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	sex and socialist realism
university of hertfordshire faculty research tVAD home	Sex and Socialist Realism is an individual research project, led by Dr Pat Simpson and located within the tVAD trans-disciplinary research group of the Social Sciences Humanities and Arts Research Institute at UH. Aspects of the project have been funded by the AHRC and British Council Visiting Arts. An application for future funding is currently under consideration by the Wellcome Trust. The project investigates the mutable construct of the Stalinist New Soviet Woman, an ideal of the national body projected at the populace through art, visual culture, and textual rhetoric. The relationship between this and early Soviet eugenics discourse is a central theme. While the overarching project is art historical and theoretical, it also contains subsidiary curatorial projects and collaborations. The current sub-project is for an exhibition of contemporary Hungarian art at UH Galleries, entitled Shifting the Foundations: Contemporary Art and the Manipulation of Genes. The exhibition is scheduled for September-October 2008 and includes collaboration with Dr David Naseby (Faculty of Life Sciences, UH) and Dr Andras Szekacs (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Plant Institute). This project is important for two main reasons. Firstly, Soviet Socialist Realism is now not only a commodity on the western art market, but, is also subject to western curatorial culture, for example, the creation of private collections of Socialist Realist art since the late 1980s in the USA, the exhibitions at MOMA Oxford and Kassel in the early 1990s, and the establishment of TMORA, Minnesota in 2002. Socialist Realism has thus become a legitimate province of western scholarly attention in its own right. It is, moreover, a major historical influence upon post-Soviet attitudes to art and gender. Thus a greater understanding of the gender politics embedded in official Soviet visual culture is crucial to the formation of a viable contemporary critical discourse. Simpson’s research in this field is internationally recognised and has led to a variety of invitations: as visiting lecturer at Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota; peer reviewer for Russian Review and Sculpture Journal; professional consultancy for New York art appraisers; informal collaboration with the Courtauld Institute MA on post-Soviet art practices; and invited international conference papers. Most recently she has been invited to be ‘partner investigator’ in an international exhibition project, Art, Eugenics and Bio-genetics, proposed for prestigious venues in Australia and the UK 2010-2012, for which a funding application is currently being considered by the Australian Research Council.