Please join us! On 09th February 2021 at 18:00 (GMT) Cambridge Ukrainian Studies launches the 2021 Lent Term Webinar Series with guest speaker Anton Lapov, an artist musician, independent curator and museologist from Luhansk/Kyiv, Ukraine, who will speak about his own oeuvre and about media art produced in Eastern Ukraine from 1990-2020. The event will take place online and is free and open to the public, register at: http://bit.ly/MMLL-Anton-Lapov.
About Anton Lapov
Dissatisfied with conventional forms of art production, presentation, archiving and preservation, Anton’s practice combines new media, creative coding, digital humanities, and experimental museology to create varied participatory and communicative situations that push the boundaries of digital technology and address problematical socio-political situations.
Forced to leave Luhansk for Kyiv due to the on-going war in the Donbas region, Anton has developed an artistic and curatorial career of international dimensions through multiple exhibitions and artistic residencies, including those that have brought him to Liverpool and London. For the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies Webinar, Anton will join us form Phoenix, where he is on a Fulbright scholarship at the Arizona State University School of Art.
Though traveling the world, Anton stays connected with Eastern Ukraine; he is a participant in such Donbas art collectives as ‘Art Cluster R+N+D’ (a liquid cluster and lab for sound-design, media-synthesis and experimental culturology that unites Ukrainian media-artists, DJs, photographers, promoters, and cultural managers) and the ‘Lugansk Contemporary Diaspora’. His work ‘East-Ukrainian Complex’ (a multimedia installation in collaboration with Maxim Losev, 2017) constitutes a warning regarding the complicit role of technology and communication media in upholding a state of permanent alert and violence that has become the norm in Eastern Ukraine. It is a weighty reflection on the aestheticization of drone-killers and on the question of personal identification in the traumatic context of being marked as a direct military target.
His provocative project ‘#hero (proposal of a media-exhibit for hall of contemporary history of Ukraine),’an internet-based installation using generative video, explores the processes of ascertaining historical memory during periods of heightened social tension and military conflicts. It involves a dynamic database of portraits associated with socio-political events in Ukraine from 2014-16 that is generated using web-searching functions that employ hashtags such as #hero, #maidan, #2014, #2016, #ato, #donbass etc. The continuously and rapidly generated portraits projected on a screen bombard the viewer with an overload of information that elicits the questioning of one’s judgment regarding the criteria of ‘heroism’.
For more information on the speaker, see: https://cargocollective.com/antonlapov
