CEED (Central & East European Diasporas) Feminisms

The CEED (Central European and East European Diasporas) Feminisms programme took place from May 2023 - March 2024, at Cell Project Space as well as online. Comprising three meetings at Cell Project Space, London, two online meetings, and one online film screening, it was a collaboration with Sabrina Fuller and Helena Reckitt of the Feminist Duration Reading Group and Jessie Krish in collaboration with Adomas Narkevičius at Cell Project Space. The CEED Feminisms: Art Practices and British Central Eastern European Diaspora Research Group was funded by the British Art Network.

This public research group and events programme explored the role of feminist thinking in constructing cultural narratives about Central Eastern Europe and British Central Eastern European diaspora. It responded to cultural blind spots around prejudice and xenophobia in the UK towards the 'Eastern European' immigrant, sharpened by Russia’s war in Ukraine, and by Brexit. The programme aimed to hold space for mutual support, curiosity and learning, thus opposing the UK's hostile environment.

Programme:

1. CEED Feminisms: Art Practices and British Central Eastern European Diaspora Research Group
May 4 2023, Cell Project Space
Public Research Meeting
This first meeting launched this public research group devoted to feminism and art practices from the British Central Eastern European diaspora. The meeting established initial ideas for a reading groups, curated events, and a bibliography exploring intersectional feminisms past and present from the region. Creating spaces of mutual support, curiosity and learning that oppose the UK's hostile environment, the research group responds to cultural blind spots around prejudice and xenophobia in the UK towards the 'Eastern European' immigrant, sharpened by Russia’s war in Ukraine, and by Brexit.
Activities departed from the following questions:
• How can contemporary and historical Central Eastern European feminisms reorient contemporary British cultural discourses about CEE, including the figure of the CEE 'migrant' in Britain?
• What is the role of English language translation as a tool for the dissemination of contemporary and historical feminist thought between Central Eastern Europe and Britain, and feminist solidarity? How does this reproduce problematic power dynamics between ‘East’ and ‘West’?
• How are artists changing narratives about the Central Eastern European diaspora in Britain and embracing intersectional CEE identities?

2. Decentering Western Feminisms
September 21 2023, Cell Project Space
Reading Group and Discussion
The meeting considered the specificities of Central Eastern European feminisms inflected by postsocialism, continuities in postsocialist and postcolonial feminisms and routes to decentring Western Feminisms. Extracts from Ewa Majewska's Feminist Antifascism (2021), focus the case of postsocialist neoliberal Poland, a ‘semi-peripheral state’ through the lens of the legacy of Polish 1980s trade union-led social movement Solidarność, weak resistance, and public protest, to situate feminism as a political antithesis to fascism. In counterpoint, Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, and Redi Koobak's ‘Border thinking and disidentification,’(2016) advocates for transversal dialogues and ‘volatile but effective coalitions between postsocialist and postcolonial feminists,’, proposing tools for a feminist practice that escapes the terms of feminism's 'Western' hegemonic centre.

Together we read out loud from:
- Ewa Majewska (2021), 'Introduction: Why Should We Reclaim the Public?,' Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common, Verso
- Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, and Redi Koobak (2016), 'Border thinking and disidentification: Postcolonial and postsocialist feminist dialogues,'
Feminist Theory, 17(2), pp. 7-14

3. Transnational Feminist Solidarity in War
October 4 2023, Online
Out Loud Reading and Discussion
Ukrainian scholars and activists Irina Zherebkina, Sergey Zherebkin and Victoria Larchenko, members of the editorial team of the 2022 journal Gender Studies No. 26 (Kharkiv Center for Gender Studies), led this online meeting exploring the dynamics and possibilities of transnational feminist solidarity in the face of Russia's war in Ukraine. Bringing together contributions from feminists based internationally, Gender Studies No. 26 was published in dialogue with the conference ‘Transnational Feminist Solidarity with Ukrainian Feminists,’ co-organised on 9 May 2022 by Irina Zherebkina with philosopher and gender studies writer Judith Butler and sociologist Sabine Hark. The issue called for 'transnational feminist analysis of unequal and unjust power relations, neocolonial and neoliberal extraction, militarization, senseless destruction, and displacement.'

Including introductions to texts by Victoria Larchenko and Sergey Zherebkin, the first half of this session will focus on three short texts from Gender Studies No. 26, including Agnieszka Graff's account of fleeting solidarity between Polish and Ukrainian mothers in the first weeks of the war, and Anna Hájková's short essay on new engagement from Western feminists with CEE feminist perspectives with the outbreak of war, which, as the author writes, caused CEE Feminists to start 'trending'. In the second half of the session we will turn to Zherebkina's recent e-flux Notes article ‘Can the Oppressors Speak?’, considering Zherebkina's nuanced perspective on the potential of feminist speech acts – writing, publishing or reading – made in solidarity, during war.

