Assessing the Applicability of Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque in Ukrainian Visual Culture

During periods of political upheaval and cultural transformation in Ukraine, questions of identity, marginality, and belonging have been negotiated through social and visual forms. Particularly, festive forms associated with carnival and circus imagery recur in literature and art. Even as the carnivalesque, conceived by Mikhail Bakhtin, is increasingly investigated as a conceptual tool, its methodological articulation in scholarship remains inconsistent. The concept is frequently treated as an overly expansive category or oversimplified as an inversion of hierarchy, divorced from historical context. To address this imbalance, Bakhtin’s carnivalesque is organized into a historically and culturally adaptive model with structural and expressive indicators. The model is then applied to the interwar-period artwork of Alexandra Exter and to Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) (case studies selected for their shared Ukrainian context. The model proposes degrees of carnivalesque activation and demonstrates the value of its use for interpreting Ukrainian artistic production.