Dr. Alexandra Selivanova

CV, research and publications

Dr. Alexandra Selivanova is a curator and art historian specialising in the history and theory of the early Soviet culture. Since January 2023 she is a research fellow (PostDoc) at Bauhaus University Weimar and affiliated researcher of the project. 

She studied architecture and art in Moscow, and wrote her dissertation at the Research Institute for Theory and History of Architecture and Urban Planning in Moscow (2010); it was published as a book “Post-constructivism. Power and Architecture in the 1930s in USSR” (2019). Since 2000, she has curated a series of interdisciplinary exhibitions in museums and galleries in Moscow (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Jewish Museum and Centre for Tolerance, Museum of Moscow), Perm (Perm Museum of Modern Art PERMM) and Yekaterinburg (Yeltsin Centre) exploring the intersections of science, technology, art and literature in the 1920s and 1930s. The exhibitions addressed such topics as Soviet art and aviation, psychotechnics, crystallography, electrification, organisation of labour processes, as well as the international art context (surrealism, Art Deco, neoclassicism, functionalism). In 2014 she founded and headed the Avant-garde Centre in Moscow, conducting research, seminars and exhibitions on the phenomenon of the Soviet avant-garde and constructivism. 

She is an author and compiler of the books “Avant-garde and Aviation” (2014), “VHUTEMAS. School of the Avant-garde” (2020), “Electrification” (2021), a series of 3 books on the new architectural typology and social processes of the 1920s in the USSR, “The Unnoticed Avant-garde”.