SAVA: IAS Researchers Maja and Reuben Fowkes present the Socialist Anthropocene

Supported by a major UKRI Frontier Research grant, IAS Fellows Maja and Reuben Fowkes will present the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts at the Igor Zabel Award conference ‘So Close: Ecologies of Life and Death’ in Ljubljana.

Co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, Dr Maja Fowkes and Dr Reuben Fowkes will open the conference ‘So Close: Ecologies of Life and Death’ in Ljubljana, Slovenia on 17 November, with the first international presentation of research into the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA). Their paper on ‘Surviving Extinction: Regenerative Ecologies of the Socialist Anthropocene’ is the result of research conducted within the framework of a UKRI Frontier Research grant, awarded to successful ERC Consolidator Grant applicants in the 2022 funding round. The conference is organized on the occasion of the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory, which recognizes the achievements of curators, art historians, theorists, art writers, and critics of East European art.

Next year Principal Investigator of the interdisciplinary visual arts-led SAVA Project, Dr. Maja Fowkes and Research Fellow in the Environmental Art History of Socialism, Dr. Reuben Fowkes, will be joined at the Institute of Advanced Studies by two further academic researchers and two artist fellows. Applications for the postdoctoral positions in the Environmental History of Socialism and the History of Socialist Science are now open with a deadline of 30 November.

For abstracts and further details about the conference programme, see the website of the Igor Zabel Foundation.

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Image credits: Stefan Rusu, Endangered Species: A plea for a Red Book of Soviet Modernism, detail of installation at National Museum of Fine Art of Republic of Moldova, 2022. Courtesy the artist.