Professional Affiliation

Doheny Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Southern California

Expert Bio

Monica Steinberg earned her PhD in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is presently the Doheny Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Southern California. Steinberg’s scholarship focuses on art and politics after 1945, with special attention to the intersection of fabulation, obfuscation, and humor. She considers the instances and the effects of artists working under satirical aliases, and the problematics and potentials of realizing artworks that use humor to address socio-political issues.

Wilson Center Project

Humor and Subtle Activism in Contemporary Azerbaijani Art

Project Summary

How might culturally specific, humorous details in contemporary Azerbaijani art operate alongside bilateral considerations of national identity and geopolitical statehood? What, and for whom, do these details translate, and what is (un)intentionally lost or miscommunicated? This project considers how a selection of works by artists who experienced the time before 1991 activate incongruent humor in a manner that elides dogma, all the while averting censorship and reprisal. Tapping into the possibilities of incongruence, their work galvanizes irony in a manner that makes explicit what is culturally implicit, calling attention to a shared sense of identity among those who “get the joke.”