In the Sphere of The Soviets: Essays on the Cultural Legacy of the Soviet Union 9813365730, 9789813365735

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In the Sphere of The Soviets Essays on the Cultural Legacy of the Soviet Union Charles Merewether

In the Sphere of The Soviets

Charles Merewether

In the Sphere of The Soviets Essays on the Cultural Legacy of the Soviet Union

Charles Merewether Tbilisi, Georgia

ISBN 978-981-33-6573-5 ISBN 978-981-33-6574-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Foreword

Charles Merewether has had a deep commitment to Russian Culture since his early teens. He avidly read the classic Modern Russian authors and later the great poets and filmmakers. At La Trobe University in the early seventies he switched from Literature to art history and also studied the Russian language there. In 1979, he spent three months in Moscow and Berlin studying for a doctoral thesis on the emerging Soviet avant-garde. His research including interviews with those who were involved in art and the Comintern after 1919 was confiscated on his return from East Berlin to the West. On his return to Australia he began work on the Workers Art Club in the 1930s and both artists and realist filmmakers in Australia who had engaged with international Communism at that time. I worked with Merewether when I came to Sydney as the first curator of International contemporary art in 1984. He was the guest curator for an original exhibition Art and Social Commitment that explored the vital movement of such committed artists from the early part of the twentieth century of the 1930s on. It was a body of art practice that often took second place in Australian appreciation to contemporaneous artists such as Boyd, Perceval, and other artists more involved with a local form of surrealism and mythological narratives than social commentary. I was struck by the stark contrast between Mexican and Australian art history in this context and the relative lack of status in Australia of these artists compared with their contemporaries in Mexico. In Mexico, exactly the opposite applied. Socialist realists such as Diego Rivera came to be the leading v

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national artists while their surrealist colleagues took second place. Many years later (1991) I had planned to make an exhibition that explored this opposition. I was working with the director of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Mexico City who was also taken by this diametrically opposed cultural response. We both thought it told a lot about our respective publics. Sadly, a change of Government in Mexico saw him replaced as Director and the project was abandoned. The exhibition Merewether curated was the result of long and diligent research and included published material as well as original artworks. One of the most gratifying things for me was that Merewether had managed to assemble all this material into an aesthetically exciting exhibition while carefully documenting this aspect of Australian culture. It became clear to me over the many years that I have since observed his curation that he has the skill to combine rich and sometimes difficult content with a great eye for art. It was a revelation for me and I think for our broader audience. Merewether has had an eventful life including more than his share of tragedy, love, loss, and he has had a rich intellectual interaction with some of the most important theorists of his time. He has worked and continues to contribute to culture in North and South America as well as The Middle East, East Asia, Central Asia, Australia, and more recently East Europe, organizing exhibitions of contemporary art for the National Museum of Art in Tbilisi Georgia, 2016–2019. This was a perfect base from which to get inside the contemporary culture of the countries covered in this book. One day someone will have to write his biography it will combine the steady intellectual nature of his work with a fascinating adventure story. To date he has largely preserved his privacy from the art world. Wherever Merewether worked he maintained strong professional engagement with artists and theorists in other countries. He has always contributed to major exhibitions and Biennales and made a point of including artists he was working alongside wherever he was domiciled. I would say that he has been a generous contributor and helped the intelligent cross-fertilization of art between diverse cultures while avoiding the homogenizing view of globalization. This book continues this broad inclusive way of looking while making the local context very apparent. Since Art and Social Commitment in 1984 I have continued to seek Merewether’s advice drawing from his compendious research and involvement with artists on their home ground. While curating the Sydney Biennale in 1992–1993 I visited Merewether in New York to get his

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suggestions about artists to look at in Latin America. At that time, he was Inaugural curator at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico while also working out of New York collecting for the museum and researching pan American artists for exhibitions. His generosity was incredibly valuable, since although I was traveling widely, I was often at the mercy of local arts agencies so his leads were very helpful. One of his suggestions took me to see Doris Salcedo in Bogota, Colombia. Without his introduction, I would likely not have found her since she had then and is still today in an antagonistic relationship with the ministry. I will always treasure that introduction and I have continued to work with Doris in exhibitions and twice collected her work for the Art Gallery of NSW Sydney. I also invited Merewether to write for the catalogue Boundary Rider and contribute to the associated symposia. In 1993–1994, we were both involved in an advisor capacity for the first Johannesburg Biennale and I was pleased to be able to see him at work in that complicated context a year before the end of Apartheid. Subsequently, he contributed to the catalogue for my exhibition Body at the Art Gallery of NSW that also included Salcedo 1997. He also contributed an essay to the catalogue Trace, the inaugural Liverpool Biennale of Contemporary International Art that I curated in England in 1999. In 2004–2006, he came back to Australia to curate the Biennale Zones of Contact. This was an exceptional Biennale especially for Sydney since it included many artists from parts of the world rarely included in main stream Global art events. Merewether did not pick from catalogues and previous biennales he spent time getting to know the countries and meeting the artists, a method I believe is essential to creating a good exhibition. His reasonable command of Russian made communication in the old Soviet Sphere relatively straightforward in for example Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The artists he brought were mostly unknown to me but the quality and sophistication of their work was very impressive. I have found this book a very useful source of information about the regions he has documented. The book will offer much to the general understanding and appreciation of the broader public, curators, art historians, and students. While there are curators who have included some of these artists mostly from the diasporas of the countries in question there is much too little available for the broader academic and general audience. Merewether’s approach is also highly constructive not trying to fit the

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artists into a global schema but acknowledging the specific nature of their culture. He has convincingly and authoritatively spelled out the historical events that have helped shape the contemporary in this region. I know this is a very important and overdue publication. Sydney, Australia

Anthony Bond

Acknowledgments

In late February 2020, I visited my sister Lizzie in Australia for 10 days only to find myself unable to return home in Tbilisi (Georgia) for several months because of the pandemic that had stopped international travel. And yet, as a result of this experience, I had the time to finish this book, enabled by the wonderful hospitality of my sister and her husband Fred during these long months. I would like to thank them and my younger sister Anthea, with whom I have been able to spend time with. Without their understanding and support, this book could never have been finished. My thanks to my good friend and colleague Ani Riaboshenko with whom I worked in Tbilisi and always found ways to support my projects and, to my dear friends Tony Bond and Anne Graham who believed I could do this book. My thanks also to my other early referees John Potts and Anthony Gardner who supported this project; to Lika Mamatsashvili, in charge of the exhibition department of the Tbilisi History Museum of the Georgian National Museum, who, with her staff, supported a series of exhibitions I curated for the museum. These exhibitions sowed the seeds for the initial stages of this project. My sincere thanks also to Alan Cruickshank who published an early draft of Chapter 2 in his journal di’van; Ringo Bunoan, in charge of the Roberto Chabet archive in Manila; Nana Kipiani, a friend and one of the finest art historians in Georgia and Agnes Linn of the Osage Foundation in Hong Kong for their support.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the support of many of the artists whose work I discuss here, especially those I know in different parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. My thanks extend also to both Viktor Misiano and Boris Groys whose scholarly work and collegiality was an inspiration. Finally, I wish to give my deepest of thanks to my family and Yana who has been by my side throughout this project and always supported me.

Contents

1

Introduction

1

2

Specter of the Soviet Union

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3

The Thaw After Stalin, Soviet Union and Ukraine

31

4

State of Play: Georgian Art Before/After Independence

57

5

Rise and Fall of Monuments

83

6

Contemporary Russia

105

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After Maidan: Contemporary Ukraine

137

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Contemporary Georgia: Here and There

169

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Lost to the Future: Central Asia

207

10

Towards a Horizontality (Memory, Margins and Borders)

253

11

Russian Affinities and Its Correspondences

285

12

The Interactivity of Energies and Montage

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CONTENTS

Postscript: Dreaming of Russia

325

Conclusion

335

Bibliography

339

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book is about contemporary art in Eastern Europe and the influence of Russia since World War Two. I have focused on the period of the 1960s until the contemporary period, looking at Russian art and its immediate neighbors Ukraine, Georgia, and Central Asia. The relationship between Russia and these countries has been complex, for some an open exchange, and for other artists conflictual. This book explores the work of the avant-garde and contemporary artists of Eastern Europe who were either Russian or influenced by the Soviet Union/Russia’s sphere of influence. This focus is on the postWW11 period of the late 1950s and Khrushchev years, then the breakup of the Soviet Union Empire in 1991 and the 1990s, ending with the contemporary period. While focusing on particular countries, notably Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Central Asia, the following 12 chapters seek to cover some broader issues and subjects. Russia has always been a part of my life. At the age of 14 when I won a School poetry prize I requested a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and read it voraciously. I then bought and read Crime and Punishment in 1969 and moved on to reading Gogol, Tolstoy, and Gorky, then later Russia’s wonderful poets Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, and Marina Tsvetaeva and, in turn, watched the films of Eisenstein (including his late trilogy Ivan the Terrible), Pudovkin among others.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_1

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At the University after studying literature for my BA at LaTrobe University in Australia, I switched to the study of art history and began to learn the Russian language from 1972. This happened under the careful eye of Nina (MikhaiIovna) Christensen at the University of Melbourne. Nina was married to Clem Christensen, founder of the Australian literary journal Meanjin, an inspiration to us all. I remember too at one time going to a packed Melbourne Hall to hear Yevtushenko who stood and read from memory his poem Babi Yar about the massacre of Jewish people in Kiev by Nazis in 1941 Then on another occasion hearing Voznesensky also read his verse. In the cold winter of 1979 I visited Moscow and East Berlin for 3 months and began research for my doctoral thesis on the emergence of the Soviet avant-garde and the cultural wing of the Communist International (Comintern), founded in 1919 and based in Berlin. However, so much of what I had gathered from this trip, especially interviews with those still alive from those tumultuous years, were seized at the border on my way back into the West in Berlin. I was told they needed to be checked but, this precious research material was never returned to me. Little could be done but, inspired by the trip and what I had learnt, I began work on the subject of the Workers Art Club in Australia in the 1930s and the Realist Film Movement in Australia. The Club had been mentioned by Bernard Smith in his book on Australian art but it was a mere sentence or two, nothing more. Yet it was enough to set my curiosity to work. I began to research and interview people and artists from the period, discovering the influence of their counterparts in Germany and North America and the internationalism of the communist movement. This in turn, led me to curating an exhibition (and catalogue) Art and Social Commitment, that finally opened in early December 1984, after 5 years research and efforts to find good museum venues to exhibit the work, beginning with the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. In the exhibition I showed paintings, prints, and photography with, in addition, tens of small magazines published between the 1920–1940s in the Soviet Union, Germany, the UK, USA, and Australia with illustrations by artists, and texts by artists groups or radical intellectuals. These I had been given by artists who had participated in their production or found in Melbourne’s International Bookshop and secondhand bookshops. After more than 30 years living and working in Mexico, North America, Middle East, and Asia, I was invited to Georgia by my friend and colleague Ani Riaboshenko. It was late 2016 and she was behind

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efforts to get State-funded organizations to support a program of exhibitions about contemporary art. This led me to working in Tbilisi for the next 3 years, organizing exhibitions of contemporary from Eastern Europe at the National Museum. From 2016–2019, I curated a number of exhibitions of contemporary art from Eastern Europe. This allowed me to study and travel in the region and to better appreciate the contemporary history of art in Georgia, Russia, and across the Caucasus and Black Sea region. So this project began. Chapter 2: “Specter of the Soviet Union” is in two parts. The first part looks at the long shadow the Soviet Union has cast over Eastern Europe since 1921 with the rise of communism and the succession of events which divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence and later, the annexation of the Crimea and destabilization of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. But, equally, the push of NATO eastwards and the increasing isolation of Russia made the lack of dialogue and mutual misunderstanding even stronger. While the focus of this book is to expand the subject of contemporary art in East Europe beyond Russia, it does not mean excluding Russia. Rather, it requires a two-fold response. First, recognizing Russia’s presence and influence and at times dominance regionally while, at the same time, paying equal attention to the art of its neighboring countries Ukraine, Georgia, and Central Asia. I have chosen these countries because of the significance of their artistic practices if not throughout the twentieth century, then from the 1960s on to their independence in the early 1990s and in recent years. The second part of this chapter explores the theoretical models developed for understanding contemporary art across Eastern Europe. These are proposed by various authors/curators in texts written and exhibitions made in the post-1991 period after the demise of the Soviet Union. Here, I focus on the texts of particular writers, notably Viktor Misiano, Boris Groys, Hans Belting, and Piotr Piotrowski. Their texts have appeared in either books or catalogue introductions to exhibitions, in which they discuss their methodological approaches. They contest the vertical basis of universality which was Western and economic-based and led to the Center\periphery model. For them, in different ways, it is matter of contesting internationalism and refining the idea of globalism, seeking to establish other models around which to build an understanding of contemporary art either internationally and regionally as for example, Eastern Europe.

