Abstract:

Political graffiti always critically reflect the social and political environment in which they are made, especially in dramatic periods. The more difficult the situation is, the more radical these “images of dissent,” as I define them. They function as a kind of litmus test of events in their society.

The aim of this lecture is to examine how the war in Ukraine is presented and constructed in political graffiti and street art, both in Ukraine itself and outside the country. Which motifs are the most frequent ones?

The lecture is based on my three trips to this war-torn country between May 2023 and June 2024 and on around 1,500 photographs of political graffiti and street art related to this war that I took in nine Ukrainian cities and towns. It also draws on hundreds of photographs taken more recently in two other post-Soviet countries (Estonia and Georgia), as well as in various European countries and the United States.

The lecture is based on my book Ukrainian Vignettes: Essays on a Culture at War, published in 2025 by DoppelHouse Press, Los Angeles:
https://doppelhouse.com/ukrainian-vignettes/
(first published in Slovenian and Serbian and currently in translation into Italian and Romanian).

Speaker bios:

Dr. Mitja Velikonja is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His research focuses on contemporary Central European and Balkan political ideologies, subcultures and graffiti, collective memory, and post-socialist nostalgia.

His recent monographs include Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe (Routledge, 2020), translated into Serbian, Albanian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, and Italian, and The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football-Fan Graffiti and Street Art (DoppelHouse Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

His essay collection Ukrainian Vignettes: Essays on the Culture of the Nearby War, based on three research trips to Ukraine in 2023 and 2024, was published in Slovenian, Serbian, and English (DoppelHouse Press, 2025) and is currently being translated into Italian and Romanian. It was nominated for the Slovenian Book of the Year Award 2024.

He has held visiting positions at Jagiellonian University in Kraków (2002–2003), Columbia University (2009, 2014), the University of Rijeka (2015), the New York Institute in St. Petersburg (2015–2016), and Yale University (2020). He was a Fulbright visiting researcher at Rosemont College (2004–2005) and a visiting researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2012) and the Remarque Institute at New York University (2018).

He has received six national and two international awards, including the Erasmus EuroMedia Award from the European Society for Education and Communication (Vienna) for his book Eurosis (2008), and an award from the Odesa Book Fair for the Ukrainian translation of Titostalgia (2024).

He is currently a visiting scholar at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

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