Silvia BURINI

Silvia Burini is full professor of the SSD ARTE-01/C. She teaches History of Russian Art, History of Contemporary Art, and Contemporary Art Curatorship at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where for over ten years she has directed the Center for Studies in Russian Art (CSAR).

Since 2011 she has been a member of the scientific committee of Cyberfest – the International Cyber Art Festival. She is a member of SHERA, the Society of East European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture, and a member of the Expert Committee for the prize Russky Rim (Russian Rome). Moreover, she was a member of the Expert Committee of Innovation Prize organized by the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA, Moscow). In 2014 she was awarded the high honor “Pushkin” for her contribution to the dissemination of Russian culture and art. Since the same year, she was an honorary member of the Academy of Arts of Russia.

She was the scientific advisor for the Russia/USSR area for the new Encyclopedia of contemporary art published by Treccani. She has recently written (with G. Barbieri) several monographs: for Rizzoli New York about Alexander Ponomarev (2020), Cristina Finucci (2021), and on the artist’s collective AES+F (May 2022), for Skira a volume about Lena Herzog (2024). At the beginning of 2022, a volume she edited and conceived was published: it collects all essays by Yuri Lotman’s Semiotics on the arts (Il Girotondo delle muse. Semiotica delle arti, Milano, Bompiani). She is currently writing an extensive volume on the History of Russian art for the publishing house Einaudi. She was Vice-Rector for Cultural Productions and Relations with the Scientific and Cultural Institutions of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice from 2011 to 2014 and a member, in the same years, of the Board of Directors of the Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation (Venice). From 2017 to 2020 at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, she was responsible for public engagement, communication, and events.

From 2018 to 2024 she was vice-coordinator of the International Ph.D. programme in the History of Arts at Ca' Foscari. She is the supervisor of doctoral theses in art history in Italy, Russia, and Spain and post-doc projects in France. From 2019 to 2023 she co-directed the journal of the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage "Venezia Arti". In 2019 she conceived the Summer School “Contemporary Art and Curatorship: from documenta to the Biennale", in collaboration with the University of Kassel, within the SIE - School of International Education at Ca’ Foscari University. In 2010 she created the “long night” of the city’s cultural institutions Art Night Venezia, of which she has been the scientific director ever since.

In 2002 she won the Sergio Polillo International Art and Literature Prize at Accademia Carrara (Bergamo), and in 2011 she won a special prize from the Konchalovsky Foundation in Moscow for her contribution to the study of figurative arts; in 2018 she received the Russky Rim prize in Rome for the dissemination of Russian art in Italy.

Silvia Burini graduated from the University of Bergamo with a thesis in History of Russian Art, she obtained her Ph.D. in Comparative Slavic Literatures at the University of Milan discussing a thesis on the Armenian-Russian painter Georgy Yakulov. She obtained a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Genoa. She took specialization courses in art history and semiotics in Moscow, Tartu, and St. Petersburg. She received scholarships at the universities of Warsaw and Harvard. She was a visiting professor in St. Petersburg and Brussels.

Her research interests are in Russian figurative arts (XX-XXI centuries) and international contemporary art. She has also been researching the comparative study of art systems (painting and literature). She deals with the semiotics of culture and the figurative arts (mainly concerning the works of Yuri Lotman, of whom she is a translator too). She is a scholar of the Russian Avant-Garde of the 10s and 20s, she has expanded her research areas to the wider context of contemporary art. In these years she has deepened themes of Socialist Realism in the figurative arts, the Muscovite underground of the Sixties and Seventies, and has also dealt with some protagonists of the contemporary art scene.

In recent years she has curated numerous projects by Russian contemporary artists, including Dmitri Prigov, AES+F, Valery Koshlyakov, Alexander Ponomarev, Grisha Bruskin, Lena Herzog, Sergey Kishchenko and Italian artists, including Cristina Finucci, Francesca Montinaro, Marco Nereo Rotelli, Sissi, Nico Vascellari, and Fabrizio Plessi. She has curated more than fifty exhibitions of Russian art from various periods, including some important exhibitions dedicated to Vasily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, and the Russian Avant-Garde, editing the catalogs too. She was co-curator of the National Pavilion of the Russian Federation at the 2017 Venice Art Biennale. She founded and has directed the Mapping Diaspora project since 2022.

Her recent fields of research are the hybrid and the monster in contemporary art and the problem of care in art and its representation. She also deals with artistic practices and the environment, with issues related in a broad sense to sustainability. In 2024, she co-curated the dual exhibition project Uzbekistan: Avant-Garde in the Desert (Venice – Florence). She is involved as a curator in the reinstallation of the Savitsky Museum in Nukus, Uzbekistan.

She is also interested in museum teaching and educational programmes: she designed and directs the Ca’rte Lab at Ca’ Foscari and coordinates an international project related to this theme. She is the editor of the book series la Prospettiva rovesciata | Obratnaja Perspektiva (reverse perspective) for the publishing house Edizioni Ca’ Foscari. She conceived many events related to Russian cinema including the "Ruskino" film festival in Venice. She has participated in important international conferences, some organized by her.