Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on April 18, 2025 in order to attend this event.

Please join the Harriman Institute for a book launch of “Collective Body” by Christina Kiaer. Moderated by Noam Elcott.

Join us for a discussion to mark the launch of Christina Kiaer’s book “Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism” (University of Chicago Press, 2024), which offers a new account of Socialist Realism not as a totalitarian style but as a fiercely collective art system.

Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, “Collective Body” presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s corporeal version of Socialist Realism as an alternate experimental aesthetic that activates affective forces for collective ends.

“Collective Body” traces Deineka’s path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Terror and beyond. Deineka figures in this study not as a singular master, in the spirit of a traditional monograph, but as a limit case of the system he inhabited and helped to create.