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As a result, I have organized this discussion of contemporary art within Eastern Europe under notions of sovereignty, national, local, and the regional/inter-local. These notions have more often than not driven the character of the debates, determined by conservative ideological interests or a recognition of issues that are non-Western and non-market driven. I argue for the value of Piotrowski’s concept of horizontality and democracy after communism in Eastern Europe. His theory counteracts other writers who have not seen both the specificity and tensions across Eastern Europe by virtue of both its ongoing and historical interconnectedness with Russia and yet aspirations to be part of a larger world of European culture. Chapter 3: “The Thaw After Stalin: the Soviet Union and Ukraine” focuses on the period, following the death of Stalin in 1953. A power struggle ensued with Khrushchev emerging victorious and on the 25th of February 1956 at the 20th Party Congress. He had denounced Stalin’s purges and opened up in a less repressive era. Most significantly, this led to a long-lasting change that began in the 1960s. The 1960s was marked by an increasing challenge to the national and emergence of the nonconformist movement. There are many artists that could be discussed but I have chosen only a few important figures who emerged in the 1950s/1960s on, beginning with Russia and the samizdat (underground) movement. Part Two looks at Vremia, the Kharkiv-based Photo Group founded in the 60s. The focus is on Boris Mikhailov and some of his contemporaries. Part Three looks at the rise of Apartment art in Odessa as a reaction against Soviet dominance. Chapter 4: “State of Play: Georgia 1980s/1990s” focuses on a new generation of Georgian artists who emerged in the immediate years before and after the country’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. This includes Gia Edzgveradze, Luka Lasareishvili, and Guia Rigvava, all of whom left Georgia in these years. I also look at Avto Varazi, Karlo Kacharava, Levan Chogoshvili, Mamuka Tseskhladse, Niko Tsetskhladze, Mamuka Japaradidze, Vakho Bugadze, Guram Tsibakhashvili, and Koka Ramishvili. Between them they produced a broad range of work from figurative to abstract, and in some cases directly critical of the dominance of the Soviet Union, in other cases, filtered through darker humor. These were exceptional artists whose work defied the imposed conventions of a Socialist Realist style of painting that, prior to independence, dominated the art schools. There were no galleries and virtually no collectors.

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Without any government or private support, the chapter discusses the alternative exhibition spaces they set up, such as the 10th Floor. The Nineties became a very different decade. Georgia gained independence but, at a hard social and economic price. As a consequence, some artists left Georgia and a younger generation of artists also emerged in a climate of social impoverishment and political instability. These artists are explored in a later chapter. Chapter 5: “The Rise and Fall of Monuments” looks more broadly across Eastern Europe from the post-World War Two era on. The building of monuments entailed the making of certain historical claims, based on an impulse to commemorate an epoch, ideology, event, or figure. This chapter opens with a brief discussion of Hans Belting and Louis Marin and their theories of the image and their pertinence to understanding the enduring power of the monument. In this context, I discuss the debates around the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Cheka (Russian secret police and subsequently the KGB). I follow the construction of the statue in the 1956 in front of Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters, and then the later debates in the Duma after the fall of the Soviet Union held during the 1990s. The chapter then goes on to discuss the legacy and debates around monuments across Eastern Europe, including Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Dagastan, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. The final part considers the response to state monuments by Russian artists Komar and Melamid (Russia) and development of the counter-monument in the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko (Poland), Mikhail Guilin (Belarus), and Taus Makhacheva of Dagestan/Russia. Chapter 6: “Contemporary Russia” looks at the period following Perestroika and breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Not only were there changes in the Soviet Union but, throughout the region that would affect all sectors of public life, including the cultural sphere. In the 1990s Russian conceptualism emerged and Moscow actionism introduced performance art into Russia. The focus of my chapter will be on Irina Nakhova (Moscow 1955), Guia Rigvava (Tbilisi 1956), Dimitry Gutov (Moscow 1960), Olga Chernysheva (Moscow 1962), Elena Kovylina (Moscow 1971), and Taus Makhacheva (Moscow 1983) who develop very different approaches working in Moscow. Their work vividly articulates the complex conditions under which people live today, the relationship with their own personal and the country’s history, and the politics of collective memory and contemporary life.

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Chapter 7: “Contemporary Ukraine: After Maidan” focuses on a younger generation of Ukrainian artists since the year 2000, in particular from the period of events leading up to Maidan in 2014 and after. The Maidan incident in 2014 deeply affected the country all sectors of society and divided people, including artists and country between the Western region and Eastern part of the Ukraine. Some of these artists directly reflect on this issue and its repercussions while others focus on other subjects. However, the choice of artists whose work I explore, is not determined by the political elements but shaped by an aesthetic engagement with their practice. The chapter focuses on the diversity of contemporary art in the Ukraine by looking at the work of Nikita Kadan (Kiev 1982), Lada Nakonechna (Kiev 1981), Mykola Ridnyi (Kharkiv 1985), Zhanna Kadyrova (Brovary, Ukraine 1981), and Anna Zvyagintseva (Dnipropetrovsk 1986). Chapter 8: “Contemporary Georgia: Here There” considers contemporary artists of Georgia and extends the concept of Piotrowski’s theory of horizontality by looking at a group of Georgian artists who no longer felt bound by national borders. This includes Maia Naveriani (Tbilisi, 1966), Thea Djordjadze, (Tbilisi 1971), Nadia Tsulukidze (Tbilisi 1976), Sophia Tabatadze (Tbilisi 1977), Tamuna Chabashvili (Tbilisi 1978), and Vajiko Chachkhiani (Tbilisi 1985). Chapter 9: “Lost to the Future, Central Asia” focuses on four countries in Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. I explore how some artists have engaged and contest the dominant representations of the country and those who live at the margins of history in their country. As explored, what becomes evident is the legacy of Soviet rule of these countries. The chapter explores the work of Vyachaslev Akhunov (1948 Osh, Kyrgyzstan), Rustam Khalfin (Tashkent 1949), Yuliya Tikhonova (Almaty 1978), Almagul Menlibaeva (Almaty 1969), Erbossyn Meldibekov (Shymkent, Kaz. 1964), Saodat Ismailova (Tashkent 1981), Shailo Djekshenbaev (Sailyk, Kyrgyzstan 1947), Gulnara Kasmalieva (Bishkek 1960), and Muratbek Djumaliev (Bishkek 1965). Chapter 10: “Toward a Horizontality” begins with a consideration of theories of cultural exchange. From there I look at an ongoing exhibition project in Hong Kong entitled, the first two being South by Southeast (2015) and The sun taught me that history is not Everything held (2018). Both exhibitions sought to rethink models with which to explore contemporary work internationally. This leads me back to Piotrowski’s theory of

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horizontality between artistic centers, regardless of country, discussed in Chapter 2. I then focus on the post-communist world and emergent democratic discourse through art in Eastern Europe. There are many differences between these artists. However, what becomes clear is the value of horizontality as a methodological way to explore the margins and bridging borders, while holding on to the residual reference to their country or cultural heritage in their work, whether through memory traces of their lives and family or the legacy of the Soviet Union/Russia. The first part “Perception and Memory” considers the work of Alicja Kwade (Katowice, Poland 1979) working in Germany and Nino Kvrivishvili (Tbilisi, 1984), two artists who have experienced growing up in different part of Eastern and Central Europe. The second part of the chapter, East is West, then considers the work of Nezaket Ekici ci (Kirshir, Turkey, 1970), Natalia Mali (Makhachkala, Dagestan, 1971), and Mariana Vassileva (Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, 1964) each of whom moved from their homeland but whose work still resonates offer critical insight into contemporary life in Eastern Europe today. Chapter 11: “Russian Affinities and Correspondences” explores the influence of Russian art beyond the sphere of the former Soviet Union. This chapter begins with looking at some of the influences and correspondences between Soviet and Chinese art, especially in recent years as opposed to socialist realism in the time of Stalin and Mao Zedong. The second part examines in particular the case of the Filipino artist Roberto Chabet (Manila, 1937–2013) and the impact of Russian and Soviet modernism. I begin with his collage and work on paper in the 1970s and the later series of “Russian paintings” from the mid 1980s, in both of which he incorporated Russian art. This is a unique case of a direct influence of Russian and Soviet art in Asia and South East Asia. This was directly influenced by what he had seen in Camilla Grey’s landmark publication The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922 and Chabet’s trip to the United States on a Fellowship in the late 1960s, during which he first saw Russian and Soviet art, especially at MOMA (New York).I then focus on Chabet’s “Russian paintings” begun in late 1984. Chapter 12: “The Interactivity of Energies and Montage” looks at early Soviet cinema and development of montage theory in cinema and its impact on digital media art. This, I argue, anticipates the development of digital media, especially Virtual and Augmented reality. I begin with the work of Jeffrey Shaw (Melbourne 1944) in developing Expanded cinema

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and the founding of the Event Research Group in 1969 in Amsterdam. The chapter explores the influence on Shaw and the expanded theory of architecture and of play developed by Dutch artist Constant (Constant Nieuwenhuys) who had co-founded CoBrA with Asger Jorn (Jutland, Denmark, 1914–1973) in 1946. Part Two follows the influence of Expanded cinema in contributing to the development of digital media art. I consider the work of a number of historians in mapping this relationship between film and digital media as it emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I trace this influence to the that of Jeffrey Shaw in the Netherlands and recent work by Fujiko Masaki (Japan), both key artists in the rise of digital media art from the 1970s on. The chapter leads us back to the rise of energetics and its influence on Soviet montage, then explore the residual influence of montage theory on digital media practice from 1960s on. This includes looking at the montage theory of Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov. The final chapter of the book: “Dreaming Russia” is more a postscript, dedicated to the work of the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (Zavrazh’ye, Russia 1932–1986) who made a series of 7 extraordinary films. His last work was made in Italy, after having left behind his motherland and yet he always remained a Russian filmmaker until his early death.

CHAPTER 2

Specter of the Soviet Union

I divide this chapter into two parts. The first part of this chapter looks at the long shadow the Soviet Union has caste over Eastern Europe since 1921 with the rise of communism. The second part explores the various theoretical models for understanding contemporary art in Eastern Europe, as it has grown over the almost 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Part One At different times, the countries which have shared common borders with Russia have, to different degrees, been affected if not influenced. These countries are Finland, Latvia, Belarus, Chechnya, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, and Mongolia. However, Russia’s sphere of influence has also reached into Central Europe, influenced by a number of events, notably the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (the Hitler– Stalin Pact or Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact), signed on August 23, 1939 and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. These events divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence with the subsequent War and Cold War redefining the East from West. To explore this however, would be the subject of a different kind of book, focusing on the geo-politics of the region and recognizing the influence of economic interests and control over trade, electricity, gas, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_2

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and oil, as much as the more recent annexation of the Crimea and both conflict and destabilization of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. In an address on March 18, 2014, following Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, Russian president Vladimir Putin outlined Russia’s historical claims over the peninsula and its Russianspeaking population. Russia’s assertion of its right to take decisive action in Ukraine was justified because it believes it enjoys a “privileged sphere of influence” in the post-Soviet space. To this end, the most important of regional organizations has been the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) established in 2002, comprised of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In addition, there are a number of frozen conflicts across Eastern Europe in Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine. These frozen conflicts entail unresolved territorial conflicts, usually divided along ethnic lines between a sovereign state and a breakaway region(s) that is either directly or indirectly supported by Russia. What distinguishes the events around the Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, and Central Asia, notably Kazakhstan, Krgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, is the development of relatively independent and vital cultural and artistic spheres in each of these countries and yet, equally, a close cultural relation of these countries to Moscow. Hence the focus of this book is to expand the subject of contemporary art in East Europe beyond Russia. This does not mean excluding Russia but, requires a twofold response. First, recognizing Russia’s presence and influence and at times dominance regionally while, at the same time, paying equal attention to the art of its neighboring countries: Ukraine, Georgia, and Central Asia. I have chosen these countries because of the significance of each of their artistic practices if not throughout the twentieth century, then from the 1960s on to their independence in the early 1990s and in recent years.

Part Two Looking for a way to characterize contemporary art in Eastern Europe and the area of focus in this book, raises as many if not more problems as answers.1 The reason being that the definition of what countries make up Eastern Europe has gone through substantive changes and, to 1 For some discussion of this subject, see Éva Forgács, ‘How the New Left Invented East-European Art’, Centropa Vol. 3, No. 2, 2003, pp. 93–104.

