Decolonization and the Avant-Garde Art School: Rethinking the Bauhaus, VKhUTEMAS, Mezhyhirya and Beyond

Recent exhibitions devoted to modernist art schools, such a Berlin’s 2019 bauhaus imaginista and Moscow’s 2020 VKhUTEMAS 100, began to shed light on a lesser known aspect of their avant-garde pedagogy; the schools’ decolonial efforts and their legacies. Such an inquiry, however, remains largely absent from the extant scholarship on the topic of avant-garde art schools and their experimental strategies. We will not be able to attempt to construct a truly comprehensive history of the global avant-garde until these efforts and their legacies are elucidated. Nor will we be able to understand the specific political implications of avant-garde decoloniality and its relevance today.

This session seeks to open a broad and rigorous discussion about the anti-colonial pedagogies and artistic strategies that evolved from within the Bauhaus, VKhUTEMAS, and the Mezhyhirya Artistic-Ceramic Technical College that thrived outside Kyiv in the 1920s. Such strategies were present for example in the teachings of László Moholy-Nagy and Béla Uitz, both emigres from the Austro-Hungarian Empire working at the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS respectively, Leninist-Internationalism and other socialist theories espoused by participants at all three institutions, and in works like the anti-colonial pottery the Mezhyhirya students derived from Ukrainian folk art. Contributors may focus on these and other anti-colonial practices in the historical schools or their global legacies as they evolved throughout the twentieth century via students and former teachers, and through the dissemination of objects and texts. Contributions focusing on Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Central Asia are especially encouraged.