Modernism and the Making of Contemporary Europe is a new lecture and podcast series at MoLI which will explore the ways in which modernist literature, art and culture has been rewritten, repurposed and revalued in twenty-first century Europe.
Featuring presentations and conversations with commentators, critics and scholars from around the globe, this series will engage the ways in which modernism has become significant to contemporary European aesthetics, heritage and identity.
Katerina Pavlidi is a postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin, working on the Research Ireland-funded project Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025. She specialises in late- and post-Soviet literature and culture with a focus on Russia. She is co-convener of the Soviet Temporalities network which explores conceptions of time that emerged during the Soviet period, and their post-Soviet legacies. Katerina has published articles and chapters on the underground art worlds of late socialism, Moscow Conceptualism, postmodernist Russian literature and contemporary cultures of resistance. Her forthcoming monograph explores the relationship between language and the body in the works of the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin.
In this talk, Katerina Pavlidi explores how Russia’s authoritarian turn since 2012 has engulfed Russian modernism and postmodernism within a neo-conservative and traditionalist ideological framework. Particularly, she focuses on how Russia’s 2014 State Cultural Policy has reframed the history of Russian modernism and reshaped the meaning of ‘contemporary art’. A key focus of her talk is a 2016 Moscow exhibition – Forever Contemporary: Art of the 20th-21st Centuries – which defanged Russian modernism and rebranded it as a precursor to a new idea of contemporary Russian art. Through this lens, Pavlidi examines how claims to the legacies of Russian modernism have become a primary battleground in the broader struggle over Russia’s political and cultural future.
The series is presented by Dr John Greaney, School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, and supported by the project Contemporary Modernisms, funded by Taighde Éireann / Research Ireland.
