Early Career Fellow in Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

April–May 2025

Transcribing Violence: Art, Nature, Politics

Vasyl Cherepanyn's project at the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective revolves around conceiving and organising a symposium that explores the complex interrelationship between the need for theorising violence as a means to reflect on current and past events and its limits in the face of practices of violence. Against the backdrop of raging wars and a fascist turn in global politics, the event tackles the multifaceted realities of violence and its societal impacts by addressing the extreme violent ideologies and their political applications, war traumas and the mass psychophysical devastation, the destruction of nature, particularly due to military hostilities, the current visual violence and the variety of forms of its representation in the arts and media. The structure of the symposium will reflect these entanglements and interrelationships and combines a theoretical discursive part with an artistic experiential part.

Vasyl Cherepanyn (Ukraine) is Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC), an institution he co-founded in Kyiv in 2008 as a platform for collaboration among academic, artistic and activist communities. VCRC is the organiser of the Kyiv Biennial and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance. Cherepanyn holds a PhD in philosophy and has lectured at several universities, both in Kyiv and in other cities in Europe. He is a curator, writer and editor.