Presently, when decolonial discourse has become a buzz word, it is important to reanimate the forgotten aspects of decolonial thought that allow for more nuanced, complex, and less binary interpretations. One of these overlooked tools is “double critique”, which acquires additional elements when formulated in/from the realm of the no-longer-post-socialist. This history allows for complexifying and problematising the coloniality/decoloniality narrative, placing it within the specific historical, political, social, and cultural context of the Cold War, decolonisation, the collapse of the socialist bloc, and the upsurge of global neoliberal capitalism turning the former Second World into a void.

However, this trajectory must be regarded in its multiple entanglements with another major global narrative of the second half of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries: the anticolonial and later postcolonial discourse. Stemming from the same origins, these narratives have remained historically and politically discordant and bear a different relation to the current decolonisation slogan. It is particularly important to see how the art worlds of the no-longer-post-socialist spaces tackle these complexities through metaphors, images, and symbols that often come into dialogue with the current global challenges in more immediate and relevant ways than any social theory is able to.

The lecture will feature Madina Tlostanova, a theorist of post-colonialism in the countries of the former Soviet empire, Mykhailo Glubokyi, director of the cultural platform IZOLYATSIA, originally based in Donetsk, and Paul Chaney, an artist and researcher who has been working on a diagram of the geological development of the area. The result of his work can now be seen in the exhibition at the Fotograf Gallery.