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some extent, a refinement of definition since 1991. Initially, it embraced some twenty-two countries, including what is now referred to as Central Europe and Central Asia. The concept of sovereignty was prevalent in the mapping of Eastern Europe after World War Two. The Yalta Conference in 1945 sought to redraw the lines marking the region and make possible a national autonomy in countries that had been under Soviet control. However, it also led to the beginning of the Cold War that would take some forty-five years to thaw. Eventually, the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in a new era for Eastern Europe, within which any such discussion included Central Europe, insofar as having experienced Soviet occupation or domination, and subsequent liberation. This led to the concept of the “National” and various books and museum exhibitions of contemporary art in both Central and Eastern Europe, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, have sought to explore this. The idea of the “national ” invokes a prevailing opinion and hence majority of a country’s population, the recent English Brexit referendum of 2016 being a good example. National distinctions have served to distinguish one country from another at an international or regional level but, even then, are usually symbolic in nature. Hence the concept of a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale is no longer that the art is representative of that country but rather, that the artist is chosen to represent that country, regardless of the artist’s nationality. These books and exhibitions cover some twenty-two countries but the areas of attention have also changed significantly over the course of this time. The final focus of this section is on the different conceptual and theoretical approaches that have been developed more recently. Such an approach by and large subsumes the national distinction as the means of determining and discussing contemporary art. It makes sense of contemporary art in these countries through a comparative analysis with contemporary work elsewhere, displacing the international or translational as a concept of analysis to explore the “Inter-local.” There can be many coexistent local opinions, points of view or ways of doing things that are constituent of and survive in a democracy and can have a voice in a larger national forum. In the field of art and culture, the local is a means of distinguishing and characterizing the particularity of a practice from that of another. This can be then the basis on which to compare with other artists locally, regionally and internationally. These issues will be discussed in relation to recent writings by three authors: Viktor Misiano,

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Boris Groys, and Piotr Piotrowski whose work has been essential to an understanding of art in Eastern Europe.

Sovereignty By the end of the 1980s, the fate of Eastern Europe appeared on the verge of irreversible change. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the breakup of the Soviet Union by 1992, the Balkan Wars leading to the collapse of Yugoslavia and successive independence gained by the former countries of Yugoslavia (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania, and Macedonia) through the 1990s—all signaled the end of the Cold War.2 Yet, the governance and cultures of Central and Eastern European countries in fact, did not radically change. The course of their independence became embroiled in Russia’s foreign policy and ambition to assert itself as a regional and global strength. As a consequence, we must acknowledge not only Eastern Europe’s historical ties to a Soviet past but to the Russian present. The contemporary history of the Ukraine is a pivotal example. Its eastern regions have been in an ongoing state of a bloody civil war between pro-Russian and Ukrainian armed forces since 2014, as well as Crimea having been annexed by Russia in 2016. These are deeply troubling events and threaten the right to national sovereignty. Recently, the Ukrainian artist, Nikita Kadan, directly referenced this in a work about the Crimea, once known as a beautiful Ukrainian resort island.3 Entitled Everybody Wants to Live by the Sea (2014), the installation included a Ukrainian flag placed above the artwork, thereby symbolically supporting the Ukraine against Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in early 2014. In this way Kadan’s work directly reminds us of Russia’s ongoing aggression against its neighbors, wielding its force again as in the days of the Soviet empire and equally, that the sovereignty of countries remains as fragile as at the end of World War Two. Addressing the subject of the mapping of Eastern Europe conveys us back to the Yalta Conference in 1945. Seeking to redefine the region and 2 The exhibition In the Gorges of the Balkans: A Report at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel (2003) was exclusively around the Balkans. 3 Nikita Kadan has made a series of work using the Ukrainian flag, such as a work included in the exhibition From the Shores of the Black Sea, September, 2016. See Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi History Museum: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2016, pp. 48–51.

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countries under Soviet control, the Yalta Conference sought to lay the ground for a new Europe in which the national sovereignty of much of Eastern Europe was promised. Sometimes called the Crimea Conference, it brought together the three heads of government of the UK, the United States, and the Soviet Union: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin, respectively, for the purpose of discussing Europe’s postwar reorganization. Convened in the Livadia Palace near Yalta in the Crimea, its goal was to shape a postwar peace: the “Declaration of a Liberated Europe.” The signed declaration pledged, “the earliest possible establishment through free elections governments responsive to the will of the people.” Such a promise would allow the people of Europe “to create democratic institutions of their own choice.”4 This peace, it was hoped, would represent not just a collective security order, but also a plan to give self-determination to the liberated populations of post-Nazi Europe. Germany would be divided into zones of occupation and Stalin agreed to permit free elections in Eastern Europe. At the same time, Stalin demanded both US and British recognition of a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and postwar economic assistance for Russia. The Soviet Union would join the nascent United Nations, insisting that each of the fifteen Soviet Republics be given a seat. However, only three countries—Belarus, the Ukraine, and the Soviet Union were included. Stalin, in return, agreed to enter the Asian war against Japan, for which he was promised the return of land, in particular Manchuria, lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.5 There is very little that survived the initial promises made between these countries. Stalin was to break his pledge given to Churchill and Roosevelt. Instead of allowing the people to establish their own form of governance, the Soviets actively encouraged Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and other neighboring countries to each construct a Communist government. Whether one believes Roosevelt conceded Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union or that Stalin simply took it, it has remained under Soviet and Russian sphere of influence to this day. Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s

4 See Yalta Conference; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference. 5 Soon after the Conference, Roosevelt died, to be succeeded by Harry S. Truman, the

Cold War began and Stalin died in 1953.

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Secretary of Commerce, remembers that Roosevelt “didn’t care whether the countries bordering on Russia became communized.6 It is only in recent years that these countries have been named. The post-1945 Google maps of Eastern Europe left unmarked those countries east of Central Europe and east of the Black Sea, including those that make up the North and South Caucasus—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Dagastan, and Georgia. This anomaly raises the persistent question of how do we define Eastern Europe? Redrawing the map and, in particular, rethinking the reality of a post-Soviet history demands a recognition of each of these country’s local cultural histories and traditions, as well as their shared histories.

The National Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, various books and exhibitions have explored contemporary art in those countries that were once part of the USSR. As already noted, these books and exhibitions cover some twenty-two countries, including for some writers and curators Central Europe, based on an understanding that many of those countries shared with Eastern Europe the experience of Soviet occupation or domination and subsequently, a period of post-Soviet liberation. The varying options in approach by cultural historians and curators are significant. For some museums and writers, it has been determined by nation, recognizing the formation of independence from the Soviet Union. In the wake of independence, this was particularly important politically and socially. It gave people a sense of their distinction and relative autonomy. Others projects were organized and presented through interlocking themes/subjects/ concepts and the grouping artists from across Eastern and Central Europe, in some cases, across international lines. One of the first post-Soviet exhibitions was Europa, Europa. The Century of the Avantgarde in Central and Eastern Europe, curated by Ryszard Stanislawski and Christoph Brockhaus at the Kunst-und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in late 1994. The exhibition presented one of the earliest and most comprehensive views of postwar modern and contemporary art from Central and Eastern Europe in the

6 Averell Harriman served Roosevelt as special envoy to Europe and served as the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Great Britain.

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post-1989 era. It was highly influential in the region as a defining post1989 moment of entry into the dominant Western art historical discourse of postwar modernism and contemporary art production. This was followed by Beyond Belief: Contemporary Art from East Central Europe, curated by Laura J. Hoptman at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1995. Focusing on “socially engaged art” in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Then the exhibition Body and the East: From the 1960’s to the Present, curated by Zdenka Badinovac, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubijana in 1998, with essays by Joseph Backstein, Iara Boubnova, Jurij Krpan, Ileana Pintilie, Kristine Stiles, Branka Stipancic, Igor Zabel, and others. The focus on “body art,” created in Eastern Europe in the early 1960s, included a wide range of practices in which the artist’s own body is the bearer of social, political, metaphorical, and philosophical content. Introductory essays by Zdenka Badovinac and Kristine Stiles discuss the art that emerged during socialism in cultural centers such as Prague, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Warsaw, and Zagreb. There were essays on eighty artists from fourteen countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, the former GDR, Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Yugoslavia. After the Wall: Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, curated by Bojana Pejic and David Elliot and held at the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm in 1999.7 Through an exhibition, symposium, and catalogue, the project presented twenty-two countries of the former Eastern bloc and newly independent states (NIS), focusing on the period from the mid-1980s until 1999. The curators write that After the Wall focuses on this period, because it is marked by many dramatic political and cultural changes in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. In short, these changes included: Perestroika, the shattering of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War, the foundation of new states and their progress toward democracy, the reunification of Germany, ethnic cleansing and both the Balkan and Chechen Wars. All of these events and changes marked this time within the post-totalitarian landscape. The exhibition and catalogue of After the Wall was organized under four sections: “Social Sculpture, Re-inventing the Past, Questioning Subjectivity and Gender-Scapes” with essays by Bojana Pejic,

7 After the Wall: Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, Bojana Pejic and David Elliot eds, Stockholm: Modern Art Museum, 1999.

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and Piotr Piotrowski.8 Pejic’s “The Dialectics of Normality” astutely raised the problems associated with the geographic division associated with being “Eastern European” but equally, being considered as autonomous. Piotrowski’s “The Grey Zone of Europe” critiques the “centralist character of globalization and multiculturalism” and its pervasive influence.9 In its place, he sought to characterize through the work of some Eastern European artists, not a universalist approach based on a Western modernist concept, but, rather around a trajectory of conflicting directions, or a “critical geography”, as Irit Rogoff had defined it.10 Rogoff published Terra Infirma in 2000, in which she elaborates her use of the term “critical geography,” first developed in earlier essays. She looks at contemporary art in the context of living in a “post-colonial, post-communist world”, writing: Geography is at one and the same time a concept, a sign system and an order of knowledge established at the centres of power.

She goes on to characterize geography as “grounded in issues of positionality” and hence the authority to name and a hegemonic identity.11 Rogoff explores the links between the dislocation of subjects and disruption of collective narratives which allows for the possibility of difference.12 With these issues in mind, she looks at contemporary art as part of a “situated knowledge” (a term coined by Donna Haraway some years earlier),

8 After the Wall, ibid. See Bojana Pejic, ‘The Dialectics of Normality’, pp. 16–28

and Piotr Piotrowski, ‘The Grey Zone of Europe’, pp. 35–41. Piotrowski’s essay was later republished in Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, Phoebe Adler and Duncan McCorquodale eds, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010, pp. 199–206. There were, of course, other catalogues/books published during these years on the subject of Eastern European Art. I have confined myself to Western languages including translations. See for example, Attila Melegh, On the East-West Slope, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006. 9 Piotr Piotrowski in Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, ibid., Fn. 5, 2006, for reference to earlier Irit Rogoff essays. 10 Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Here we should mention Edward Soja who developed the concept of a critical geography more broadly applied in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London: Verso, 1989. 11 Ibid. p. 21. 12 Ibid. p. 12, xiii.

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and not through a universalist or nationalist lens.13 As Rogoff writes, this framework enables her to address the “current reality of living in a post-colonial, post-communist world, a world in which the subject of the migrant has made us recognize that the issues of national borders, of belonging and identity are in crisis.”14 In 2002, In Search of Balkania, was curated by Roger Conver, Eda Cufer, and Peter Weibel for the Neue Galerie, Graz and, in the same year, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York published Primary Documents: A Sourcebook of Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s.15 In some respects, this book followed the model of the earlier and invaluable series Documents of Twentieth Century Art (originally edited by Robert Motherwell). Tacitly, the book acknowledged the far-ranging diversity of modernism in Central and Eastern Europe after World War Two, with a strong emphasis on Russia as well to the Balkans, the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In the following year the First Prague Biennale was held with the title Peripheries Become the Center. Its curators, pronouncing publicly the dissolution of the dichotomy of the center and periphery concepts and thus alluding to “a liberation of plurality in terms of both identity and artistic practice.”16 In the same year, Boris Groys curated Dream Factory Communism at the Schirn Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany. Groys argued that the late realist works of Kasimir Malevich, presented the macrocosm of Soviet art in the Stalin era.17 Clearly, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe share common historical relations to the Soviet Union era and post-Soviet Russia. However, the reasons for a geographical focus on countries west of the Black Sea in many of the books and exhibitions during this period remains obscure. Missing was an account of art practices in the many countries that lay east of Central Europe, notably further around the Black Sea 13 See Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, New York: Routledge, 1991. 14 Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma op. cit., p. 20. 15 Primary Documents: A Sourcebook of Eastern and Central European Art Since the

1950s, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002. 16 Prague Biennale 1, “Press Release” www.praguebiennale.org. 17 Groys, Boris, Hollein, Max, Weinhart, Martina (Editors) Dream Factory Communism:

Visual Culture of the Stalin period, Berlin: Hatje Cantz publishers, 2003.

