About

My research focuses on modernism in Eastern Europe. I explore how cultures of censorship and surveillance impacted artistic production, with a particular interest in the Soviet Empire and its peripheral regions.

I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2020, after which I held several fellowships, including that of Leonard A. Lauder Postdoctoral Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art, and Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center, Harvard University. I joined the department in 2024.

I am currently completing my first book, The Black Square and the Blue Pencil: Censorship and the Stimulation of Modernist Style. Focusing on avant-garde networks spanning Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan, the book explores the hidden history of artists’ often surprisingly productive interactions with censorship. By extending the tools and approaches of new materialism to encompass censorship studies, I call attention to often-sidelined sources: newspapers with missing columns, books with fragmented paragraphs, blacked-out illustrations. Collecting and cataloguing the first visual history of these visibly redacted materials enables me to chart how the cuts and strikes of censorship informed ruptured and fragmented avant-garde aesthetics. Ultimately, the book rethinks the origins of abstraction by challenging outdated resistance narratives in favour of a complex dialogue of semantic exchange.

My second book project, Coding Modernity: The Cryptographic Imagination and the Interwar Avant-Garde, is a cultural history of spying, secret policing, and the intersection of art and surveillance technologies. I explore time-specific sociologies of seeing, arguing that interwar Europe's increasingly paranoid perceptual registers impacted the production and reception of visual culture and study how the language of code catalysed modernist production by inculcating alternate modes of literacy in the first half of the twentieth century.

Assistant Professor

Contact:

Tel: +44 (0)24 76 23622
Email: kamila.kocialkowska@warwick.ac.uk

FAB 5.70
Faculty of Arts Building
6 University Road
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7EQ

Selected Publications

Malewicz’s Mimetic Resistance: Censorship as Spur to Suprematism’,Modernism/modernity 30, no. 3 (2023), 563-590.

‘Stalin’s Collectivisation as Zombie Apocalypse: Images of the Undead in 1930s Russia’,Oxford Art Journal 45, no. 1 (March 2022), 127-146.

‘Kruchenykh’s Explosive Texts: Elemental Anarchy in the Gelatine Press and the Gelatine Bomb’, in Soviet Materialities, edited by Mollie Arbuthnot, Christiana Bonin, Gabrielle Ferrari (Manchester: Manchester University Press), forthcoming.

Qualifications

MA Fine Art (University of Edinburgh)

MA History of Art (Courtauld Institute of Art)

PhD History of Art (University of Cambridge)