Together we read out loud from:
- Irina Zherebkina, ‘Editorial: Feminism, War, Solidarity’, Gender Studies No. 26, pp. 1-3
- Agnieszka Graff, ‘Solidarity with Ukraine, or: why East-West still Matters to Feminism’, Gender Studies No. 26, pp.1-5
- Anna Hájková, ‘The Crumbs from your table’, Gender Studies No. 26, pp. 1-3
- Irina Zherebkina, ‘Can the Oppressors Speak?’, e-flux notes, 26 May 2023

4. On Gendered Labour, Diasporic Experience, and 'East' to 'West' migration
November 11 2023, Cell Project Space
Artists’ Film Screening and Discussion
This afternoon session focused on artworks by feminists from and in Central and East Europe addressing labour, diasporic experience and 'east' to 'west' European migration: Sanja Iveković, Tanja Ostojić, Darija Radaković and Selma Selman. Presented artworks were Iveković’s film The Invisible Women of Erste Campus (2016), and performances including Selman’s Mercedes Matrix (2020), Ostojić's Mis(s)placed Women? Dedicated to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada (2016) and Radaković's Misplaced Woman (2015). Informed by these artworks, we considered migration as a response to the uneven social and economic impacts of post-socialist transitions to neoliberalism in Central Eastern Europe, or to conflict in the region. Reflecting on embodied experiences of labour and the circulation of goods and value, we explored forms of solidarity with all displaced womxn as a response to attempts, particularly in Western Europe and North America, to control and weaponise gendered and racialised migrant and indigenous bodies.

Moderator Lina Džuverović is a curator & Course Leader for the MA Curating and Collections at Chelsea College of Art and a member of the FDRG Support Group. With connections to the former Yugoslavia, Džuverović's research focuses on feminist art histories and contemporary art as a site of solidarity and community-building.

5. Sanja Iveković: The Invisible Women of Erste Campus
January 5 2024, online
Artist’s Film Screening
An online presentation of Sanja Iveković's rarely screened film 'The Invisible Women of Erste Campus' (2016). Framed through the repetitive gestures of a day’s work, Iveković's filmic portrait of the staff who clean Erste Group bank's Vienna headquarters tracks the anonymous cleaners against the expansive architecture of the Erste Campus. The relentless activity of cleaning breaks intermittently when the women read lines of poetry written for the film by Croatian writer Aida Bagić, in their mother tongues. Unravelling connections to Central Eastern and Southern Europe, where the Erste Group provide financial services, the artist probes the conditions of the cleaning women's invisibility, giving rise to alternative representations.

6. SKAM, or the Albanian Lesson
March 20 2024, online
Reading Group
Radical Sense, a reading group based in Tirana, led this session, focused on a micro-reader on translating SCUM Manifesto, radical feminist Valerie Solanas’s 1967 polemical argument for the wholesale extermination of men. Together we collectively read Doruntina Vinca’s oral essay ‘SKAM, or the Albanian Lesson,’ 2021, followed by a discussion about the power of Solanas’s writing, the resonance of her life, and the complexities of translating SCUM Manifesto into Albanian. Radical Sense is a weekly radical feminist reading group based in Tirana, Albania. Founded in 2018 by Silvi Naçi, Doruntina Vinca, and Leah Whitman-Salkin, Radical Sense is a space for reading, listening, and thinking together.

Biographies
Lina Džuverović is a curator & Course Leader for the MA Curating and Collections at Chelsea College of Art and a member of the Feminist Duration Reading Group’s Support Group. With connections to the former Yugoslavia, Džuverović's research focuses on feminist art histories and contemporary art as a site of solidarity and community-building.

Sanja Iveković is a photographer, performer, sculptor and installation artist. Known as one of the first artists in Yugoslavia to actively engage with gender difference, tackling the commodification of women’s roles with the onset of consumerism in the country, themes including representation of women and their status in society continue to be central in her work. Iveković has received numerous prizes and awards at film and video festivals, including Locarno and Montreal. She has participated in several biennials including documenta 8, 11, and 13 in Kassel and Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg, as well as in exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Taxispalais, Innsbruck; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna; Fundació Antoni Tapiès, Barcelona, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Radical Sense is a weekly radical feminist reading group based in Tirana, Albania. Founded in 2018 by Silvi Naçi, Doruntina Vinca, and Leah Whitman-Salkin, Radical Sense is a space for reading, listening, and thinking together.

Irina Zherebkina is Professor of the Philosophy Centre of Humanitarian Education, Branch in Kharkiv, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Ukraine) and Director of the Kharkiv Centre for Gender Studies (since 1994); Editor-in-Chief of the Gender Studies Journal (since 1998), and, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics. Zherebkina's many books include Passion. Women’s Sexuality in Russia in the Era of Modernism (St. Petersburg: Alethea, 2001, 2018); Judith Butler’s War and Peace (with Sergei Zherebkin) (St. Petersburg: Alethea, 2019), and Stalinist Antigone and Feminist Intervention in Stalinism (St. Petersburg: Alethea, 2019). Since the beginning of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Zherebkina has positioned herself as a strong critic of Putin's militaristic politics in her numerous journalist publications and interviews including: 'Can the Oppressors Speak?,' e-flux Notes, 2023; 'A Ukrainian Philosopher’s Reluctant Departure from Kharkiv by Masha Gessen,' The New Yorker (2023), and 'Dispatch from Kharkiv National University,' Boston Review, 2022. Together with Judith Butler and Sabine Hark she was the organiser of the international conference 'Transnational Feminist Solidarity with Ukrainian Feminists,' on 9th May 2022.

Sergey Zherebkin is Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Humanities Education, Kharkiv Branch, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. His books include Unstable Ontologies in Contemporary Philosophy (St. Petersburg: Aletheia, 2014); World and Peace by Judith Butler (with Irina Zherebkina) (St. Petersburg: Aletheia, 2018); Cyborg-Nationalism, or Ukrainian Nationalism in the Era of Post-Nationalism (with Irina Zherebkina) (St. Petersburg: Aletheia, 2019); Contemporary Western Philosophy Introduction (with Irina Zherebkina) (St.Petersburg: Aletheia, 2022). Zherebkin is currently affiliated at the London School of Economics and Political Science as a Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department of Sociology.