Merging the Unmergeable: Environmentalism in the Late Socialist Industrial Landscape

About the presentation:

In a 1977 monograph devoted to the work of Ural Tansykbayev (1904-74), it was reported that the celebrated Uzbek artist witnessed with pride and joy the transformation of his native land by the Soviet people and sought through his painting to capture the “merging of the unmergeable.” This presentation considers the extent to which the merging in socialist art of the infrastructures of industrial modernity – the proliferating mines, factories, railroads, pylons, dams and canals, with the remains of the natural environment – solitary trees, retreating lakes and distant mountains, constituted a latent form of ecological critique. How far did the emergence of more equivocal and conflicted depictions of the industrial landscape reflect growing ecological awareness, serving also as unwitting documents of the distinctive environmental histories of the Socialist Anthropocene?

About the Seminar:

‘Nature and Socialist States’ focuses on the environmental history of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The aim of the seminar is to reflect on the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between state socialism and the natural environment: the negative impacts of industrialization, the management of land and forests, the development of ecological expertises and environmentalist movements,  the attempts to reconcile economic development with the needs of nature preservation and the artistic representations of these processes.

More information about the seminar can be found here. 

About Maja and Reuben Fowkes:

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021), The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015) and a special issue of Third Text entitled Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism (2018). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianism at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their Horizon Europe project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant. For more, see: www.translocal.org