Gender and sexualities in (post)Soviet/ (post)Socialist music, theatre and visual arts

Program

The participants

• Stephen Amico is Associate Professor of Music, The Grieg Academy, University of Bergen, Norway. He is author and editor of several publications on post-Soviet popular music and sexuality, including the book Roll Over, Tchaikovsky!: Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality (New Perspectives on Gender in Music) (University of Illinois Press), 2015.
• Tiina Pursiainen Rosenberg is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Stockholm University. She is the former rector of the University of the Arts Helsinki and has previously been a professor of gender studies at Stockholm University and at Lund University.
• Yngvar B. Steinholt is Associate Professor of Russian Culture and Literature at the University of Tromsø, Norway. He has published numerous articles and books on popular music in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, as well as on art activism, protest culture and contemporary Russian society. Among the other influential publications, Steinholt is also co-author of the book Punk in Russia: Cultural mutation from the ‘useless’ to the ‘moronic’ (Routledge), 2014.
• Harry Liivrand is Estonian art historian and curator of numerous important exhibitions which, inter alia, are covering marginalised topic of gay sensibility in post-Soviet Estonian art. He is author and editor of numerous fascinating publications about art, history, music and opera. Liivrand was 2011–2016 appointed as Estonian cultural attaché in Berlin. Currently, Liivrand is a visiting lecturer of Estonian Academy of Music and Theater, as well as a Head Specialist of Research and Communication at the Academic Library of Tallinn University.
• Rebeka Põldsam is Estonian art critic and curator-project manager at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia. Her academic focus at the Estonian Art Academy and Goldsmiths College, but also as a curator and art critic, has been on representations of sexual minorities and post-Soviet gender representations in Estonian and Eastern European contemporary art.
• Terje Toomistu is Estonian documentary filmmaker and anthropologist, whose works often draw from various cross-cultural processes, queer realities and subjectivities, and cultural memory. At the moment she is working on a documentary film about distinctive hippie movement, the psychedelic underground in the Soviet Union.

How to participate to the Event

• (Post)Soviet aesthetics
• Musicology
• Visual art studies (incl. design and fashion studies)
• Theater studies
• Feminist theory
• Queer approaches
• Critical studies on men and masculinities
• Media, film and communication
• Cultural studies

Information & contacts