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and the Caucasus. Perhaps, it can be accounted for by the overbearing impact of Russia’s continuing control and its lack of recognition of the independence of the Ukraine, Bulgaria, and countries of both the North and South Caucasus. In 2005, three years after the Primary Documents book by MoMA, Piotrowski published In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avantgarde in Eastern Europe 1945–1989 which engaged Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, with “forays” into Bulgaria.18 Reminding its audience of the importance of the Yalta Agreement, Piotrowski proposed that the geographic and spatial character of Eastern Europe is, as Michel Foucault had argued “an essential plane for the relations of power”19 Foucault had written in another context, that to deconstruct the relations of power embodied in space, involves not only dividing but also a crossing of borders. Piotrowski uses this idea as the basis upon which to include the eastern part of South Europe as well as Eastern Europe. Piotrowski notes that his book In the Shadow of Yalta is a comparative analysis in which a “diachronic dimension is therefore established through several synchronic samples.”20 On this basis, his argument establishes a more equal and comparative exchange than that proposed by the “globalization argument” or the line of enquiry that has explored modernity as a plurality of modernities, including both “minority” and “repressed”21 This echoes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature who argued that the three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective arrangement of utterance. The scarcity of Minor Literature in the public sphere creates for Deleuze and Guattari a necessary collectivization of enunciation; the

18 Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe 1945–1989, London: Reaktion Books, 2009. First published in Poland in 2005 and later in English. 19 Piotrowski, ibid., p. 15. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews

and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin Gordon ed, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. See also Foucault and Space, Knowledge and Power, Foucault and Geography, Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden eds, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007. 20 Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, op. cit., p. 9. 21 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana

Polan, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

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individual writer inevitably speaks for the collective experience. In this way, minor literature produces an “active solidarity” among the collective through which its revolutionary potentiality is felt. Minor Literatures for Deleuze and Guattari promote a state of community and becoming as an escape from majoritarian nationalism. In privileging “becoming” over a secure sense of national identity, they create a democratic vision of a collectivity without hierarchy. Piotrowski’s caveat is, nevertheless, that the type of art produced in these countries differs between each other because the communist systems were “different… sometimes contrary [in] character and intensity.”22 In 2007, the journal Afterall published East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, the result of their long research project on Eastern Europe.23 Initiated and edited by the Slovenian artists’ group Irwin and introduced by museum curator Charles Esche, the voluminous book consists of essays on contemporary art in eighteen countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The project addressed the lack of a “referential system for the arthistorically significant events, artifacts and artists that would be accepted and respected outside the borders of a given country,” which (was) observed in Eastern Europe.24 The aim of East Art Map (EAM), as its authors assert, is “to present art from the whole space of Eastern Europe, taking artists out of their national frameworks and presenting them in a unified scheme.”25 Such an aim, they argued, was justified by the need for an in-depth study mapping the developments of East European art and its complexities and situating it in a larger context. Still, as the members of Irwin acknowledged, their ambitions were not lofty but rather practical: to organize the fundamental relationships between East European artists where these relations have not organized, to draw a map and create a table.26 22 Op. cit. 23 East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, IRWIN ed, London: Saint

Martin’s College of Art and Design, 2007. The essays devoted to individual countries were first published as a part of Afterall journal in 2002. 24 Irwin (ed.), ‘General Introduction’, East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, London, 2006, p. 12. 25 Ibid. p. 12. 26 ‘General Introduction’, op. cit., p. 12.

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Another project that operated with the concept of the historicization of East European art was the exhibition Interrupted Histories, held at the Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana in 2006. The exhibition presented itself as a tool for creating history in the context of the West’s domination in establishing its art history as the only internationally valid canon. The invited artists and groups acted simultaneously as archivists (“of their own and other artists’ projects or of various phenomena in the national history”), curators (“who research their own historical context and establish a comparable framework for various big and little histories”), historians, anthropologists, and ethnologists (“who record current and pertinent phenomena in the interaction between tradition and modernity as well as rapid change in the local landscape”).27 The purpose of these self-historicizing strategies, however, was “not to establish yet another collective narrative such as the Western world is familiar with.”28 As Zdenka Badovinac, curator of the exhibition, remarked, “[t]hese artists are not interested in creating a new big history, but are rather interested in the conditions that sustain the tension between small and temporary histories and what is defined as big history.”29 Essentially, the book stays with national divisions in the post-Soviet era with a focus on particular artists and artworks. The only exception being the final essay “The Post-Soviet Condition” by eminent cultural historian, Susan Buck-Morss who writes of a universal condition: “we are all in this time that is both transient and universal; we share the same contingent history.”30 She notes an unpublished manuscript by Helen Petrovsky, a Soviet scholar who had noted “a human community (or collective) in the making”, a “transient social present and ‘the shock of non-similar similarity.’”31 The following year, the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato held the exhibition Progressive Nostalgia, curated by Viktor 27 Badovinac, Z. 2006, ‘Interrupted Histories’, in Prekinjene zgodovine / Interrupted Histories: ArtEast Exhibition, Ljubljana, unpaginated. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Post-Soviet Condition’, East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, ibid., p. 498. 31 Ibid., p. 498. Helen Petrovsky, unpublished manuscript. At the time of this book, Petrovsky is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Analytical Anthropology in the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy, Moscow.

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Misiano.32 Dedicated to contemporary art from former USSR countries, the exhibition covered eleven countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Krgyzstan, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, and the Ukraine. It thereby expanded both the MoMA and Piotrowski books to include certain Caucasus countries and two Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan and Krgyzstan. In the introduction, Misiano wrote that there is a larger problem at the heart of the matter. He notes, “History is…a drama and a utopia that is today becoming a strategy of resistance…The more authoritarian and corrupted that the ideology stabilization becomes the more the practice of cynicism and ironic deconstruction…becomes filled with liberated meaning.”33 In 2010, the English publishing house Black Dog presented Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, that included six essays and some fifty-six artists from sixteen countries, of whom twenty-five are from Poland and Russia.34 The editors Phoebe Adler and Duncan McCorquodale, note the artists were chosen based on the “account of their reputation on the international contemporary art scene” and hence is presented by medium, rather than country of origin, paying testament to the fluidity of borders…”35 Shortly after, Terry Smith published his book Contemporary Art, offering an alternative critical model through which to tackle the contentious issue of distinctions made on the basis of geography.36 In his introduction, Smith argues that “the contemporary” or “contemporaneity” is quite distinct from “the modern”. Drawing on Etienne Balibar, Smith notes Balibar’s idea of translation as, “The showing of that which is shared, that which is different, and that which is untranslatable in all spheres of life… Alertness to multiplicity and difference has been and continues to be, at the core of contemporaneity.”37 However, while the book ranged across countries and artists in different countries and cities, 32 Viktor Misiano, Progressive Nostalgia: Contemporary Art of the Former USSR, Prato, Italy: Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, 2008. 33 Viktor Misiano, ‘Progressive Nostalgia’, ibid., p. 12. 34 Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, Phoebe Adler and Duncan McCorquodale eds,

London, UK: Black Dog publishing, 2010. 35 Foreword, Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, ibid., p. 7. 36 Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents, London: Laurence King, 2011. 37 Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe: Reflections on Transitional Citizenship,

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 115.

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it offered little to distinguish one from another in the context of their immediate site of production and reception. In 2014, the exhibition Fragile Sense of Hope opened in Berlin, Germany.38 Its ambition, as stated by the organizers, was to “invite visitors to contemplate the fragility of Europe’s many private and public hopes.”39 It included artists from the Balkans, notably Croatia, BosniaHerzegovina, Kosova, Macedonia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, and the Ukraine, arguing that the modern social and cultural history of the Caucasian countries was and remains not so different from other countries such as the Ukraine or Romania. There had been equally vital avant-garde movements, even though their respective, unfolding histories were distinct in regard to the presence of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.40 Moreover, many artists do not live in their countries of origin but rather, produce and exhibit their work primarily in Western Europe and only, at times, in their country of origin. Hence, a writing of their histories cannot be adequately mapped within the context of their country of birth, nor country in which they live.

The Inter-Local The inter-local is the final area of focus regarding the different conceptual and theoretical approaches underlying some of the books and exhibition projects highlighted. This enables us to move beyond the national and addresses the inter-local, as distinct from the international, as the organizing concept around which to look at and evaluate contemporary art not only Eastern Europe but rather, those post-Soviet Union countries (including Central Asia) that remain outside the sphere of influence of and exchange with Western Europe.

38 Fragile Sense of Hope—Art Collection Telekom, me Collectors Room/Olbricht Foundation, Berlin, Germany, 10 October 10–23 November 2014. The exhibition was curated by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher, and organized in conjunction with the Collectors Room/Olbricht Foundation. 39 Ibid. Exhibition brochure. 40 If we consider Georgia as one of the key countries of the Caucasus that has time and

again resisted Russian domination, then we might also look at its history over the past one hundred years. See my essay ‘Redrawing East of the East’, in State of Play: Georgian Art, 1985–1999. Tbilisi, Georgia: Contemporary Art Gallery, National History Museum, pp. 11–16, 2016.

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Such an approach by and large subsumes the national and regional distinctions as the means of determining and discussing contemporary art. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, writers were beginning to look more closely at the concept of the global. Hans Belting had argued that contemporary art is global by definition, engaging with the issues important to the whole world, while its critique aims at the processes which shape the present time everywhere. Consequently, what is local for Belting, has become global.41 While true, I would give pause to a global perspective. For while recognizing the general trend of co-option of contemporary art into a global cultural economy, we need to examine more closely this process in relation to its locality. This will lead to a more acute means of differentiation, most especially in regard to Eastern Europe.42 Until recently, Eastern Europe had been defined neither by geographical nor social reasons but rather, first and foremost, by political and economic factors. This was critical in distinguishing features of post-Soviet countries as distinct from Western European culture and art. For many of these contemporary artists, geography is a highly charged term, at one time, nation-bound. However, national distinctions are understood as no longer the basis of comparison, but a point of reference. At the same time, we can no longer base our reading on a universalism that was the underlying principle of Western modernism. As Piotr Piotrowski notes, this approach was oriented around the “centre-periphery distinction and constituted a vertical and revisionist history of art”, hence raising issues of locality and difference. He likened this approach to Edward Said’s characterization of Orientalism. Moreover, reflecting on the “global turn” in the humanities, Piotrowski observed in 2008 that the type of locality related to the structure of nation-states and the modernist form of nationalism “is now changing on account of the process of globalization”, specifically 41 See Hans Belting, ‘Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age’, Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective, Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg eds, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007, pp. 16–38. See also Hans Belting, ‘Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate’, The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg eds, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009, pp. 38–73. 42 Anthony Downey has written recently an excellent critique of the cultural economy of globalization in relation to the Middle East. See Anthony Downey, Future Imperfect: Focus on visual Culture in the Middle East\, published in di’van | A Journal of Accounts, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 110–119.

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with “the transformation of nation-states into more cosmopolitan organisations.”43 In its place, Piotrowski proposed a horizontal approach, rather than a universal reading of contemporary art. However, despite his enthusiasm at the time, Piotrowski was still hesitant to accept that locality had disappeared as an identity marker. “The nation” seen from a postmodern perspective is deprived of its essential features. Postcolonial scholarly practice however, relies on the essence of the nation to define its critical strategy and resistance to “the center.” Using an international horizontal art history, operating with the notion of “the nation,” there must be a defense of the (national) subject. It is thus closer to the post-colonial interpretation than to the postmodern. In this regard, the concept of geography becomes critical. Piotrowski was pointing to the clearly perceived need to shift positions as defined in the late 1990s, from defining a specific space for the region to placing it in a critically nuanced global perspective.44 As if in response, Boris Groys, wrote in his “Haunted by Communism,” an introduction to the book Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe: Can this art be said to possess a distinct character? Is it possible to speak about Eastern European art as a cultural phenomenon that crosses the borders of individual national cultures and unifies, to a certain degree, the Eastern European cultural space—being at the same time distinctive from that of other regions. Indeed, the Eastern European cultural space is extremely heterogeneous.45

Given this heterogeneity, Groys continues that there is only one experience which unites these countries and that is the experience of Soviet communism. This experience also distinguishes them from others. Groys continues that for post-Communist artists “the socialist alternative is not only a utopian, idyllic dream project into the future but also a nostalgic and simultaneous traumatic memory of their recent past.”46 In this sense,

43 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History’, Umeni/Art, Vol. 56, Issue 5, 2008, pp. 378–383. 44 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘East European Art Seen from Global Perspectives: Past and Present’, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland, 24–27 October 2014. 45 Boris Groys, ‘Haunted by Communism’, Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, op. cit., p. 18 (see Fn. 34). 46 Groys, ibid., p. 21.

