The article reveals the heuristic potential of social and humanitarian knowledge in understanding the complex nature of terrorism. The  given research optics allows to expand traditional frameworks of considering terrorism as a phenomenon caused by political, ideological and economic factors; to reveal and substantiate deep cultural and mental reasons of the given phenomenon; make sense of terrorism as a destructive form of cultural identity. The cultural and historical origins of modern terrorism, which is closely connected with radical Islam, are analyzed in the civilizational system of coordinates “West–East”. The system ofтargumentation is based on scientific concepts and current artistic practices that interpret the causes of inter-civilizational tension resulting in international terrorism. The change of the status of the artist in the “epoch of terrorism” is analyzed; the theme of theatricalization and aestheticization of terrorist actions and the role of media in these processes are problematized. As a newest trend, which has not received any serious theoretical reflection, the text considers the phenomenon conditionally designated as “sublimation of terrorist activity into a symbolic sphere”, which is manifested in the destruction of monuments of world cultural heritage, in the orientationтto culture as a new strategic object of terrorist attacks, on the one hand, and theтuse of cultural resources for self-presentation and promotion of their ideology by terrorist organizations, on the other.

The article raises the question of redefining curating in the field of artistic processes and defining it as a sociocultural practice. As a starting point for curatorial activity, we understand curatorial education, which currently exists in Russia in two forms: within the frameworks of schools of contemporary art and in the mode of academic programs. The focus of the research is the schools of contemporary art as new educational institutions that form both curators and artists capable of carrying out, in addition to artistic, curatorial activities. The article examines two conceptual frameworks that make it possible to problematize the basic points associated with the model of curatorial education in the form of schools of contemporary art. The first framework is associated with the theory of critical pedagogy and its development in the works of Henry Giroux, primarily in relation to the issue of the relationship between cultural and educational practices. The second framework is designated by Boris Groys’s concept of the new. It allows problematizing the position of schools of contemporary art in relation to previous educational strategies in the artistic space. In the context of two conceptual frameworks, curatorial education is seen as a form of cultural production.

Based on the analysis of the legislative sources of the Russian Empire in the middle of the 18th century, the article examines important aspects of the formation of legal culture during the reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. This was expressed in the introduction of special state measures aimed at detecting and punishing robbery, plundering the treasury, causing damage to trade and means of communication. During the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, a system of state measures to combat “thieves” and “robbers” took shape, and the responsibility of local authorities for the search and capture of “villains” significantly increased. Since the empress abolished the death penalty, the concept of “political death”, which had been used earlier, acquired special significance in the system of state legislation. New legislative measures were aimed at raising the status of government representatives – detectives, the legitimacy of the investigation procedure, toughening penalties for violation of public order, and saving public funds. However, as the documents show, during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, the state power was never able to achieve significant results in this area, as evidenced by the recurrence of imperial decrees and the ascertaining of new violations in them.

The article highlights the history of the so-called proletarian museums that opened in Moscow’s working-class suburbs in the 1920s. The study of their activities seems relevant, since it opens up the opportunity for a deeper study of the history of art museums in Moscow in the 1920s. Special attention is given to the Fifth Proletarian museum, which was a part of the State Tretyakov Gallery. More archival documents have survived on this museum than on any other of the proletarian museums. After studying some unpublished documents in Russia’s major archives, the author has discovered some important, previously unknown facts about these museums. This article takes a close look at how the paperwork was handled at the museum, how the items were registered, accounted for and taken care of and how the collections were accumulated and organized. Also thoroughly described in the article is the history of the museum’s closure as the author analyzes why it was eventually shut down. Moscow’s proletarian museums went down in history as an original new form of art institutions targeting “uncultured” visitors. Unfortunately, these museums were short-lived as they fell victim to the lack of funding and shortage of trained staff during the New Economic Policy era (1921–1928).

The reliable identification of Sogdians in the art of China of the early Tang dynasty is the big methodological problem. The difficulty of identification is compound by the fact that many of their images were found during the non-official excavations. The cultural assimilation of the Sogdians, which was going quite quickly, also makes it difficult. The cultural assimilation of the Sogdians, which was going quite quickly, also makes it difficult. This problem studied by the author in recent years on the basis of a comprehensive study of the costume of Sogdians and their neighbors, and their recognized social roles. There is a significant difference in the social status of most of the personages depicted in the art of Sogdia and in the Diaspora. Chinese clay burial figures “mingqi”, produced between 660 and 755 yy. CE, are sometimes portraits of Sogdians, depicted with high accuracy in ethnographic details. However, the meaning of placing them in the graves of Chinese officials is not entirely clear. A list of 15 costume elements that were the peculiar signs of Sogdian cultural identity for the Chinese was revealed. Occasionally, among “mingqi” there are such exotic-looking characters as a Sogdian aristocrat-official or a merchant of expensive wine.

