Behind the Porous Curtain: Photography by Anatoly Pronin
Monday, 23 January 2012–Friday, 09 March 2012
Harriman Atrium, 12th floor IAB, 420 West 118th Street, New York, NY
Behind the Porous Curtain, curated by Regina Khidekel, showcases 20 works by Anatoly Pronin. These works capture the Soviet period of artistic inspiration of the 1970s, as the post-Stalin thaw opened a pathway through the iron curtain for modern Western art and culture to enter the Soviet Union. Most of Pronin’s photographs were shot behind the theater curtain, capturing the private and almost intimate world of rehearsals with iconic figures such as George Balanchine, Laurent Terzieff, and Marcel Marceau.
The theater tours displayed in this exhibit ended the isolation of the Soviet art scene, reviving names erased from history and introducing new ideas and methods. One of the central subjects of this collection is Leonid Jakobson, a non-conformist choreographer who created masterpieces despite strict state control, transforming classical ballet technique into modern dance lexicon.
Anatoly Pronin has pursued photography since childhood. After graduating from Leningrad State University, he worked for Leningrad publishing houses and magazines before moving to the United States in 1981. His works are part of the collections of the State Russian Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress, among many others. He has been awarded numerous grants and awards, including the silver medal at the 1971 Berlin International Photo Exhibition.
This exhibit is part of the Fragments from the Past series, an ongoing collaboration between the Russian American Cultural Center and the Harriman Institute which aims to create a mosaic of historical events related to the Russian artistic and cultural landscape both in the Soviet Union and the West.
Exhibit Opening: Tuesday, January 31st, 6:00pm - 8:00pm
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The Holocaust as Culture: A Conversation with Imre Kertész
Monday, 23 January 2012, 7:00pm
Heyman Center for the Humanities - Common Room, Level 2
Thomas Cooper in discussion with Ivan Sanders on his recent translation The Holocaust as Culture: A Conversation with Imre Kertész (Seagull Books, Dec 2011.) Moderated by Gergely Romsics of the Hungarian Cultural Center and with an introduction by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical.
In The Holocaust as Culture, Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self.
The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University and the Hungarian Cultural Center.
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The End of Certainty or Quo Vadis Democracy? The Case of Europe and Hungary
Wednesday, 25 January 2012, 12:00pm–1:30pm
Room 1219, International Affairs Building
Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a talk by Ferenc Miszlivetz, Deak Visiting Professor at Columbia for the spring 2012 semester.
Professor Miszlivetz is a sociologist, academic advisor and doctor of international studies. He is currently the leader of the Value & Culture Workshop in the Political Science Institute at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is professor at the University of Western Hungary where he is also a faculty member and director of the Institute for Social and European Studies. He will be introduced by Professor István Deák.
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Protests, Elections and the Prospects for Political Change in Russia
Thursday, 26 January 2012, 12:15pm–1:45pm
Room 1512 IAB
Please join the Harriman Institute for a panel discussion with
Timothy M. Frye, Harriman Institute Director and Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy,
Lincoln Mitchell, Harriman Institute Associate Research Scholar, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs,
Stephen Sestanovich, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor for the Practice of International Diplomacy.
Moderator: Elise Giuliano, Political Science Department, Barnard College.
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Exhibit Opening: Behind the Porous Curtain
Tuesday, 31 January 2012, 6:00pm–8:00pm
Harriman Atrium, 12th Floor IAB, 420 West 118th Street, New York, NY
Behind the Porous Curtain, curated by Regina Khidekel, showcases 20 works by Anatoly Pronin. These works capture the Soviet period of artistic inspiration of the 1970s, as the post-Stalin thaw opened a pathway through the iron curtain for modern Western art and culture to enter the Soviet Union. Most of Pronin’s photographs were shot behind the theater curtain, capturing the private and almost intimate world of rehearsals with iconic figures such as George Balanchine, Laurent Terzieff, and Marcel Marceau.
The theater tours displayed in this exhibit ended the isolation of the Soviet art scene, reviving names erased from history and introducing new ideas and methods. One of the central subjects of this collection is Leonid Jakobson, a non-conformist choreographer who created masterpieces despite strict state control, transforming classical ballet technique into modern dance lexicon.
Anatoly Pronin has pursued photography since childhood. After graduating from Leningrad State University, he worked for Leningrad publishing houses and magazines before moving to the United States in 1981. His works are part of the collections of the State Russian Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress, among many others. He has been awarded numerous grants and awards, including the silver medal at the 1971 Berlin International Photo Exhibition.
This exhibit is part of the Fragments from the Past series, an ongoing collaboration between the Russian American Cultural Center and the Harriman Institute which aims to create a mosaic of historical events related to the Russian artistic and cultural landscape both in the Soviet Union and the West.
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