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it is simultaneously utopian and dystopian. Furthermore, many shared an ambivalent artistic attitude of the post-Communist period and used irony to distance themselves from the official ideology. Today the art scene is a place of emancipatory projects, participative practices, radical political attitudes but also a place of memories of the social catastrophes and disappointments of the revolutionary twentieth century. In this context Eastern European art plays an important role because the revolutionary past is its own past. Just as the demise of Eastern European Socialist regimes left a vast territory and resources for private appropriation, the simultaneous death of Socialist humanity left a vast empire of feelings, a huge emotional estate released for individual artistic appropriation.47

Groys goes on to discuss the emergence of the Western art market and both the commercialization and commodification of Eastern European art as the result of the Cold War, characterizing the latter as a “postCommunist art”. This, for him, is the only way to speak of art from these countries as a whole, over and above specific national identities. As a result, socialism’s legacy is that the avant-garde in the East has not been charged by utopian perspectives. Rather, it has primarily worked from a collective perspective, as distinct from the individualist characteristic of the West. Moreover, this avant-garde was founded and functioned in a transgressive, non-academic manner, venturing into uncharted territories, innovating and challenging the status quo, and creating different life conditions. One may ask why Groys avoids including Central Asia in this summary of a post-Soviet condition when, in fact, the same conclusion can be applied to both the cultural dynamic of artists in both Kazakhstan or Krygystan. If we study the past three generations of Kazakh artists, there has been an increasing shift away from a Soviet ambit and ideas toward individuality. Young contemporary Kazakh artists align themselves with Western artists in spirit where their personal lives and experience is more important than the idea of a collective or national identity. Moreover, they don’t seek to establish some link to their past or traditions of the land or popular culture. This is why too, Misiano includes Central Asia, rather than only Eastern Europe, recognizing the post-Soviet experience

47 ibid., pp. 20–21. Groys offers as examples the work of the Russian artists Komar and Melamid and Slovenian group IRWIN.

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as the defining principle in understanding the character of contemporary art in all those countries once controlled and defined by Russia and the Soviet Union. As he writes, “history (is a) drama and a utopia that is today becoming a strategy of resistance… The more authoritarian and corrupted that the ideology stabilization becomes the more the practice of cynicism and ironic deconstruction (the strategy of resistance that was practiced back in the Soviet years) becomes filled with liberated meaning.”48 Terry Smith in his Contemporary Art: World Currents proposes an alternative critical model through which to tackle this issue of the local/national/ international.49 In his introduction, Smith argues that “the contemporary” or “contemporaneity” is quite distinct from the modern. But this does not mean that it is an even playing field or, that every country is on the same economic or socio-cultural footing and is therefore comparable with one another.50 Furthermore, while citing Piotrowski’s work on Poland, Smith does not discuss the author’s elaboration of the concept of “horizontality” first proposed in 2008. Piotrowski’s concept of horizontality in fact accommodates the concept of “contemporaneity” as part of a comparative means of evaluating contemporary practices. This must also be distinguished from the use of the term horizontality by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alan Bois to define an operation where the floor became a production site of art.51 The promise of the “now-time” of “a human community (or collective) in the making… of (a) non-similar similarity” lies before artists of both Eastern European and Central Asian countries.52 And yet, the chronic lack of a local infrastructure, of resources and support for contemporary art in almost all these countries needs to be recognized as issues to overcome in order to make possible their cultural development. It is, if nothing more, the reason why artists of these countries work in, if not move, to Western Europe or elsewhere and, why the critical value of “horizontality” had remained an unrealized promise for so long.

48 Misiano, Progressive Nostalgia, op. cit., p. 12. 49 Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents, London: Laurence King, 2011. 50 Here Smith paraphrases from Etienne Balibar’s, We, the People of Europe: Reflections

on Transitional Citizenship, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 51 See Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1977. 52 Helen Petrovsky, op. cit.

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We can say that the suppressed unconscious of art history, namely, national art histories, was interfering with the idea of a horizontal art history. By the early 2000s, the question of nation-building and nationalism seemed a distant and obsolete issue. But much has changed since with the rise of a populist and reactionary nationalism that has turned its back on refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers or, waged political, religious or ethnic repression against others. Germany, Poland, Hungary, and The Netherlands have seen the rise of right-wing political parties, promoting xenophobia, hatred, and racism within their country. In such a climate the cause for any kind of regionalist, internationalist or universalist approach has been swiftly rejected as irrelevant, if not denounced as threatening to local interests and needs. The changing political landscape of Europe has additionally altered the rhetoric, urgencies, alliances, and agencies of academic discourse. The attempt to apply a regional perspective at a time of pervasive nationalism is also reflected in Piotrowski’s project of subverting the hierarchical position of different art histories by positioning them horizontally. Borders are being closed, but they continue to be crossed throughout the continent. It can be no longer simply the embrace of the national and with it, the sense of national self-definition but, rather the argument for and defense of some form of transnational values. As Piotrowski argues, the key problem of a horizontal art history is one of localization. “We have the ‘history of modern art’ with no local specification while, on the other hand, (outside the centre) we have all kinds (of) adjectives specifying the regional.”53 Secondly, Piotrowski was conscious of the paradox that equality might come at the price of losing local and national histories, with their specificities, peculiarities, and subtle distinctions. He writes of the need to recognize local canons and value systems which often contradict those of Western art centers. In so doing, one does not produce a single meta-narrative which would adhere to the Westcentric, universal, vertical model of art history, but a horizontal, polyphonic, and dynamic paradigm of critical art-history analysis.54 Seeking to syncretize the two streams of thought in his vision, Piotrowski argued that a horizontal art history written from a micro perspective in order to make a critique of the essence of the national

53 Piotrowski, ‘On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History’, op. cit., p. 381. 54 Ibid., pp. 378–383.

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subject, deconstructing it so as to defend the culture of the Other against the national mainstream. He developed the solution of transnational, regional art history narratives which negotiate values and concepts along lines other than the opposition between national and international.55 The changed orientation of the positioning, literally inverted the loci of a region’s art history and challenged the centric position of the canon. This offered a positive solution as to how to overcome the limitations of binary opposition, juxtaposing the diverse art histories of the centers and margins and placing them on the same level, removing any hierarchical or subordinate relations between them. According to this theory, the necessary act of leveling should be twofold; the manoeuvre of “localizing” the center should go hand in hand with an analogue process on the other side, namely, “The Other must also take a fresh look at itself, define its position and the place from which it speaks.”56 In other words, the local becomes the means of and source for distinguishing and characterizing the particularity of a practice as distinct from another, by and large, regardless of national boundaries. By the late 1990s, Piotrowski was pointing to the clearly perceived need to shift positions as defined by a specific space to placing it in a critically nuanced global perspective.57 He developed the solution of transnational, regional art-history narratives with which negotiate values and concepts along lines other than the opposition between national and international.58 This changed orientation of the positioning, literally inverted the loci of the region’s art history and challenged the centric position of the canon. Piotrowski offered a positive solution as to how to overcome the limitations of binary opposition, juxtaposing the diverse art histories of the centers and margins and placing them on the same level, removing any hierarchical or subordinate relations between them. The key problem was one of localization and the step forward was a horizontal art history 55 Ibid. 56 Andras, Edit, ‘What Does East Central European Art History Want: Reflections on

the History Discourse in the Region Since 1989’, Extending the Dialogue, Berlin/Vienna: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory ERSTE Foundation/Archive Books, 2016, p. 60. 57 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘East European Art Seen from Global Perspectives: Past and Present’, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland, 24–27 October 2014. 58 Ibid.

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written from a micro perspective. In other words, the local becomes the means of and source for distinguishing and characterizing the particularity of a practice as distinct from another, by and large regardless of national boundaries. This critique of the essence of the national subject, defends the culture of the ‘Other’ against the national mainstream.”59 However, tacit in this discussion is the issue of the role of art in advocating democracy in Eastern Europe, a subject Piotrowski develops in his last book before his death.60 The issue of horizontality was a method of practice that underscored a democratic impulse as we will see in the work of the Polish artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Ukrainian artist, Nikita Kadan. In essence, the issue of democracy lies at the heart of Piotrowski’s project when he writes of a critique of the national subject, understood within the context of countries that were formerly communist. That is, not only is horizontality simply about making connections between different points, overrunning national boundaries and hence imposed ideological limitations. More, it is about using those connections—its correspondences and alliances—to reflect back on the local. To some extent, it resonates with Nicolas Bourriaud’s “concept of relational aesthetics” and theoretically, with Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of the curvature of social space that allows for points of intersection and intersubjective responsibility, that is an irreducible ethical proximity to another.61

59 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde’, Monoskop 2009. 60 Piotrowski, Piotr, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, trans. Anna Brzyski, London: Reaktion Books, 2012. 61 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 2nd ed., Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Press, 1978.

CHAPTER 3

The Thaw After Stalin, Soviet Union and Ukraine

The Thaw, by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg published in 1954, was a novel which heralded post-Stalinist liberalization. As a concept, the term was used to mark the era that ran from Stalin’s death in 1953 until it ended with Russia’s new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, proclaiming a new political path toward modernization.1 In art, this condition was expressed by the artist Yuri Pimenov with a series of landscapes, especially his painting A Wedding on Tomorrow’s Street, (1962). It pictures a young, newly married couple walking along planks over a churned-up, muddy suburban street. But the street has become a construction site with new blocks of flats going up everywhere. And yet, the scene is filled with the sunshine of spring, a symbol of growth and the young couple appear to be striding forward into their future life.2 After the death of Stalin, a power struggle ensued with Khrushchev emerging victorious. On the 25th of February 1956 at the 20th Party Congress, he denounced Stalin’s purges and opened up in a less repressive era and a thaw began. The 1960s was the beginning of the long enduring Cold War years, until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. But not 1 I draw on Viktor Misiano’s marvelous text: “Thaw and the Poetics of Soil,” Sweet Sixties, Specters and Spirits of a Parallel Avant-Garde, eds. Georg Schöllhammer and Ruben Arevshatyan. Sternberg Press and Tranzit, 2014. 2 It was a popular, hopeful image for many and used on a stamp in the Soviet Union in 1973.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_3

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only were there changes in the Soviet Union but, throughout the region. This would affect all sectors of public life, including the cultural sphere.

Part One While the early years of twentieth-century modernism can be characterized as a period of cultural exchange and collaboration, the 1960s was marked by the beginnings of the nonconformist movement and samizdat (underground movement) in Russia and the Ukraine that can be loosely defined as dissident with the Soviet regime. This was very much against about the bureaucratization of artistic practice and daily life in the Soviet Union and not about anti-socialism. The 1957 thaw also resulted in the discovery of Western artistic practices and historical Russian avantgarde traditions by young Soviet artists. Artists began experimenting with abstraction, as it was the antithesis of Socialist Realism. As a “movement” the function and role of the nonconformist art was clear. Artists saw that the state would no longer accept their art and would be barred from joining the Artists Union. Precluded from membership, these artists were considered dissidents. Joseph Backstein, the Russian curator, author and museum director, characterizes this in Russia in the following way? The duality of life in which the official perception of everyday reality is independent of the reality of the imagination leads to a situation where art plays a special role in society. In any culture, art is a special reality, but in the Soviet Union, art was doubly real precisely because it had no relation to reality. It was a higher reality…. The goal of nonconformism in art was to challenge the status of official artistic reality, to question it, to treat it with irony. Yet that was the one unacceptable thing. All of Soviet society rested on orthodoxy, and nonconformism was its enemy. That is why even the conditional and partial legalization of nonconformism in the mid-1970s was the beginning of the end of the Soviet regime.3

The Cuban Missile Crisis from October 1962 strengthened the Kremlin conservatives, primarily Mikhail Suslov and Leonid Ilchev. Khrushchev changed his attitude and lost confidence in the anti-Stalinist “thaw” 3 Backstein, Joseph. “A View from Moscow,” Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 332.

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movement he had launched was nearing its end. Despite the fact that he did not understand abstract art Khrushchev, nevertheless, had much more in common with the artists creating it than with the hard-liners who already sought a less unpredictable leader. In November 1962, Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Kislovodsk, Russia, 1918–2008) published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. By the end of the month on November 26th, an avant-garde art exhibition was opened at Eli Beliutin studio in Moscow. Hundreds of invitees gathered to see art which had not partaken in official displays before. Three days later, the works were transferred to the second floor of the Manezhe Exhibition Hall, right across from the Kremlin and above the floor that had already displayed Thirty Years of Art in Moscow. The “thaw” era symbolically ended quickly when Khrushchev, together with other Party leadership, visited the art exhibition on December 1, 1962. By this time the exhibition had been already open to the public for a month and seen by over 100,000 visitors. However, Khruschev’s visit led him to rant against “filth, decadence and sexual deviations”4 “It is dog shit… A donkey could smear better than this with his tail,” shouted Nikita. He turned to Zheltovsky, the painter. “You’re a nicelooking lad, but how could you paint something like this? We should take down your pants and set you in a clump of nettles until you understand your mistakes. You should be ashamed. It’s a pity, of course, that your mother’s dead, but maybe it’s lucky for her that she can’t see how her son is spending his time. What master are you serving anyway? …You’ve got to get out or paint differently. As you are, there is no future for you on our soil.”5

Following Khrushchev’s visit, a series of meetings between the artistic intelligentsia and the Central Committee Ideological Commission reasserted party control over the arts along with the central principles of Socialist Realist “partiinost’ and narodnost.” A few days later, at a reception and despite the fact that there were hundreds of artists present at 4 Reid, Susan Emily, “In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Slavica Publishers. 6 (4): 673– 716, 2005. There are different versions of Khrushev’s speech, see McMillan, Priscilla Johnson and Labedz Leopold, Khrushchev and the aArts: The Politics of Soviet culture, 1962-1964. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. 5 Ibid.

