The symposium Russian Avant-garde Revisited revisits the cultural history of Russia and other Eastern European countries in the twentieth century, histories that still remain virtually unknown or misrepresented in the West due to a lack in the flow of information on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
The Russian Avant-garde is relatively well known in the West. Therefore, the discussion does not focusing on the history of the Russian Avant-garde as such, but rather on the influence that the Utopian projects of the Russian Avant-garde exert on contemporary culture. There is no doubt that contemporary art practices like participation art, installation art, and socially-engaged artistic projects are creating new audiences that are deeply influenced by the Russian Avant-garde. Today however, it is considered even more important to understand that the Russian Avant-garde tried to expand the notion of art and its inclusion in everyday life, something that is not traditionally believed to be part of the sphere of art. The attempt to democratize the notions of art and artistic practices can be understood as a precursor and future model for many similar artistic and theoretical investigations on the level of the quotidian.