Wednesday 17 March, 2021
2:30pm GMT - 4:00pm GMT
Speaker
Dr Daria Melnikova (Sainsbury Institute)
About the Talk
Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow 2020-21, Dr Daria Melnikova will be discussing Futurism in Russia and Japan based on her recently published article, What Is Futurism? Russia and Japan Exchange Answers for the World Art Seminar, hosted by the Department of Art History and World Arts Studies at the University of East Anglia.
This talk introduces Russian Futurist David Burliuk (1882–1967) and Japanese Futurist Kinoshita Shūichirō (1896–1991) as major agents in shaping Futurism in the early 1920s in Japan. The two artists organized exhibitions of the Futurist Art Association and delivered lectures on new art; furthermore, Kinoshita published the Futurist statement “Awaken! Friends! To Fellows of the Futurist Art Association” (1922), and they collaborated on the book What Is Futurism? We Answer(1923). Infused with Japanese and Russian indigenous themes, their “incomprehensible paintings” synthesized the theoretical and stylistic modes of Italian Futurism with anachronistic notions of progress and spirituality as a path out of Western modernity.
About the Speaker
Daria Melnikova received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania specializing in modern and contemporary Japanese art. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the specific medium of “performance art” (pafōmansu āto) that intersected such areas as film, photography, literature, and visual arts within the cultural, social, and political milieu of Japan from the early 20th century to the present.