The Topicality of Ruins (Zur Aktualität von Ruinen) 

32nd Conference of the German-Polish Working Group for Art History and Monument Preservation.

4 – 6 December 2025, 

Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), and Collegium Polonicum in Słubice. 

In her paper, Untouched, Varvara Keidan Shavrova examines post-transformational landscapes of decay—places shaped by abandonment and destruction that give rise to modern ruins. The Untouched photographic and film project explores these themes through studies of ruined and deserted homes in two locations where Keidan Shavrova has lived: the old quarters of Beijing, and remote villages on Ireland’s west coast. By comparing these settings, the project considers what remains when people leave their homes, whether through forced demolition and rapid development or through economic decline and demographic change.

As Dr. Katy Hill notes in her introduction to the Untouched publication: “The paradoxical proposition of Untouched is the active representation of the disregarded. Varvara Keidan Shavrova presents not a social vision but an objective observational one, which takes the subject close-up and examines it aesthetically to create a rich visual fabric.'  1.

Building on this reading, the present paper returns to the project after two decades to reassess its wider implications and to frame new questions about the cultural work of such documentation.

Revisiting the themes first explored in the Untouched project, the paper considers the aesthetic and anthropological value of documenting ruins through artistic practice. It asks whether artworks can function as monuments once the original sites have been destroyed or allowed to decay, and, if so, how such value might be measured in historical and cultural terms. Do these visual records sustain a nostalgic impulse to preserve memory when the physical presence of a home has been obliterated? Or do they operate instead as vital repositories of human presence, activity, and displacement—recording traces of lives either forcibly disrupted or quietly abandoned?

1. Hill, Katy. “Objects in time, space and history” Introduction to Untouched, Timezone, Beijing, 2008.

Image: Varvara Keidan Shavrova, Beijing Walls 6, 2008, photograph on aluminium, 190cm x 110cm