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We regularly introduce scholars that work in the project by letting them answer three short questions. Today, we talk to Olga Nefedova. She is an art historian and holds a degree in Orientalism from the Russian State Academy of Fine Arts (Research Institute of Art Theory and History) with a thesis on “Franco-Flemish artist Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. XVIIIth century European Orientalism – theory and practice”.Olga Nefedova is a former director of the Orientalist Museum in Doha, Qatar. She has worked for many years with private and government collections and museums in the Far East, South Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf countries (Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia). Currently she is an associate professor at the National Research University HSE, Moscow. Her current research project “Art and Artists Crossing Borders: the Early History of Art Education for Arab Students in the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1979” focusses on the early history of art education of students from Arab countries in the USSR. The research has been supported by the Orient-Institut Beirut: in 2018 Olga Nefedova was awarded Hans-Robert Roemer Fellowship for Visiting Scholars. She is a member of the research project “Relations in the Ideoscape: Middle Eastern Students in the Eastern Bloc (1950s to 1991).”What will you be working on while being involved with the “Knowledge Unbound” project and what did you work on before?Duringrecent decades, interest in different facets of contemporary Arab art hassignificantly increased. Although recent developments have played a key role inbringing current Arab art into wider focus, there remains a gap in the academicdiscussion of certain aspects. My current research is dedicated to the newartistic practices and the art heritage of Arab artists, that were graduates ofthe Vasily Surikov Moscow State Art Institute and the Moscow State StroganovAcademy of Industrial and Applied Arts. More precisely I consider artists, whocame from 1959, being the first post-War II students, to 1979 and include onlystudents who eventually graduated or were postgraduate students during the sameperiod. In the decades under consideration here, the Arab students came fromcountries such as Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine,Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The study is based on previouslyunpublished archival material from various archives. The research is undertakenand written with the aid of artists and / or their relatives and friends, basedon the material about the meetings, interviews and correspondence with them. What role does the concept of “knowledge” playin your own research?Currently Iam working on the subject of students’ graduation works, created within theideological concept of social realism in art, their historical appearance andtheir political environments. Graduation work is a climax of many years ofstudents’ studies and the final outcome of a knowledge transfer process. It canbe seen and explored in the context of students’ relations on various levels,such as relations between a student and their mentor, relations between astudent and their art institute at large, and relations between a student and theart education system within the ideology of social realism in art. The historyof those artworks becomes perhaps as important as the artworks themselves.Paintings, graphics and sculptures are apprehended through their origins,contexts of students’ relations and perceptions. The aim of this study is toanswer various questions surrounding the historical framework of those works ofart, such as who, when, where and how they were created, and why those worksbecame a manifestation of students’ everyday experiences. Explaining thehistory of artworks and artistic practice by means of the social, political andeconomic contexts within which works were conceived, produced, perceived andused, I will argue that students’ graduation works, as products of the finaloutcome of knowledge transfer process, are effectively documents of their time,responding to and reflecting their socio-historical context. Have there been any surprising moments in yourresearch recently?First ofall, there are a few methodological difficulties that I encountered and wouldlike to briefly mention. To start with, the number of publications, articles,and the amount of academic research in foreign languages carried out in the fieldof Arab artists in the USSR is close to non-existent. For this reason oralsources are of major significance and importance. The second difficulty inaddition to this lack of written sources is that many interviewees found itdifficult to speak about their links to the USSR. However, conductingconversational interviews with artists and their relatives and friends, I movedmethodologically from political history towards cultural and social aspects.These stories, from the problem of Arab students’ adaptation to the newenvironment and troubles caused by cultural differences to the Arab absolvents’fates and their contacts with the USSR after ending their university studiesand returning to their homeland, expressed the interviewee's interpretations ofthose events and their significance. Thanks to this I gained a whole new pointof view at the social history of Arab students in communist countries. One of themost surprising moments, however, is the former students’ lack of knowledge andunderstanding of realities of the Soviet life, in spite of many years ofstudies that they spent in the USSR. This can be partially explained by adevelopment of a strictly controlled dedicated program of foreign students’adaptation in institutes and universities in the USSR.