Dr Maria Chehonadskih

Profile

I am the Director of Liberal Arts and Programme Lead for the BA Liberal Arts. I teach on the interwar avant-garde movements, Soviet visual and literary cultures, and digital media. I received a PhD in Philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University in 2017. Before joining Queen Mary, I was a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford in 2019-2021 and an Associate Lecturer at Central St. Martins, University of the Arts.

Teaching

Semester A

SML5209 Life Under Construction: Artistic Responses to War and Revolution

LIB5202 Thinking, Writing and Research Across Disciplines

STA7010 Theories and Critical Concepts of Digital Media and Cultures

Semester B

STA7003 Technological Aesthetics: Art, Power, and Cold War Divides

SML4006 Culture and Language

STA7008 Digital Methods and Ethics in Digital Media and Cultures

Research

Research Interests:

• the dialogue of arts and sciences in modern Europe
• interwar avant-gardes
• Soviet visual and literary culture
• (post)-Socialism, Cold War and the geopolitics of knowledge.
• media theory and critical AI studies
• continental philosophy and aesthetic theory

Recent and On-Going Research

My monograph ‘Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge After the October Revolution’ unsettles established narratives about the formation of a revolutionary canon after the October Revolution. Displacing the centre of gravity from dialectical materialism to the rapid dissemination, canonisation and decline of a striking convergence of empiricism and Marxism, the book explores how this tendency, overshadowed by Cold War historiography, establishes a new attitude to modernity and progress, nature and environment, agency and subjectivity, party and class, knowledge and power. The book traces the adventure of the synthesis of empiricism and Marxism from the 1890s to the 1930s, offering a radical rethinking of the true scope and scale that its main proponent, Alexander Bogdanov, had on the post-revolutionary avant-garde. The book draws on both key and forgotten figures and movements, such as Proletkult, Productivism, Constructivism and Factography.

My current project is on the interwar debates in art, science and aesthetic theory on the automation of human cognitive abilities and the rationalisation of artistic production. The project reconstructs discussions on symbol and form, artistic perspective and iconography, the politics of image projection and the automation of meaning. My current work-in-progress maps the transnational geographies (Hungary-USSR-Austria-Britain) and milieux surrounding a Hungarian artist Béla Uitz’s ‘Ludditenbewegung’ etchings (1923) based on the play ‘Die Maschinenstürmer’ by Ernst Toller (1922).  

Publications

Book

‘Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge After the October Revolution’ (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2023)

Articles and Book Chapters

‘The Naked Truth of Fact: Andrei Platonov on the Margins of Factography’, Stalin Era Intellectuals: Culture and Stalinism, ed. by Vesa Oittinen and Elina Viljanen (Routledge, 2023), pp. 74-89

‘Reformulation of Knowledge: Epistemological Reading of Soviet Marxism in the post-Soviet Times’, Studies in East European Thought 74 (2022), 75–91. Available at: <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11212-021-09412-7>

‘Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Books 1–3, by Alexander Bogdanov’ (Book Review), Rethinking Marxism 34, 1 (2022), 116-124

‘What is Pussy Riot’s “Idea”’?, ed. by Kélina Gotman, Theories of Performance: Critical and Primary Sources, Vol. 4: Body Politics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), pp. 138-145 [originally published in Radical Philosophy, 176 (2012), pp. 2-7]

What and Whom Are We Working For? (a conversation between Maria Chehonadskih and Kaushik Sunder Rajan), The New Alphabet, ed. by Katrin Klingan, Joanna Schindler and Nick Houde (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2021), pp. 64-72

‘Die Stofflichkeit des Universums: Alexander Bogdanow und die sowjetische Avantgarde’, trans. by Philipp Albers, Kosmismus, ed. by Boris Groys and Anton Vidokle (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018), pp. 116-133.

‘The Stofflichkeit of the Universe: Alexander Bogdanov and the Soviet Avant-garde’, e-flux Journal # 88 (February 2018) [e-journal]. Available at: <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/88/174279/the-stofflichkeit-of-the-universe-alexander-bogdanov-and-the-soviet-avant-garde/>  

‘Ambiguous Constellations: Race, Nation and Class in the Post-Soviet Era’, Balibar/Wallerstein’s “Race, Nation, Class”. Rereading A Dialogue for Our Times, ed. by Manuela Bojadžijev and Katrin Klingan (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, KHW, 2018), pp. 45-67. ‘The Form of Art as Mediation: A History and Storytelling Before and After Moscow Conceptualism’, Cosmic Shift: Russian Contemporary Art Writing, ed. by Elena Zaytseva, Alex Anikina (London: Zed Books, 2017), pp. 191-208.

‘The Communist Individuation in Lev Vygotsky’, Stasis 2 (2017), pp. 110-135.

‘The Comrades of the Past: The Soviet Enlightenment Between Negation and Affirmation’, Crisis and Critique, Volume 4, Issue 2 (2017), pp. 86-105.

‘Cultural and Cold Wars: Notes on Multipolar World and Diplomacy’, WdW Review: Arts, Culture, and Journalism in Revolt, ed. by Define Ayas and Adam Kleinman (Witte De With Publishers, 2016), pp. 302-306

‘The Class Composition of Russia’s Anti-Putin Movement’, South Atlantic Quarterly 113, 1 (2014), pp. 196-209

Edited Journal Special Issue

Maria Chehonadskih, Keti Chukhrov, Alexei Penzin, eds. Stasis: Antiquity and Modernity of Soviet Marxism 2 (2017), 288pp. ISSN (Print) 2310-3817

Art Catalogues and Essays (Selected)

‘The Global Distribution of the Ethical’ (with Andrés Saenz de Sicilia), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, CC: World (July 2020) [blog], Available at: <https://ccworld.hkw.de/the-global-distribution-of-the-ethical/ >

‘The Awkward Object of the Postponed Futures’, exhibition catalogue. Postponed Futures, curator Nikita Kadan (London: GRAD Publishing, 2017), pp. 36-41.   

‘Jumping Ahead: Dialectical Thinking, Strategy and Production of Art’ (a dialogue with Anatoly Osmolovsky), exhibition catalogue Parallel Convergences, (Venice: Marsilio, 2014), pp. 25-33