Art and Protest in Putin's Russia

Cultural and political imaginaries in Putin’s Russia

“…His words had givenrisetohopesandexpectationsthatanalternativepolicymightbepossible, and society woke up from its state of political lethargy and demanded democraticchange.Buthiswordsandtheeventsthatfollowedalsotriggered theConservatives. Acounter-culturedevelopedfromwithinthesubculturesofthearts (Jonson 2015a). Social-politicalgrassrootsmovementsstartedappearing,suchastheone against the building of a motorway through the Khimki natural park in the outskirtsofMoscow.TheKhimkimovementhadthesupportofpeoplefrom theculturalsector.…”

Blogging the Virtual: New Geographies of Domination and Resistance In and Beyond Russia

“…Despite this, vibrant oppositional cultures do exist, though they take ambiguous shapes in order to evade state repression (Fröhlich and Jacobsson 2019). Yet street actions remain challenging and often dangerous, which has caused opposition cultures to thrive in the worlds of art and music (Jonson 2015). There are debates about the distinctions between countercultures, protest, and opposition (Gabowitsch 2017), but here, I define opposition as action taken against the state or in defiance of state narratives, and in this sense, opposition flourishes on the RuNet.…”

The gendered iconography of the Belarus protest

“…The electoral protests changed this landscape as the participants had to create new modes of Belarusian identity that was devoid of the state-sponsored recognizable symbols of Belarusianness (Fabrykant, 2018) and focused on the pre-Lukashenka iconography—such the white-red-white flag. Drawing on Ranciere, Jonson (Jonson, 2015) discusses political protest in art as “aesthetic rupture” in Russia and shows how political protest in Russia engaged with many taboo topics offering many examples of counterculture. In Belarus, however, the artistic expression did not necessarily create a rupture with the existing aesthetics.…”