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How do we feel about visual art and protest? How can artwork connect audiences? How does visual art differ from other elements of protest?

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How do we feel about visual art and protest? How can artwork connect audiences? How does visual art differ from other elements of protest?

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'protest aesthetic' - is it a thing? good or bad? idk

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'protest aesthetic' - is it a thing? good or bad? idk

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can you be oppressed within a protest movement? 

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can you be oppressed within a protest movement? 

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how do some protest experiences differ from others? 

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how do some protest experiences differ from others? 

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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/how-russian-feminists-are-opposing-the-war-on-ukraine/

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I was raised by my grandparents in a small city in Moscow province. I called my grandmother 'mom' for as long as I can remember. Ten years ago, I was abroad on a summer study trip when she died suddenly. My relatives decided not to tell me so that I could finish my studies in peace. But, of course, from their silence, I deduced that something terrible had happened at home. I was so paralysed with fear that I didn't even ask. I waited for the end of my studies in appalling oblivion.

When I returned, my grandmother was already buried. I never saw her body and for a long time couldn't believe that she was no more. She just disappeared, and it seemed to me that at any moment she would appear again. It took me years to realise that she was really gone. I also had to cope with agoraphobia, and begin to get out of the house and travel again.

The death of my grandmother completely changed my life, but also made me who I am today. It made me a feminist activist, as I wanted to do something that would restore harmony and meaning to the world that I had lost. It made me a scholar, as I wanted to better understand those who had been like parents to me.

Now I am in London. Since October, I have been writing a thesis on the gender history of the USSR at University College London (UCL). I am studying the lives of girls and young women who were raised in the Cold War-era Soviet Union - women like my grandmother. It took me a long time to gain the courage to leave for another country, and I did it only when I had no prospects left in Russia.

In recent years, feminism in Russian society has been developing and growing, as has interest in gender studies in general. But this development has taken place in spite of the state and the authorities, who persecute anyone who doesn't toe the party line.

'Through a glass, darkly'

Four months after I left Russia, something terrible has again happened at home, and on a much more monstrous scale. The government that I never elected and had opposed all my adult life has attacked its neighbour, Ukraine, without declaring war. The country where I have relatives and friends, which I have visited numerous times, is now burning.

Russian soldiers are killing civilians and destroying entire cities in Ukraine, and I am far away again and see it all "through a glass, darkly". I get a terrible feeling of déjà vu and despair from the news - but also from seeing how everything repeats itself and becomes only scarier.

The most terrifying part is the feeling that it isn't just my own past repeating itself, but that the whole traumatic history of Eastern Europe is turning into some kind of ouroboros - a giant snake eating its own tail. When I read about the hundreds of thousands of people leaving Ukraine, I remember the story of my grandfather, who was from a Jewish family in Ukraine and had to flee Kharkiv in 1941 when it was occupied by the Nazis.

He was a six-year-old boy, and both his parents were serving on the front line (his father as a soldier, his mother as a surgeon). He left by train with his grandmother, Berta, for the city of Berezniki in the Perm Krai region of Russia. Berta was so old that my grandfather thought she would not survive the weeks-long trip. My grandfather had a name tag on his clothes with information about relatives in Siberia in case he was found alone.

Now the gears of history are turning in the opposite direction. As a historian, I understand that I can't draw loose historical analogies or simply say that history repeats itself. But I can talk about how one trauma leads to another, how the memory of suffering or resentment creates new disasters.

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How Russian feminists are opposing the war on Ukraine

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I was raised by my grandparents in a small city in Moscow province. I called my grandmother 'mom' for as long as I can remember. Ten years ago, I was abroad on a summer study trip when she died suddenly. My relatives decided not to tell me so that I could finish my studies in peace.

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https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/03/29/the-feminist-face-of-russian-protests-a77106

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The Feminist Face of Russian Protests - The Moscow Times

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On Feb. 23, Daria Serenko, a Moscow political activist, was finally released from a fifteen-day jail sentence. Daria had been arrested for an Instagram post she had made in 2021 that featured “extremist” symbols associated with anti-corruption firebrand Alexei Navalny.

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https://www.instagram.com/fem_antiwar_resistance/?hl=ru

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https://www.goethe.de/prj/zei/en/fem/23117481.html

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The feminist anti-war movement in Russia and around the world

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Immediately after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, some sections of Russian society sharply criticised the acts of war. An organised, resolute anti-war movement with clearly-defined goals and principles has been set up inside Russia by women, to be more precise, by feminists.