SAVA Launches New Podcast 'Left to be Desired'

Left to be Desired podcast explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global Socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes will invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene.

Two episodes of the podcast are now available on the podcast website and on Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and Audacy. It will be available on Apple Podcasts soon. Stay tuned for announcaments, news and events through our Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.  

In episode 1 of Left to be Desired, Maja and Reuben Fowkes talk to Austrian artist Oliver Ressler about his recent work around extractivism and explore connections with socialist geographies. In episode 2, Maja and Reuben Fowkes converse with Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova about the turbulent legacies of the Soviet transformation of Central Asia.

About Oliver Ressler:

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Since 2019 Ressler directs Barricading the Ice Sheets, a research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the Austrian Science Fund, that lead to an exhibition at Camera Austria in Graz in September 2021. Barricading the Ice Sheets was recently also on view at The Showroom, London. 

About Saodat Ismailova:

Saodat Ismailova grew up in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and is now based in Tashkent and Paris. Ismailova’s filmography addresses themes of national memory, women’s sovereignty, ritualism and mortality. In 2021 she founded Davra, a research group devoted to the study, documentation and dissemination of Central Asian culture. In 2022 her work was selected for both the Venice Biennale and Documenta. Her short films were recently screened at Tate Modern, London. 

About SAVA:

Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) is the first large-scale interdisciplinary research project that institutes the Socialist Anthropocene as a new field of study within the critical corpus concerned with challenging and decentring the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene, asserting the constitutive role of the twentieth century environmental histories of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. It is led by Maja and Reuben Fowkes, who are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.

Thank you for listening!

This podcast is edited by Sammara Abbasi.