Iliazd: Displacement and Display

An international conference with: Régis Gayraud, Tatiana Nikolskaïa, Nana Shervashidze, Regina Kühn, Sergey Kudriavtsev, Thomas Kitson, Johanna Drucker

Convened by Thomas Kitson and Valentina Izmirlieva

“Iliazd: Displacement and Display” brings together experts from various fields to shed light on the ways Ilia Zdanevich’s work and legacy have been both constrained and abetted by his life’s trajectory from Tbilisi and Petersburg through Istanbul to a stateless existence in Paris. How did Iliazd’s movement across political, linguistic, and cultural boundaries affect his tendency to manipulate conventions and straddle disciplines? How did Iliazd’s lifelong guiding artistic principle, всёчество (everythingism, toutisme), help him confront experiences of social and geographic displacement and how, in turn, did those experiences alter his notion of всёчество and the art he made? Finally, we hope the day’s discussions will reflect on how the organization of disciplines and institutions, both within and without academia, has affected reception of Zdanevich and other transnational figures who might be termed “disciplinary refugees.” A second conference (in French) will be held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Site François Mitterand on June 7, 2019.

 This conference is part of "Displacement and Display: The Ongoing Revolutions of Ilia Zdanevich," a Global Humanities project led by Valentina Izmirlieva and sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Humanities at Columbia University. "Displacement and Display: The Ongoing Revolutions of Ilia Zdanevich" focuses on the life, work, and reception of the Georgian-born Russian avant-garde propagandist and poet who, under the name Iliazd, spectacularly remade the phenomenon of livre d’artiste in mid-century Paris and engaged the major visual artists of his time. The stateless Zdanevich, keenly attuned to the contingencies of his own existence at society’s margins, has subsequently been a "disciplinary refugee," sitting just outside the frame of any particular discipline’s ideally constituted object. An international workshop to be held at Columbia Global Centers / Paris will provide an opportunity to illuminate disciplinary, political, and institutional factors that influence the way such transnational figures are studied and how they challenge us to deploy new configurations of the institutions and practices that support research in the humanities. This project grows from the PGIF initiative Black Sea Networks and contributes to its research stream on the transit of refugees through the Black Sea and Istanbul after the Russian Civil War.