series of debates
From Putin to Stalin. Around the Invasion of Ukraine
A series of discussions accompanying the exhibition Ukraine. Under a Different Sky
- In 2022, the Russian leader’s mask ultimately fell off, revealing to the world an imperial, brutal visage familiar from the past: the face of Stalin and his accomplices. We have witnessed the same barbarous methods that characterized the leaders of Communist Russia, but also the country’s earlier rulers since Ivan the Terrible.
- Ukraine is not the first victim of Putin’s neoimperial ambitions, but the first one treated with such bestial persistence, in plain view of the whole world, so close to the EU border. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also exposed an intricate web of connections and ties between the free world and the criminal regime that until now have been largely unnoticed in the public discourse.
- In a series of debates titled From Putin to Stalin. Around the Invasion of Ukraine, we look at the aggression from a broader cultural, historical, and civilizational perspective. True to the CCA’s motto – “Rethinking the World through Art” – we consider Ukrainian artists’ narratives as an impulse to rethink the current situation in our part of the world, including in a broader geopolitical context. We want to ask about the cultural and social mechanisms that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has revealed, and about how it has brought about a re-evaluation of the concepts that organized the life of Western societies so far..
