Nicoletta Rousseva
Resident Graduate Scholar
Department of Art History
About
Bad Comrades: Art and Answerability After Socialism
When Europe’s socialist regimes collapsed in the early 1990s, socialism’s memories, lived experiences, and artistic traditions did not vanish along with the walls, nation states, and political parties that once defined the region. My dissertation examines these afterlives of socialism in southeastern Europe. Across three chapters, I consider why and to what ends contemporary artists in former Yugoslavia and Albania continue to affirm state socialism’s art forms, attitudes, and institutional structures after its political model failed. Moving against “end of history” narratives that cast 1989 as the decisive victory of liberal capitalism, this project studies the artistic sensibilities, critical perspectives, and political desires that come into view when contemporary East European art is cast not as antithetical to but in continuity with its vexed socialist past.