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This roundtable examines public and street art under authoritarianism, exploring the artistic practice not merely as genres but as contested states of publicness where artistic visibility becomes a site of political negotiation. When visual art confronts systematic censorship and state oppression, “publicness”; transforms from a spatial designation into a precarious achievement requiring continuous struggle.
Analyzing cases from the Soviet Union and contemporary authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe (Belarus, Russia, Hungary) and beyond, the discussion foregrounds how publicness operates through new forms of presence alongside continuing absence as censored works, suppressed voices as constitutive elements.
Roundtable participants:
Dr. Margarita Kuleva is a sociologist of culture, artist, and curator, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU Russian and Slavic Studies Department. Her research explores labor inequalities in the art world, with a focus on invisible cultural work in the post-Soviet context. She has collaborated with institutions such as Manifesta Biennale, Garage MoCA, and the Goethe Institute. She holds a PhD in sociology from the Higher School of Economics in collaboration with Bielefeld University. Her dissertation, based on over 70 interviews, compares post-Soviet with British art labor experiences and examines the careers of young cultural workers in post-Soviet cities. Kuleva’s work has been published in Cultural Studies and the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Dr. Agnes Szanyi earned her doctorate in sociology at The New School for Social Research in New York in 2024. Her dissertation investigates the intersection of art and activism and the dilemmas of artists striving to change the largely privately funded New York art world and the larger society. Between 2007 and 2011, she was the project assistant of the Budapest- based tranzit.hu Contemporary Art Initiative. While a doctoral student, she was a research fellow of the Curatorial Design Research Lab at Parsons School of Design. Since 2014, she has been a member of the art collective BFAMFAPhD. In 2010, she co-edited Art Always Has Its Consequences: Artists’ Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia 1947-2009 (Sternberg Press). In 2022, she edited a thematic issue of Mezosfera on art activism. Currently, she works on a book based on her dissertation research.
Dr. Dzmitry Suslau is a Lecturer at University College London. A specialist in public art, he is also the co-founder and creative director of Climate Art, a public art commissioning platform focused on environmental change. Dzmitry’s current research and teaching explore contemporary East European art through the lens of horizontal art history, a concept proposed by the late Piotr Piotrowski. He is particularly interested in the artistic networks of the late 1990s and early 2000s in the US and Europe, investigating how these connections bridged the East-West divide and facilitated a more pluralistic understanding of art across time and space.
Image: Francisco Infante-Arana, 1968, Suprematist Games.
