their book Art History on Display: Soviet Museum Between Two Wars (1920s-1930s) is forthcoming from Bard Graduate Center.