“Cracks in the Canon: Modernism and Censorship in Eastern Europe”, a conference at ULB co-organised by Kamila Kociałkowska

Kazimir Malevich, Supremus #58: Yellow and Black, 1916 (Russian State Museum, St Petersburg).

On Monday 5 and Tuesday 6 September, on the occasion of the inauguration of the interdisciplinary research centre MODERNITAS, the Université libre de Bruxelles hosted the conference “Cracks in the Canon: Modernism and Censorship in Eastern Europe”. Exploring art, literature, film, and the complex censorial apparatus surrounding their creation from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, this conference explored how both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ censorship operated as a formative force within modernist culture.

This event was organised by our Fellow Kamila Kociałkowska and her host promoter at ULB, Dennis Ioffe, Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature (Faculty of Letters, Translation and Communication).

Kamila, PhD in Art History (University of Cambridge), was awarded a Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellowship in 2021-2022 to carry out a research project entitled “Modernism Dismantled: Russian Censorship and the Avant-Garde Experience 1910-1918”. During her time at ULB, she contributed to the establishment of the MODERNITAS research centre within the Maison des Sciences Humaines MSH-ULB, focusing on interdisciplinary research on modernity and modernism.

The full programme of the conference can be downloaded here.