Research Interests
Modern art, Historical Avant-Garde, History of Photography, and the representation of animals in Soviet art and visual culture.
Ivan’s dissertation, “State Farms in Construction: Photography and the Making of the Soviet Agricultural Landscape,” focuses on the pictorial genre of agricultural landscape as constructed by photographers in the Soviet Union during collectivization in the 1930s. His project examines photographic representations of agricultural labor in Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia, with particular focus on the illustrated magazine State Farms and Machine Tractor Stations in Construction (Na Stroike MTS i Sovkhozov) (1934-37). Reading these landscapes—often against the grain—his dissertation asks how they generated novel representational devices that made visible the progressive politics of socialist modernization in rural areas, yet were also complicit in obscuring famine, environmental degradation, poverty, and economic dependency.
Ivan earned his BA from a joint program of Smolny College (Saint Petersburg, Russia) and Bard College (New York). He also worked at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where he co-curated exhibitions of surrealist artists’ books.