The Special Optics of War
Panel discussion with Tom Holert, Olexii Kuchanskyi, and Asia Bazdyrieva

Russia’s war in Ukraine is a hybrid war of images and real violence, where iPhone journalism counteracts constant accusations of so-called fakes. Media theorist and curator Tom Holert, critic and theorist Olexii Kuchanskyi, and art historian Asia Bazdyrieva discuss the new porosity and agency of images in the current war.

Tom Holert works as an interdependent scholar and curator. In 2015, he cofounded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. From October 2022 he will be visiting professor at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK). Recent book publications include Knowledge beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (2020), Politics of Learning, Politics of Space: Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s (2021) and Ca. 1972. Gewalt—Umwelt—Identität—Methode (2022). Among his recent exhibitions are Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930 (with Anselm Franke, 2018) and Education Shock: Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s (2021/22), both at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (the latter also at Vorarlberger Architektur Institut, Dornbirn).

Olexii Kuchanskyi is an independent researcher, film curator, and writer whose main interests lie in experimental moving-image art, collective visual practices, their ecological impact, and critical cultures of nature. S/he was born in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, and lives in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine. His/her works have been published in Prostory, Your Art, TransitoryWhite, Political Critique, East European Film Bulletin, Arts of the Working Class, Moscow Art Magazine, e-flux Notes, Theory on Demand, and others. S/he was a member of Occupy Kyiv Cinemas, an activist network protecting Kyivan communal property cinemas at risk of privatization.

Asia Bazdyrieva is an art historian and PhD candidate at the Make/Sense program between FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Münchenstein, and Linz University. Her research interests span visual culture, (feminist) epistemology, and environmental humanities at large, and pay particular attention to the project of Soviet modernity with its ideological and material implications in spaces, bodies, and lands. She coauthored Geocinema—a collaborative project that explored the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema. Geocinema has been nominated for the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2020) and the Golden Key at the Documentary Film and Video Festival (2021).