Lecture by MASHA CHLENOVA
Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York City  

The Artist as a Nomad: Liminality as a Space of Freedom 

This talk examines several interwar avant-garde artists who embraced the itinerant conditions of modernity as a strategy for articulating spaces of resistance to the dominant forces of national and ethnic belonging. It considers works by such figures as Guillaume Apollinaire, Marc Chagall, Blaise Cendrars, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, who embraced liminality in various ways. Existing between predetermined modes of identity and unified subjectivity, they sought to open up spaces of meaning outside dominant cultural narratives, whether through actual travel, by cultivating “the spirit of expatriation,” as Duchamp put it, by inhabiting a space between cultures and languages, or through an outright refusal to belong. Excavating and validating such intentions, and their specific artistic manifestations a century ago, remains acutely relevant in our divided world today. 


Masha Chlenova holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University. She is part-time Assistant Professor of Art History at Eugene Lang College at The New School and an independent curator based in New York City. She held curatorial positions at the Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, organized independent exhibitions, served as a guest curator at Munchmuseet in Oslo and as a curatorial consultant for The Avant-Garde Museum at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Her primary focus is on the historical avant-gardes; early abstraction across the media; museology and history of exhibitions. She is working on a book on early Soviet museology and its European reception. Her second current research and exhibition project examines the historical avant-gardes of the 1910s–30s through the prism of cosmopolitanism, internationalism and nomadism, underscoring their transnational drive in combination with the need to establish cultural sovereignty of several newly independent nations.

 

Admission is free, but registration is required.
Registration: kassakmuzeum@pim.hu