Organised by Susanne Frank, Yvonne Albers, Michail Leivadiotis, and Samira Spatzek, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities".

For this additional RA 1 Meeting, we have invited our current Artists in Residence, Dana Kavelina and Polina Barskova, for an end-of-year get together and exchange about their works.

Dana Kavelina was born in 1995 in Melitopol and was based in Kyiv\Lviv, Ukraine, but is currently living in Germany. She is a graduate of the Department of Graphics at the National Technical University of Ukraine. She primarily works with animation and video, but also uses installation, painting and graphics. Her works often thematize military violence and war seen from a gender perspective and address the position of the victim as a political subject, as well as the distance between historical and individual trauma, memory and misrepresentation. Her works have been exhibited at the Kristianstads konsthall, Sweden, Haus der Kunst, Munich, M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium, Fridman Gallery, New York and the Neue Galerie Graz, Austria.

In 2018, the animated film "Mark Tulip, who spoke with flowers" received the Special Jury Prize at the Odesa International Film Festival and the Grand Prix of the KROK festival. In 2020 the film "Letter to a Turtledove" was included in the "War and Cinema" programme of the American magazine e-flux; in 2022 it was shown in the MoMA screening programme "Notes from the Ground".

In recent years, Polina Barskova has produced four book-length works across several genres, styles and languages. These include a prizewinning anthology of translations, Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (2016), works composed during the Nazi blockade of the city that lasted from September 1941 to January 1944 and claimed more than a million victims. Her scholarly study, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster, written in English, appeared a year later. The same period witnessed the publication of two volumes composed in her native language. Her hybrid prose work Zhivye kartiny (Living Pictures) was published in Russian in 2014 and was awarded the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize; it now appears in vivid, resourceful translations by Catherine Ciepiela (English) and Olga Radetzkaia (German). Her ninth book of poems, Vozdushnaia trevoga (Air Raid), followed three years later; the acclaimed Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort recently provided electric English translations of poems selected from over a decade of Barskova’s work in a collection of the same name. Barskova’s disparate work as scholar, archivist, anthologist and poet converges in her quest to retrieve what has been repressed in forbidden or forgotten pasts – including her own.