Modernism and the Making of Contemporary Europe is a new lecture and podcast series at MoLI which will explore how modernist literature, art and culture have 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 with the ways in which modernism has become significant to contemporary European aesthetics, heritage and identity.
Katia Denysova is a curator and art historian of modernist art. From 2022–26, she co-curated the travelling exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, which won the Apollo Exhibition of the Year Award for 2023. She also co-edited and contributed to the volume (Thames & Hudson, 2022) which accompanied this exhibition. Denysova has held research fellowships at the University of Tübingen, the University of Basel, and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. She is currently consulting on exhibition projects at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
In this talk, Katia Denysova will analyse Ukraine’s place in the history of European modernism. First, she will explore the development of modernist art in early-twentieth-century Ukraine, when its territory was divided between different empires. Specifically, she will examine how local pictorial traditions and transcultural exchanges intertwined to shape a modernist aesthetic. Then, she will consider the importance of this history to today’s Ukraine. Taking her curatorial work on the 2023 Apollo Exhibition of the Year In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine (2022–26) as a case study, Denysova will draw on her experience of presenting modernist material to international audiences during a period of war and territorial invasion. She will discuss how modernism has become a language of communication and exchange in contemporary Europe, as well as the role historical avant-garde cultures can play in contemporary cultural diplomacy and the expression of national sovereignty.
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.