In the era of the dominance of visual information, the study of vision models, cultural and historical constructs becomes particularly important, the core of which is an image as a category of cognition, representation, and perception. One of the phenomena of interest for visual research is Atlas, which can be described as a visual archive, as a productive form of organization of knowledge, representing a historical model of vision. For the researcher Atlas raises the problem of an image that performs cognitive functions and forms socio-cultural interactions. In addition, Atlas as a visual construct that can be an actual form of artistic expression. This article is devoted to the study of the Atlas of the outstanding German artist G. Richter (b. 1932). The Atlas is a unique art project that has been created for more than half a century (1962–2013), which is of interest as a space for the representation of a modern picture of the world and the practices of its perception. The Atlas is studied as a complex multilevel visual space, media in nature, heterogeneous in substance, which appeals to individual and collective memory, reflects the subjective image of the world of its creator. The article shows that the G. Richter’s Atlas reveals the dominance mechanisms of visual images, models the practices of representation and perception of reality, thus being itself a visual model of a modern world, penetrated by media streams.

The author explores ways to visualize the everyday life of the Brezhnev period’s soviet childhood in a Eugeniya Dvoskina’s drawings cycle «#forthosewhoremember». Comparing the artist’s work with other modern visual nostalgic projects, the significance of the selected source is justified: this cycle allows us to give an idea of the visual environment of the child, typical kinds of the children’s territory, public and private areas in the collective memory of the generation. Based on the methodology of visual sociology (P. Shtompka, O.V. Gavrishina), the author analyzes the reasons for the cycle’s perception of the older generation as uniquely “Soviet” and raises the question about markers of “Soviet childhood”. The universality and heritability of many children’s practices makes them timeless, so the design of the material world and symbols of Soviet ideology are main signs of the historical era. Compositional and graphic solutions of images play an important role for the viewer’s perception. Knowledge of nature and artistic skill allows the artist to create heroes with accurate behavioral characteristics and evokes, in addition to visual, almost all types of sensory memory (tactile, motor, audio). The use of accompaniment text, often in the form of speech formulas, is crucial for this effect. If we consider this cycle in the logic of S.”Boym’s reasoning about nostalgia, drawings about soviet childhood can be attributed to the procedural type of nostalgia, which is characterized by irony and contradictory attitude to the past. Eugeniya Dvoskina’s work provides a complex multi-faceted visualization of the everyday life of Soviet childhood in the 60–80s of the XX century.

Contemporary art more and more actively interacts with the non-artistic museums. For instance, biological, historical as well as anthropological museums become spaces for contemporary art exhibitions or initiate collaborative projects. This process seeks to link different types of materials to make the interaction successful. Thus, several questions appear: can we talk about interaction, if the museum becomes a place for the exhibition devoted to the topics of history, ethnography or biology? Does any appearance of contemporary art in the museum territory become a part of intercultural dialogue? And how do we assess and analyze the process of interaction between these two spheres? Among nonartistic museums working with contemporary art the museums of conscience appear to be one of the most interesting. This type of museums is quite new – it developed in 1990s when the International Coalition of Sites of Coscience was created and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was founded. The interaction between contemporary art and museums of conscience starts to develop in the context of changing attitudes towards historical memory as well as widening the notion of museums. In this situation museums need new instruments for educational and exhibitional work. Contemporary artists work with the past through personal memories and experience, when museums turn to documents and artifacts. So, their collaboration connects two different optics: artistic and historical. Thus, it is possible to use the Michel Foucault term dispositif to analyze the collaboration between artists and museums. Foucault defines the dispositif as a link between different elements of the system as well as optics that makes us to see and by that create the system. The term allows us to connect the questions of exhibition work with philosophical and historical issues when we analyze the projects in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The YouTube platform hosts a multitude of video clips that contain various media representations of the collective memory of Soviet history. In this array of multimedia products, videos created by ordinary bloggers take their own place. Videos with themes about the recent Past are formed on the basis of digitized fragments of documentary and fiction films, photographs, posters, postcards, drawings, etc. Verbal comments of viewers-users to videos expand and change their semantic content. The purpose of the article is to reveal in the videos of ordinary bloggers various techniques for audiovisual constructing the collective memory of the mass repression of the 1930s and the Gulag. The criteria for selecting sources for the study are: the time they were posted on the YouTube platform (2010s), video bloggers claim to be documentary, the number of comments. The research results demonstrate that bloggers shape clusters of collective memory of the repressions and the Gulag using audiovisual signs and symbols that are easily recognizable by viewers. The same photographs and film fragments can “work” in video differently depending on how they relate to the verbal and audio components of multimodal text. The techniques used by bloggers for audiovisual documentation of the Soviet Past combine pre-digital and digital technologies. The selection of certain audiovisual components as “raw data” for video, their montage, giving historical figures certain roles, organizing time and space in a digital narrative, including different social and political contexts in it, all allow bloggers to form various representations of the collective memory of the Soviet past, depending on their ideological positions.