Maria Engström's talk examines the afterlives of Soviet cultural heritage in contemporary Azerbaijan, focusing on how the visual legacy of Socialist Realism is preserved, negotiated, recycled, and reinterpreted within the country’s museum landscape. Maria will focus on the Tahir Salahov House Museum, dedicated to one of Azerbaijan’s most prominent artists, Tahir Salahov (1928–2021), who played a pivotal role in shaping Soviet petroaesthetics and petro-masculinity. From the late 1950s onward, Salahov’s work constructed and popularized an image of Baku as a city defined by oil and oil production. He is regarded as one of the principal founders of the Severe Style (surovyi stil’) in Soviet painting. Emerging in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the movement became a visual embodiment of the Khrushchev Thaw, characterized by its emphasis on individual experience, the romanticization of the Soviet citizen, and an aesthetic of the industrial sublime. Through an analysis of the House Museum and its modes of displaying Salahov’s artistic and biographical legacy, the talk explores how Soviet visual culture is recontextualized within contemporary Azerbaijani cultural memory. Maria will ask how the museum negotiates the tensions between Soviet heritage, national cultural identity, and the enduring significance of oil as both a material resource and a central element of Azerbaijan’s visual and cultural imagination.
Maria Engström is Professor of Russian and Director of Russian Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her current research focuses on post-Soviet intellectual history, environmental aesthetics, and queer visual culture. She co-edited Soviet Myth in Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2026) and The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (Oxford University Press, 2024). Engström’s recent publications include “Dark Petro-aesthetics: The Crude Ghosts of Soviet Oil” (2026), “Queering Socialist Realism: The Case of Georgy Guryanov” (2023) and “Orientation—North: Geidar Dzhemal’s Metaphysics of Politics” (2023). Her current project ‘Weaponizing Visual Cultures: Anti-Environmentalism and Neo-Extractivism in Contemporary Petrostates. The Cases of Russia and Azerbaijan’ (2026-2028) is supported by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Sweden).
The talk will begin promptly at 3:15 pm (GMT), allowing time for people to arrive from across campus and further afield.