About the lecture

In her lecture, Olga Bubich reflects on the rise of "memory wars" – in her home country Belarus, in Russia and, more broadly, across the world. This lecture begins by looking at the foundations of this phenomenon: why authoritarian and populist regimes are increasingly interested in how we remember, and how our perceptions of both past and present are formed. Drawing on insights from psychology and media theory, she briefly outlines how memory functions as an unstable, constantly reconstructed process, vulnerable to external influence. She also touches upon how technological acceleration, attention economy, and the outsourcing of memory to digital devices reshape our capacity to remember, forget, and critically engage with reality.

Building on this, Bubich also gives concrete examples, focusing, in particular, on the use of nostalgia as a political and propagandistic tool in contemporary Russia. Through slogans, education, culture and art production, the past is selectively reconstructed and mobilized to produce simplified, emotionally charged narratives that resonate and reinforce collective anxieties.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.

About the speaker

Olga Bubich is a former ICORN Fellow, an essayist, journalist, and visual artist from Minsk (Belarus), living in exile in Berlin. Both in her essays and in her photography-based projects, she reflects on collective memory and collective forgetting of traumatic pasts. Currently, Bubich resides as a flat guest of PEN-Vlaanderen in Antwerp.

Organized by the Faculty of Arts (UAntwerpen), ARIA (UAntwerpen) and Forum for Central and Eastern Europe (KULeuven)

Practical information

Monday 11 May 2026

6.00 pm – 8.00 pm

UAntwerp City Campus, Building R, Room R.007, Rodestraat 14, 2000 Antwerp (City Campus map)

Language: English

Attendance is free; you can register via the button below