What does it mean to ‘monumentalise’ today? What can we do with the complex legacies of imperial histories imprinted in cities’ architecture, squares, cultural institutions and museums? What are we to do with the collections of looted artefacts and dispossessed cultural heritage in the Global North?
In the context of Mykola Ridnyi’s solo exhibition The Battle over Mazepa, a leading critic of the persistent (neo)colonial practices and the author of The Brutish Museums (Pluto Press, 2020), Dan Hicks, will address the imperialist roots of archaeology, museology and collecting in the nineteenth century through the prism of what he calls “World War Zero” – the Crimean War (1853–1856). From Russian imperial army helmets and guns as “trophies” in the collection of the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum to the questions of the fate of the monuments at large, Hicks, in conversation with our curator Denis Maksimov, will give us a sneak peek into his upcoming book All Monuments Must Fall (Penguin, 2024), which he will present at Pushkin House in December 2024.
ABOUT THE Speaker
Dr Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA, is a Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, a Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan has published eight authored and edited books and has written articles, essays and op-eds for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers for a wide range of audiences: from the Times Literary Supplement to The Art Newspaper, Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Artnet, Architectural Review, Frieze Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Independent. Dan has regularly appeared on live radio and TV news and in documentaries, including the BBC News at Ten, Channel 4 News, Sky News, LBC, Times Radio and BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, The World Tonight, Front Row, Today Programme and Making History.