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the Kremlin, including Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev exceeded his Manezhe statement by saying: If that’s supposed to be a woman, then you’re faggot. And the sentence for them is ten years in prison, he said to an artist. Is this a cow or a horse?6

To Khrushchev destalinization apparently held, quite intimately, great limitations. Just as he was capable of overthrowing Stalin, this time he was equally ready to attack something severely, but not to implement an entirely new system. Stalin never returned and neither did entirely the traditions of his time but anything modern was under attack. Yet, what had happened in the meantime could not be completely erased. Newspapers again called upon a need to purge art. “Thawed” Soviet art could not return to the patterns Khrushchev understood best. The exhibition that had provoked his response remained on display at the Manezhe for a while, attracting numerous visitors. No one was arrested or exiled, there were no trials or prohibited publication of works and Khrushchev was not in favor of. That happened only after he was deposed by the end of 1964. However, the fallout from the Manezh exhibition had caused restrictions to be enforced once again. The new restrictions could not however, curtail what the young artists had learned during the five-year interlude. Dmitry Plavinsky (1937–2012) was one of these nonconformist artists. From 1941–1944 he had lived as an evacuee in Omsk, returning to Moscow in 1945. From 1951–1956, he studied at the Theater Design Department of the 1905 Institute of Art School with Victor Shestakov (1898–1957), the former chief artist of Meyerhold. In 1957 he then worked at the international artists’ studio at Gorky Park and participated in the exhibition of the VI International Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow with artist Anatoly Zverev (1931–1986).7 At the time he became engaged by Art Informel and Jean Dubuffet. From 1958 to 1965 Plavinsky traveled around the country and visited northern Russian towns (Pskov, Kostroma, Ferapontovo) and Central Asia. This led to his interest in old Russian culture and “structural symbolism.” In his own words, the artist describes the artistic movement 6 Ibid. 7 From 1975 he became a member and a regular participant of exhibitions of the Moscow Joint Committee of Graphic Artists on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street.

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he developed as “structural symbolism” where an integral view of the world disintegrates into a sequence of symbolic forms, subsumed into the strata of time—the past, present, and future. In 1964 he produced a graphical book of grasses painted from life after which he finally moved across to figural painting, as well as texture painting, and his works increasingly included religious motifs. An exhibition dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky and Dmitry Plavinsky: A breakthrough in the past reveals much about this period.8 The exhibition highlighted Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev (1969) and Dmitry Plavinsky’s etchings and paintings made at the same time and, in some cases, in the same places as Tarkovsky (1932–1986) had been filming.9 In the 1960s both artists were drawn to Russia’s ideologically forbidden religious past, to what the curators of the exhibition call the “aesthetics of icons as the manifestation of the Christian world view, as a path for spiritual development and inner freedom.”10 The idea of the exhibition was suggested by Polina Lobachevskaya, director of the AZ Museum, who told The Moscow Times that they wanted the show to be “emotional, visceral. The cultural ties with the past had been broken in the Soviet era, but these two artists put the ties back together and united the eras. To let people see that, we had to create an exhibition that would let them feel what united these two artists.”11 The basement of the Theater of Nations’ New Space, was dedicated to Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, Andrei Rublev and the second floor to the work of Dmitry Plavinsky: paintings of fantastical creatures, shields, cosmic objects, and a small self-portrait. One wall was designed as a kind of iconostasis to hold a series of etchings of icons and the ruined country churches of the late Soviet era. Paintings by Plavinsky and large photographs of the characters in Andrei Rublev stood against the visual backdrop of images from the film playing on the walls as clouds played across the ceiling.

8 Andrei Tarkovsky and Dmitry Plavinsky: A Breakthrough in the Past, Theater of Nations’ New Space (Strastnoy Boulevard), June 20–July 20, 2017. 9 Tarkovsky’s work is discussed more extensively in the Postscript to this book. 10 Ibid. 11 Polina Lobachevskaya, The Moscow Times, 2017.

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Part Two Different small groups of nonconformist art emerged in the period of the 1960–1970s, especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg but, also in different cities of the Ukraine, especially Kharkiv and Odessa. Critic and theorist Victor Tupitsyn (Moscow, 1945) points out that the 1960s mark an era of “decommunalization” in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev worked to improve housing conditions, and a consequence of this was that artists began to get studios of their own, or shared spaces with like-minded colleagues.12 The Nonconformists were not united by any singular style, but rather by a common desire to create freely and to exhibit their work without restrictions. Many members of the Lianozovo group worked in an abstract style. Tupitsyn considers that, “the aestheticization of misery is precisely what distinguishes the representatives of the de-classed communal intelligentsia of the thaw era from their predecessors.”13 In Moscow, the Lianozovo Group formed in 1958, named after Lianozovo, a small village outside of Moscow, where most of the artists lived and worked. It was centered around Oscar Rabin (1928–2018), along with his wife Valentina Kropivnitsky (1928–2008) and a number of artists and writers were involved including : Evgenii Kropivnitsky (1893–1979), the artist and poet, Olga Potapova (1892–1971), Lidia Masterkova (1927–2008), Vladimir Nemukhin (1925–2016), Nikolai Vechtomov (Moscow, 1923–2007) and the poets Vsevolod Nekrasov (Moscow, 1934–2009), Genrikh Sapgir (1928–1999) and Igor Kholin (Moscow, 1920–1999). Officially, those in the Lianozovo group were members of the Moscow Union of Graphic Artists, working in the applied and graphic arts. As such, they were not permitted to hold painting exhibitions, as that fell under the domain of the Artists’ Union. Consequently, apartment exhibitions and literary salons began at this time as a means of publicly exhibiting. However, the Lianozovo group, in particular, was often

12 Tupitsyn, Victor. “Nonidentity with Identity: Moscow Communal Modernism, 1950s-1980s,” Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 86. 13 Tupitsyn, Victor. “Nonidentity with Identity: Moscow Communal Modernism, 1950s-1980s,” Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 86.

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harassed by Soviet officials as they were especially vigilant in pursuing public exhibitions of their work. In strong contrast to the Lianozovo Group artists who were primarily abstractionists were the Sreterensky Boulevard Group. The Sretensky Boulevard Group was a group of artists that had studios in and around Sretensky Boulevard in central Moscow who, by the late 1960s, became a loosely associated community. Those primarily identified as the core group were Ilya Kabakov, (Dnipropetrovsk, 1933), Eduard Steinberg (1937–2012), Erik Bulatov (1933), Viktor Pivovarov (Moscow, 1937), and Vladimir Yankilevsky (Moscow, 1938–2018). The group also included Oleg Vassiliev (Moscow, 1931–2013), Ulo Sooster (Uhtri, Estonia, 1924–1970) and others with the same preoccupation. The artist’s studios were also used as venues for ideas about unofficial art. The majority of visual artists who became part of the Sreterensky Boulevard Group worked officially as book illustrators and graphic designers and were members of the Moscow Union of Graphic Artists. But it is also apparent that the group were conformist as a survival strategy, a tactic which began at the art academies. Ilya Kabakov, one of the Sretensky Boulevard Group, was born in Dnipropetrovsk to Jewish parents. During World War II he was evacuated to Samarkand with his mother. There he started attending the school of the Leningrad Academy of Art that was evacuated to Samarkand and from 1945 to 1951, he studied at the Art School, Moscow. From 1953 on, Kabakov became a book illustrator and official artist. But he was also able to produce his “private” artwork in his official studio and began making his first unofficial works, sketches on paper which he called “drawings for myself.” The phrase “drawings for myself” serves as a title for the works and an explanation. Kabakov reports that during school and throughout his early career he did everything expected of him and, on the surface, accepted the Soviet reality. In 1957 he graduated from V.I. Surikov State Art Institute, Moscow, where he specialized in graphic design and book illustration and by 1959, Kabakov became a “candidate member” of the Union of Soviet Artists (he later became a full member in 1962). This status secured him a studio, steady work as an illustrator and a relatively healthy income by Soviet standards. In general, Kabakov illustrated children’s books for 3–6 months each year and then spent the remainder of his time on his own projects. By using fictional biographies, many inspired by his own experiences, Kabakov attempted to explain the birth and death of the Soviet Union,

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which he claimed to be the first modern society to disappear. In the Soviet Union, Kabakov discovered elements common to every modern society, and in doing so examined the rift between capitalism and communism. Rather than depict the Soviet Union as a failed Socialist project defeated by Western economics, Kabakov described it as one utopian project among many, capitalism included. By re-examining historical narratives and perspectives, Kabakov delivered a message that every project, whether public or private, important or trivial, has the potential to fail due to the potentially authoritarian will to power. Kabakov’s Self -Portrait of 1962 recalls the post-Impressionist French painter Paul Cézanne, suggesting a gesture of solidarity with the Russian avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, who revered Cézanne. In 1956 Ilya had visited Robert Falk, a member of the pre-revolutionary Jack of Diamonds group, who had been ostracized by the Soviet authorities for both his Jewish identity and his refusal to paint in the Socialist Realist style. But Kabakov had his first taste of publicly challenging the Soviet regime when in 1965, he was included in an exhibition of a number of works of Soviet artists by a member of the Italian Communist Party in L’Aquila, Italy. The goal of the show was to prove that the Soviet Union had a more diverse culture than was known to the West and even to the Soviet people. Kabakov lent a series of drawings entitled Shower. In the original series, a man is depicted standing under a shower but with no water. Kabakov interpreted the work as a simple but universal metaphor about the individual who is always waiting for something, but never receives anything. The Italians and critics of communism interpreted the work as signifying Soviet culture and its lack of material reward. As a result of this publicity, Kabakov was prevented from getting work as an illustrator for four years, forcing him to work under someone else’s name. The use of an alter ego would subsequently become a common tool in Kabakov’s unofficial artwork. It was at the studio on Sretensky Boulevard that Kabakov’s unofficial work took a new turn. Previously, his work consisted of relatively modest-sized drawings of approximately 8 × 11 inches. He began to create considerably larger works. The Russian Series (1969), consisting of three paintings, (49 × 77 inches) was one and it became a prototype for Kabakov’s later works, Each painting was covered with a sandy brown colored enamel but there were minute details and objects alternatively on the surface or hidden beneath the sandy color. The details interrupt the viewer’s gaze, which would otherwise be overwhelmed by the color of

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brown enamel. In all three works, the details are located in the corners or away from the center. The wholeness of the sandy color, similar in color to that of soil, is left intact, interrupted in a discrete manner almost secretively or mistakenly. Yet the dominance of the center overpowers the viewer, returning his gaze to the middle and away from the discrepancies in color. Kabakov described the colors of paint in The Russian Series as the main characters. The brown sandy soil color of the first series was the same enamel used in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s to paint everything from roofs to hallways, but most often floors. Kabakov points out that the color of the state is red but the color of the country is grey, due to its “humdrum existence.” Kabakov assigns these colors a metaphysical, meaning that the earth and nature were controlled and depicted by the Soviet state.14 He then suggests that if you mix these two colors you end up with the brown sandy soil color, which signifies both the floor and the ground that support the feet of the populace of the Soviet Union. The green of the second series was enamel, used to paint the lower part of the walls up to one meter high in order to protect them from dirt and scuffs. For Kabakov, these colors evoked feelings of unavoidable hopelessness. But, what these series of paintings do not address overtly is any political ideology. Only impersonal colors exist to dominate minor features, all of which are faceless texts and objects.

Part Three Meanwhile in 1974, the Lianozovo group proposed an open-air exhibition in an attempt to circumvent the law. They invited dozens of other nonconformist artists also to exhibit. It became known as the Bulldozer Exhibition (Byld´ozepna v´yctavka) opening on a vacant lot in the Belyayevo district, southwest of central Moscow on September 15, 1974. The exhibition was organized by three underground artists: Oscar Rabin (Moscow, 1928–2018), Youri Jarkikh (Tikhoretsk, Krasnador Krai, Russia, 1938,) and Alexander Gleser (Baku, 1934), with Moscow and Leningrad artists, including Evgeny Ruhkin (Saratov, Russia, 1943–1976), Valentin Vorobyov (1938), Vladimir Nemukhin (Priluki, 14 Kabakov would repeat this strategy from 1983–1988 with a second series called Three Green Paintings. In this series, rather than depict objects, he placed texts on the upper left and right hand corners of what is otherwise a field of green enamel paint.

