Red Love: a reader on Alexandra Kollontai

Conversation with editors Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, and Joanna Warsza following a postponed book launch at e-flux for Red Love: a reader on Alexandra Kollontai, presented by CuratorLab at Konstfack University, Tensta konsthall, Cabinet and Sternberg Press.

The reader is accessible in open access on Konstfack’s website.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator based in Berlin and Stockholm. Her other book Seven Years: The Rematerialization of Art from 2011 to 2017 was published by Sternberg Press in 2019. She is a guest lecturer of CuratorLab.

Michele Masucci is an artist, researcher, and educator based in Stockholm. 

Joanna Warsza is a Program Director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts in Stockholm and an independent curator based in Berlin.

Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra KollontaiAlexandra Kollontai was a Bolshevik revolutionary, and after the 1917 October revolution the people’s commissar of social and one of the first female ambassadors in the world. She worked to introduce crucial reforms for women’s liberation: such as abortion rights, secularized marriage, and for paid maternity leave; and considered “comradely love” to be a political force. Red Love is the reader devoted to her legacy stemming from research by CuratorLab at Konstfack University in Stockholm and Tensta konsthall, accompanying Dora García’s exhibition back in 2018. The conversation presents this historical figure, her involvement in politics and some of her writings and asks how to read Kollontai’s vision of love today and relate it to current feminist struggles?

Edited by Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, Joanna Warsza with CuratorLab 2017/18 participants: Aly Grimes, Malin Hüber, Nicholas John Jones, Martyna Nowicka-Wojnowska, Alessandra Prandin, Dimitrina Sevova, Sophia Tabatadze, Federico Del Vecchio, and Hannah Zafiropoulos

Contributions by Bini Adamczak, Sara Ahmed, Giulia Andreani, Lise Haller Baggesen, Petra Bauer & Rebecka Thor, Dora García, Michael Hardt, Pontus Pettersson, Jonathan Brooks Platt, Agneta Pleijel, Nina Power, Paul B. Preciado, Alla Mitrofanova, Martyna Nowicka-Wojnowska, Michele Masucci, Maria Lind, Aaron Schuster, Oxana Timofeeva, Mohammad Salemy, Sally Schonfeldt, Sophia Tabatadze, Tomas Rafa, Alicja Rogalska, Joanna Warsza, and Hannah Zafiropoulos

Design by Jiri Novak