Visual culture makes up a significant part of a particular national culture or civilisation and encodes the main values and attitudes of the people and state. For understanding Russia with her dramatic history this is particularly significant. The course aims at providing the students with knowledge of the Russian visual arts and contemporary visual environment with its semiotics and encoded social values.

Content of the course

Starting from the Russian icon and the 19th century painting, the course concentrates on Russian avant-garde art, the Soviet poster and Soviet/Russian art-photography with special attention to the following topics:

• The Russian avant-garde: in literature and in visual arts;
• The history of the Soviet poster;
• Photography and propaganda;
• Gender in Russian painting poster and photography;
• Censorship in visual arts under Stalin;
• Famous Russian war photographs and photographers;
• Socialist realism in the visual arts (1950s-1980s);
• The re-emergence of fine-art photography in the 1970s;
• Outstanding contemporary Russian photographers.

The final part of the course deals with the Post-modernist ?visual quotation' and visual pop-culture in modern Russia (?what people see').

Kurssi toteutetaan yhteistyössä valtakunnallisen Venäjän ja Itä-Euroopan tutkimuksen maisterikoulun kanssa.

Enrolment via NettiOpsu http://www.uta.fi/nettiopsu/