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Kaluga Oblast, Russia, 1925–2016), Lidiya Masterkova (Moscow, 1927– 2008), Boris (Borukh) Steinberg (1938–2003), Nadezhda Elskaya (1947–1978), Alexandr Rabin (Lianozovo, 1951–1994), Vasilij Sitnikov (Novo Rakitino, Tambov Governorate, Russia 1915–1987), Vera SellRyananoff (1951), Vitaly Komar (Moscow, 1943), and Alexander Melamid (Moscow, 1945), and Igor Sinyavin (1937–2000). The paintings at the Bulldozer exhibition were installed on makeshift stands made out of dump wood and attendance was approximately twenty artists of the artists and a group of spectators that included relatives, friends of the artists, friends of the friends and some Western journalists. But the exhibition was forcefully broken up by a large police force that included water cannons, 3 bulldozers and dump trucks, and hundreds of off-duty policemen. The attackers destroyed the paintings, beat and arrested the artists, spectators, and journalists. One of the most dramatic scenes was Oscar Rabin, one of its organizers, who went through the exhibition hanging to the blade of the bulldozer. Rabin later recounted the horror of seeing art crushed and artists arrested: “It was very frightening … The bulldozer was a symbol of an authoritarian regime just like the Soviet tanks in Prague.” Two of his own paintings—a landscape and a still life—were among those flattened by bulldozers or burnt by the invading KGB. Rabin later recounted the incident in an interview in London in 2010: The exhibition was prepared as a political act against the oppressive regime, rather than an artistic event. I knew that we’d be in trouble, that we could be arrested, beaten. There could be public trials. The last two days before the event were very scary, we were anxious about our fate. Knowing that virtually anything can happen to you is frightening.15

Backstein had gone to see the Bulldozer exhibition and remembers: I kept asking myself what happened? Why was there this sudden change of course? Of course the foreign press played a crucial role in legitimising contemporary art in the Soviet Union. But there was already something brewing within the regime, a subtle new dissident movement that was

15 Darlya Alberge, “Russian Painters Denounced as Soviet Traitors Exhibit in London.” The Guardian, November 30, 2010.

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slowly but steadily growing until it erupted in perestroika, which eventually lifted all the Kafkaesque barriers and constraints. Although most of the “bulldozer artists” subsequently emigrated from the USSR, their legacy is as tangible as ever. This brave, brief exhibition changed things permanently. I want to believe that there will be no return to those times of censorship and surveillance, regardless of all the recent conservative rhetoric.16

Rabin was arrested and punished with expulsion from Russia, but was allowed to leave with his family to Paris. However, the event was widely publicized in the Western media and the authorities were forced to allow a similar open-air exhibition in the Izmailova urban forest two weeks later on September 29, 1974. The new exhibition of works of 40 artists was held for four hours and was visited by thousands of people. Later remembered as “The Half-day of Freedom,” the Izmailovo exhibition in turn gave way to other exhibitions of Nonconformist art and part of the history of modern Russian art. Many of the members of Sreterensky Boulevard Group were part of what became known as the Moscow Conceptualists School. Beginning with Komar and Melamid and their Sots art movement in the early 1970s, it continued into the 1980s. It also included Ilya Kabakov, Dmitri Prigov (Moscow, 1940–2007), Irina Nakhova, Viktor Pivovarov, Erik Bulatov (Sverdlovsk, 1933), and Andrei Monastyrski (1949). Bulatov explained that conceptualist art is, “a rebellion of man against the everyday reality of life… a picture interests me as some kind of system… opening into the space of my everyday existence.”17 Or, as Kabakov writes: This contiguity, closeness, touchingness, contact with nothing, emptiness makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of ‘Russian conceptualism’… It is like something that hangs in the air, a self-reliant thing, like a fantastic construction, connected to nothing, with its roots in nothing…18

16 Backstein, Joseph, “The Rebels: 40 Years Ago Today an Underground Exhibition Changed the Face of Art in Russia Forever.” London. The Calvert Journal 22, September 15, 2014. 17 Roberts, Norma, ed. The Quest for Self -Expression: Painting in Moscow and Leningrad, 1965-1990. Columbus: Columbus Museum of Art, 1990, p. 72. 18 See Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (1995) explains why conceptualism is particularly appropriate to the culture and history of Russia, but also how it differs from Western Conceptualism.

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As one of the leaders of Muscovite conceptualism, the work of Dmitrij Prigov in the 1980s included a series in which he focused on the pages of one newspaper, Pravda. This provided the frame for his graphic layout and the choice of single words (such as Gorbachev, Sakharov, or Glasnost ) which, unvaried, continuously return, isolated against a bed of printed words. It was extreme and minimalist in its approach. As Joseph Backstein explained, “The creation of this nonconformist tradition was impelled by the fact that an outsider in the Soviet empire stood alone against a tremendous state machine, a great Leviathan that threatened to engulf him. To preserve one’s identity in this situation, one had to create a separate value system, including a system of aesthetic values.”19

Part Two In the early 1970s, the Vremya (“Time”) Group established themselves in Kharkiv. Evegniy Pavlov (Kharkiv, 1949), Yuriy Rupin (Lyman, Donetsk Oblast, 1946–2008) and Boris Mikhailov (Kharkiv, 1938) were among its founders. Active from about 1972 to 1976, this semi-official movement of photography, later known during the perestroika as the “Kharkiv school of photography,” these artists rejected the aesthetic criteria imposed by the state. For more than 15 Soviet years, the Vremya Group managed to secretly create, exhibit, and preserve their work in Kharkiv. Members also included Oleg Maliovany (Rubtsovsk, Altai Krai. Russia, 1945), Oleksandr Suprun (Berezivka, Kharkiv Oblast, 1946), Gennadiy Tubalev (Kharkiv, 1944–2006), Oleksandr Sitnichenko (Kharkiv, 1948–2018), and Anatoliy Makiyenko (Kharkiv, 1949), who joined the group later— realized in the framework of this program the need to develop a new approach, a new look at the photography. Later generations, notably Roman Pyatkovka (Kharkiv, 1955), Misha Pedan (Kharkiv, 1957), and Sergey Bratkov (Kharkiv, 1960) continued to develop Vremya years after. Vremya’s arrival marked the beginning of the phenomenon of the Kharkiv school of photography, an unstable informal community that slips away from any description was a formal language, manifesting itself only “in the disappearance, leaving only traces of their communicative gestures.” Such spontaneous associations fundamentally differed from

19 Backstein, J. Op.cit.

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coercive,” communities of kommunaamateur, one focused on technical quality, encouraged by the state through the creation of a network of photo clubs, and a reportage one, directed by an ideological governmental order—Rupin and the other members of the Vremia group were looking for ways to rethink photography as an artistic practice. On the ruins of imperial and totalitarian symbols incarnated mainly by the representation of endless parades and celebrations, members of the Vremia group sought traces of the presence of life through photography, which became the main tool of their resistance to the randomness and neurosis of the regime.20 From this point of view, it is easier to grasp the meaning of the “blow theory,” which was proclaimed by Rupin during a retrospective exhibition of the group in 1983. According to this theory, a photograph should punch the face of the viewer in order to lead him out from indifference and apathy. Obviously unbearable for the regime, the exhibition was censured and shut down the day of the opening. In an interview in 2019 in the British journal of Photography, Victor Kochetov, a member of Vremia, remarked: If you wanted to become a professional photographer in the Soviet Union, you only had two options. Either you could work at an atelier producing pictures for books or postcards, or you could work for the press – and both meant conforming to the ideological pressure of the state. Kochetov chose the first option, and through the 1960s he worked as a commercial photographer in Kharkiv, Ukraine, photographing events such as weddings and funerals, and providing images for books on travel.21 “In the USSR, there was no such term as ‘art photography’, at least not in Kharkiv,” he says. “There were some photography clubs at factories or big institutions, but it was mostly typical amateur photography. Everyone was just taking pictures of their children, wives, cats and sunsets.”22

One of the founders of Vremya was Boris Mikhailov (1938) who had received an education as an engineer and started to teach himself photography. After the KGB found nude pictures of his wife he was laid off from his job as an engineer and started to work full-time as a photographer. 20 The Soviet regime also prohibited to take photographs from a high point of view, as well as to photograph strategic objects—factories, railways, and military sites. 21 Marigold Warner, “Painting Photography: Victor and Sergey Kochetov.” British Journal of Photography, January 30, 2019. 22 Ibid.

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From the mid-1960s, Boris Mikhailov documented in Kharkiv the Soviet corporeality, banished into a non-manifestation. He had his first exhibition at the end of the 1960s and from 1968 to 1975 he shot several series documenting everyday scenes, the best known of them being the Red Series. In these photographs he mainly used the color red, to picture people, groups and city life. Red symbolized the October Revolution, political party and the social system of Soviet society. With Klebrigkeit (1982), Mikhailov added explanatory notes, or diary-like text to the photographs. And by the end of the 1990s, he had produced a massive series of 418 photographs called Case History (1997–98), that captures the social disintegration with its poverty and homelessness of contemporary Russia. It shows the situation of people who after the breakdown of the Soviet Union were not able to find their place in a secure social system. In a very direct way Mikhailov points out his critique against the “mask of beauty” of the emerging post-Soviet capitalistic way of life. From the late 1960s, the woman’s naked body also became the important topic of the aestheticized photographs of Oleg Maliovany. Only in the context of these years when defeminization and demasculinization were imposed by the Soviet regime, can the cult of the naked body, which dominated Vremia’s photos, be understood as one of their fundamental positions. Yevgeniy Pavlov, born in Kharkiv (1949) took his first steps in art in the late 1960s and by 1971 had joined Vremia. In 1979, he graduated from the cinematographic department of the Kiev State Theater Institute. Pavlov together with Oleksandr Suprun and Eduard Stranadko (1958 Ukraine) employed the “Defect as Aesthetic” style, which converted the liability of defect to a creative asset. Family and Ukrainian life are clearly apparent in his collage work translating personal and cultural metaphors into signs of contemporary life in Russia at the time. Pavlov’s Violin series, shot in 1972, was a perfect manifestation of Vremia’s position, organically embodying the ideas of the nonconformism of those years. It can be also perceived in the context of the Soviet hippie movement and the triumphant march of the music culture of the Beatles in the late 1960s–early 1970s. The main innovation of the work, significant for the general cultural space of unaffiliated art in the USSR, was the massive shot of the naked male model, which was done as an artistic project. This work with the group of “hippie” youths became the prototype of happenings and events shot as film stills. Even dignified by the instrument, this transgression of the erotic subject was perceived as an

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attempt on the moral foundations of Soviet society. But thanks to the violin’s presence, the performance “with musical instruments” invoked high art, bringing to mind connotations with classical visual art. Pavlov’s friend Jury Rupin (1946, Krasnyi Lyman, Donetsk Oblast— 2008, Vilnius, Lithuania) was also one of the first members of Vremia. At the age of 12 he had his first camera and started to make photography. Using a little-known bakelite model called a Smena, a low-cost 35 mm manufactured in the Soviet Union by LOMO, he snapped his grandmother feeding chickens in the yard of their house in Krasny Liman, about 200 km from Kharkov. From 1961 to 1965 Rupin studied at the Slavyanskiy Technical College and then served in the Soviet army from 1965 to 1968 in both Tbilisi and Yerevan. Rupin learnt his craft during his last year of military service. His parents sent him the money for a Zenit 3M, the first Soviet mirror camera with interchangeable lenses. During that time, he started to make photos while in the military. For Rupin, “it was mostly taking pictures of the top brass, particularly one major who liked to have his portrait done, but I also had to cover the routine lineups and parades.”23 However, like most representatives of the photographic underground in Kharkiv, Rupin pursued a higher technical education, after leaving the army, studying at the Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute from 1969 to 1974. In 1971, while studying at the Institute, he became one of the initiators of the “Vremia” group. Rupin was one of the first of Vremia to master color photography, both for commercial purposes and for art photography, amplifying the dramatic effects of images. Despite nude imagery was tabooed in the Soviet Union, it was this genre that drew his attention. Both the male (Sauna series, 1972), and the female body allows him to create images of the most abstract language, as with the series Anxiety, 1973. Tatiana Pavlova in her essay The Vremya Group’s Time, writes: Pornography was a criminal offense in the Soviet Union, and the legal definition was so vague that any photographer who took a nude picture could be easily charged as authorities saw fit. This was one of the many ways the government used to keep the people in check by arbitrarily assigning guilt. But prohibiting the photographing of nude models ‘in inappropriate

23 Lucy Davies, “Jury Rupin,” Mutual Art, Summer 2009. Zenit produced this to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.

