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Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East (PPV) is an experimental UCL-based platform...
Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East (PPV) is an experimental UCL-based platform that organises talks, reading groups, workshops, and exhibitions that address and challenge power structures in the post-Soviet and post-socialist world. While seeking to make sense of the Power Vertical (a term used by political scientists to refer to Vladimir Putin’s brand of post-Soviet authoritarian governance), PPV also looks beyond it, exploring the heterodox shapes, styles, and ideologies populating the Global East, and emanating from it to the wider world. Moreover, it aims to probe ways in which scholars can collaborate with artists, architects, and activists from across the Global East: not only to analyse the Power Vertical but also to develop tactics and strategies to ridicule, trick, twist, undercut, queer, resist - and pervert it.
2019-20 theme: PiraMMMida
In 2019-2020, PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East), will operate under the umbrella theme “PiraMMMida”. This theme is taken from the name of a 2011 movie about MMM Global, a bank and pyramid scheme established in 1990 by financier and fraudster Sergei Mavrodi (1932-2018), also said to be responsible for the Bitcoin surge of 2018.
About
PPV is convened by Maria Mileeva (History of Art, UCL), Michał Murawski (SSEES, UCL), Denis Maksimov (Avenir Institute), with the help of a group of PhD students at UCL. PPV functions under the auspices of the SSEES FRINGE Centre. In 2019-2020, PPV is generously supported by the UCL European Institute through its Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. PPV is also supported by The UCL Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art and UCL Culture; and is organised in conjunction with the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies and The Avenir Institute.
For more information about PPV, please visit our website: https://www.ppv.life