Suslau, Dzmitry;
(2022)
Between Public Art and the Monument: National Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kaliningrad, Minsk, and Vilnius.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Abstract
One striking similarity in the development of Kaliningrad, Vilnius, and Minsk, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, was the significant increase in the number of monuments across the three cities. Celebrating past military triumphs, legendary forefathers or martyrs to the cause of independence, they provided visual articulations of national pasts narrated anew, offering those narratives seeming fixity. Furthermore, all three cities saw an increase in public art commissioning. Adopting a cross-border approach, this thesis examines the processes of national identity and cultural memory articulation in twenty-first-century Kaliningrad, Vilnius, and Minsk. Analysing such mnemonic markers as public art and monumental commissions, it examines the images that states aim to project of themselves in each of these three cities. At the same time, by looking at specific realms where the struggle over memory occurs, it acknowledges the role of various actors in negotiating the production of commemorative forms in urban settings and questions the possibility of uniform national remembering. Spanning a roughly thirty-year period, from the late 1980s to 2020, this multi-city study of national identity reconfiguration draws attention to the blurred edges of cultural memory, suggesting that distinctive national narratives are often formed from shared mnemonic material. Furthermore, the in-depth study of these processes within the given period highlights the continual mutability of national memory. The concluding section of this work offers a reflection on the role of the monument in the twenty-first century.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Between Public Art and the Monument: National Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kaliningrad, Minsk, and Vilnius |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2021. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > SSEES UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10147160 |
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