Victoria Lomasko: The Last Soviet Artist

In this lecture, artist Victoria Lomasko will present her most recent book, The Last Soviet Artist. This collection of graphic reportage created during trips across the former Soviet republics chronicles gender rights, grassroots initiatives, and fragments of the Soviet heritage and new trends in Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, and the North Caucasus; the Belarusian Revolution of 2022 and the last major protests in Russia on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; and life in exile. She’ll describe how these various subjects are united by the theme of generational conflict in the post-Soviet space.

Victoria Lomasko’s practice of graphic reportage synthesizes image and text, taking the form of novels, journalism, comics, paintings, and monumental murals. A renowned dissident voice in the highly censored environment of contemporary Russia, Lomasko’s seminal graphic novels, including Other Russias and Forbidden Art, have an honest style exposing the country’s inequalities and injustices while amplifying and defending the plight of Russia’s many voiceless and unseen communities. Travelling across Russia and neighboring countries, often at huge personal risk, she often embraces a magical realist sensibility as a method of processing subjective and visceral experiences.

Lomasko’s most recent novel, The Last Soviet Artist, finished three weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is a timely work anticipating the region’s seismic political changes that won the 2022 Free Voice award from PEN Catalan and Prix Couilles au Cul pour le Courage Artistique, Festival de BD d’Angoulême. In 2024, a movie titled Tree of Violence about the artist was distributed by TV-ARTE.

Event sponsored by the Global Bryn Mawr, the Center for Visual Culture, and the Russian Department.