2022-2023 FELLOW: ANNA KAMYSHAN
Anna Kamyshan is a multidisciplinary curator and artist working in the fields of architecture, urbanism, and socio-cultural studies. She was invited by the Jencks Foundation for a 5-month fellowship at The Cosmic House, due to the war in her home country and her displacement from Ukraine.
Before the war, Anna’s work centered on the topic of ‘live memory’ — such as A Glimpse into the Past, the site of Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, and the idea of non-exploitative relations with nature through the concept of ‘friendship’. Anna has a broad research interest ranging from art and architecture to social theory and philosophy.
At the Jencks Foundation Anna is conducting research on the Portrack Seminars, an informal set of explorative discussions and debates on post-modernism convened by Charles and Maggie Jencks, which took place in Portrack (Scotland), Santa Monica, and London throughout the 1990s. The core group of the organisers of the seminars included Richard Falk, David Ray Griffin, Charlene Spretnak, Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick Jencks. These seminars brought together a core transdisciplinary group of thinkers and focused on a broad range of themes including ‘post-modern culture, science, religion, linguistics and metaphor, politics and economy, governance, ecology and the relation of this paradigm to traditional and indigenous cultures.’
Mapping the relations among these ideas and their development through the seminars, Anna is drawing a diagram continuing the tradition of Charles’ ‘Evolutionary Tree’ images. This visualisation will show the gradual post-modernisation of the world through the lens of the Portrack Seminars, outlining a new Post-Modern Cosmology that brings together sciences, religion and ecology in dialogue. Anna’s research at the Jencks Archive is feeding her parallel project at UCL on Dnipro, Ukraine’s largest river facing deep environmental and political crisis.