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circumstances,’ i.e. outside of a bathhouse, created a legal loophole that was used by Jury Rupin in his impressive Sauna (1972). Bursting with protest energy, Rupin’s pictures of male bathhouse scenes were an act of defiance.24

In the 1970s, Rupin’s works used mainly experimental techniques of photography such as photo collage, pseudo-solarization, intermediate negatives, as well as the posterization technique invented by Witold Romer, a Polish engineer born in Lemberg (Lviv, Ukraine). These experimental photographs received the most vivid approval among those colleagues whose opinion Rupin respected the most at this time. Rupin’s first institutional recognition took place in 1974, when two of his works were published in the specialized monthly publication Ceskoslovenska Fotografie.” At the top of the page devoted to Rupin’s work, there was a photography made in high contrast pseudo-solarization technique from the series “Bathhouse” taken in 1972, while the “Anxiety” (made before 1975) was published in its lower part. From 1971 to 1985 Rupin worked as a correspondent for TASS, Evening Kharkiv, and Red Flag and from 1979–1985, he studied the History of Art at Repin Leningrad institute of painting, sculpture, and architecture. In 1989, he moved together with his family to Vilnius, changing his first name from Yuri to Juri, and opened first a private gallery “MRK” in Tallinn, (Estonia, for three years (1990–1993). By the 1990s he abandoned art photography and focused on managing the stock photo agency “Rupincom” (1994–2001). He died in Vilnius in 2008. Rupin’s novel A Photographer’s Diary was published online published in the late 2000s. It shows his prevailing interest in nude photography, one of the worst sins according to the socialist realism canons. It also makes clear how Rupin based his work on breaking Soviet taboos and conventions in art, such as The Death of A Cow that pictured slaughtering, butchering, and carving a carcass, or the series November 7 that debunked the hypocrisy of the Great October Revolution Day demonstrations. According to his Photographer’s Diary, his photo collage Night (1974) was the reason for the dismissal from the photo club in 1975/1976. Viktor Kochetov says he owes much of his own career to these artists, because they encouraged him to make fine art and make pictures for 24 Tatiana Pavlova, “Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics.1970-1980’s,” in VASA: Online Center for Media Studies, 2004.

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himself. “Mikhailov’s style of shooting – presenting two photographs on one sheet using writing on top – it was something that turned our work over,” he says. “It was unique. My discussions with Rupin and Mikhailov and their positive response to our work was the only stimulation and purpose for us to continue along this artistic route.” “They were part of a very small circle that affected everyone who got in touch with it.” On May 26, 1972, when Victor was 25 years old, his son Sergey was born. “Our collaboration began right after he started to sit on the potty,” says Kochetov. “He became my best model.” When Sergey was old enough to take pictures himself, they started to work collaboratively, and later helped each other by filling in for their odd jobs. In 2019 MOKSOP (Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography) chose images the Kochetov’s hand-made from 1970–2000 for its first publication. Because its hand-tinted images are “so visually strong that it is able to amuse even a demanding contemporary viewer” remarks Sergiy Lebedynskyy, founder of MOKSOP, representing a photographic history that is largely unknown to the broad public.25 Victor remarks that there was no real reason why he and Sergey started to paint their photographs, or work with a panoramic camera, other that it looked more interesting. But in doing so, they were inspired by Boris Mikhailov’s Luriki, a handcolored series from the late 1970s. Luriki was an underground method of hand-coloring black-and-white photographs. In an interview published in Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-related Works of Art in 2004, Mikhailov referred to the method as “Eastern idiocy,” and the “backwardness of Soviet Technology”—explaining that it was used only because he, and others, couldn’t get hold of color film. But, as Mikhailov also later points out, the technique revealed an irony and humor in the ordinary, creating images that “made people smile.” “The main point of Luriki was ‘making the beautiful even more beautiful’ with the help of old-fashioned, lagging technology,” he said. Officially the hand-colored images were considered bad taste and kitsch, and most exhibitions during Soviet times didn’t accept them. Even so, it was popular. “It was of high demand,” says Kochetov, “which is why Kharkiv became the centre of production of luriki for the whole of the USSR in the Brezhnev times of 1964-1982.”

25 KOCHETOV: Sergey and Victor Kochetov, Kharkiv: MOKSOP (Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography), 2019.

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“There was no particular idea or vision behind it, we just worked on the picture until we liked the result,” he adds. “But one could analyse particular images, and the usage of certain colours. If pink is used on ‘masculine’ images – and most Soviet propaganda images do look masculine – it may provoke an opposite effect. Or blue, the colour of dead body, is very heavy and disturbing.”26

The publication KOCHETOV contains a lot of nudity. Nude photography and references to sex in general were taboo, says Kochetov, and could not be shown in Soviet times—any images including nudity, including lightly pornographic shots, were confiscated by authorities and destroyed. “The ideological pressure was pushing all photographers to self-censorship, nobody would try to show such pictures in public,” he says. “Every single exhibition or photography show was checked by the state prior to its opening.”27 The censorship could be what led to the popular belief that “there is no sex in the USSR,” a phrase blurted out by a Russian actress during a live TV show aired in America. Kochetov recalls having unlimited access to condoms at state pharmacies, for example, sold for 4 kopeks (around 0.05 pence) a pop. So while the images in KOCHETOV were difficult to show at the time, and may appear surreal at first glance now, for Kochetov, they’re mostly a record of everyday life. The choice of photo-graphics, which, besides Rupin, was practiced inside the Vremia group can be directly linked with the relevant contemporary trends in Czechoslovak and Polish photography. Kharkiv photographers indeed had more or less stable access to specialized photographic magazines coming from these socialist countries—the Polish “Fotografia” and the Czechoslovak “Revue Fotografie.” Polish art photography, from Jan Bułhak, the pioneer of pictorialism and one of the founders of the Union of Polish Art Photographers to Edward Hartwig, demonstrated a consistent tradition of graphic experiment that was popularized in Poland and abroad through book publishing, specialized publications and exhibition activities of the Union. This tendency regained importance throughout the Europe in the 1950s, with the movement for the “Subjective Fotografie” of Otto Steinert, who reestablished the

26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

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connexion with the experiments of Bauhaus and “The New Vision” of László Moholy-Nagy, interrupted by the Second World War. However, if the photographic experiment in Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as in the countries of liberal democracies, was associated with the will to “prove the existence of a personal vision, an aesthetic bias on the content and the form, to affirm the creative power of the photographer who alone transforms the subject to the image” then, in the conditions of the dictatorship of socialist realism, it acquired inevitably the status of a political gesture. Indeed, as Jury Rupin recalls in his “Diary,” “formalism,” was totally “inadmissible for internal use.” The interest of underground photographers in the individual, vulnerable, naked, repressed corporeality in the Soviet context was largely related to the prohibition of its representation. The image of the naked body was automatically disregarded as “pornography.” As a part of the negative aesthetics of the Vremia group, the representation of the individual corporeality allowed the photographers to reveal the signs of “collective” reflected on it. Mikhailov demonstrated most clearly this projection of the collective image on the specific body in the series “Yesterday’s Sandwich” (1965–1981), where he overlaid color slides of the images of private and under-represented body with images of the “public body.” The nude body in the photographic practice of Jury Rupin is associated both with the trial of the limits of socially permissible representation—and their transgression as with “The Night,” (1974), and with the perception of the body as of the last possibility of a private and inalienable experience.

Part Three Russian and Soviet Nonconformist art is both geographically far-ranging and broad in character.28 It covers the period from the era of Khruschev’s thaw in the late 1950s on through to the era of Perestroika and breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Accordingly, its development can be seen in different countries across Eastern Europe that, while outside the focus of this book, have all been in reaction to the hegemonic power of the Soviet Union. 28 There are corresponding movement throughout the Soviet Republics, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

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Already from the late 1950s and early 1960s on, many artists from Odessa began to challenge the petrified style of Socialist Realism that had dominated Soviet art institutions since 1932. Artists were inspired by the light and sea landscape and ancient origins of their city as well as drawing inspiration from the early twentieth-century achievements of the radically innovative Russian avant-garde, rediscovering local avant-garde traditions. The euphoria that college students felt at the time fueled their enthusiasm for the exploration of cultural riches that could be found in the museums, libraries, and bookstores of the cultural centers of the Soviet empire. In the middle of the 1960s, several young artists from Odessa continued their education in Moscow and Leningrad. Their studies coincided with the short-lived Khrushchev’s Thaw, characterized by greater openness in society and flow of information. While Moscow and Kyivbased artists mostly concerned themselves with reflections on Socialist Realism and the political agenda of the day, Odessa artists addressed the issues similar to those explored by contemporary European art, which aimed, first of all, at solving aesthetic problems. Yuri Egorov (1926–2008) was the recognized leader of this early generation of nonconformist art in Odessa. He had studied painting in St. Petersburg, then returned to teach art in Odessa. While maintaining his official position, Egorov encouraged his students to experiment outside the confines of academic realism, as they sought to depict the very essence of Odessa. One of his students, Aleksandr Freidin (1926–1987), captures a contemplative mood in his 1978 painting “At the Window.” In it, a featureless figure stands in a sun-filled room, with a clear blue sky and seemingly endless horizon outside the portal, apparently lost in thought. Another painting from the same year, “Reflection of the City” by Lucien Dulfan (Frunz, Kyrgyzstan, 1942), embodies the city’s mythic reputation. Though reflected in the Black Sea, this distant, otherworldly cityscape seems to float in space, a world apart from its surrounding homeland and neighboring Soviet republics. Many critics believe that the Fence Exhibition at the Odessa Opera Theatre in 1967, organized by young artists Valentin Khrushch (Odessa, 1943–2005) and Stanislav Sychev (1937–2003), became the starting point for “Odessa nonconformism.” Founded in the then occupied Odessa, the Fence exhibition lasted only three hours. Khrushch had received his primary art education in the Odessa Art School during the 1950s and subsequently became one of the central figures of nonconformist and underground art in Odessa, and later Moscow, as it emerged

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in the 1960s and 1970s. His works, which move seamlessly between figuration and abstraction, are enormously important to the history of Russian contemporary art, but due to their “unofficial” status, he remained better known in Ukraine and Russia than in the West. In 1979, Khrushch participated in the unofficial exhibition “Contemporary Art from Ukraine” (Munich-London-Paris-New York). By 1982, Khrushch had moved from Odessa to Moscow. Later he began to spend time in Kimry, Tver region, where he died from cancer on January 24, 2005.29 Vladimir Strelnikov (1939), born in Odessa, made his studies at the local art academy. In 1960, he debuted in Odessa at the autumn exhibition of the Fine Art Federation and took part in several officially approved exhibitions in the Soviet Union and abroad until 1971. His art career resulted in loss of official approval, and from 1972 he was forced to relegate his exhibition to private households in Kiev, Odessa, Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1978, he emigrated from the USSR to Vienna and in the following year, he settled in Munich where he has worked and lived since. Apartment exhibitions became a milestone in the history of Odessa nonconformist art. There were many artists who took an active part in the unofficial, so called “apartment exhibitions” in the 1970s. These artists continued to show their art privately in spite of the constant harassment from the authorities and the oppression and hatred coming from the majority of the officially recognized artists. They had close connections with the Moscow centers of the underground art movement and were participating in the apartment exhibitions of nonconformist art in Moscow and in Leningrad. They also invited their Russian colleagues to visit Odessa and to take part in their apartment exhibitions there. Apartment exhibitions became a milestone in the history of Odessa nonconformist art. One of these apartments was that of Vladimir Asriev (1949), a young musician and future modern art collector. His apartment was constantly open for artists and viewers from 1975 to 1979, when Asriev was forced to emigrate. Distanced from the capitals of Kiev and Moscow, artists in Odessa enjoyed a tightly knit community, yet were not confined to a singular ideology or style. During the 1970s, apartment exhibitions became an 29 There are major holdings of his works in a few American museums and private collections concerned with nonconformist art. He has been widely exhibited and collected in the countries where he worked, and has exhibited in Paris at UNESCO.

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underground outlet for sharing new work, as many artists in Odessa resisted any association with official affiliations. In addition to experiencing these “deviant” works of art, participants and guests enjoyed the prohibited diversions of jazz records and Western art books. This briefly resurrected culture of the Odessa café-cabaret (which had flourished at the turn of the twentieth century) even attracted official artists as visitors, who risked their jobs to be part of such fashionable happenings. The Apartment of painter Ludmila Yastreb (Saratov region, Russia 1945–1980) and her husband Viktor Mariniuk (1939) became one of the central locations for these artistic salons. Encouraged by the reception of Yastreb’s 1979 triptych “NON ,” these artists began to refer to themselves as “nonconformists,” venturing into the forbidden territory of abstraction, as well as incorporating ready-made and found objects. Yastreb experimented with light and transformation of the form in the paintings “Old Bottles ” (1971) and “Big Pyramid” (1978), which burst with bold colors and dynamic compositions. Before her death in 1981, she also developed a feminist approach to the body and organized other women artists in the city. Another possibility for young artists to realize their creative ambitions was to turn to applied and monumental art, which required the fusion of painting and architecture, allowing the artists to depart from the conventional dogmas of Socialist Realism. First examples of highly professional murals were produced in Odessa in the end of the 1960s by Yuri Egorov, V. Strelnikov, Alexander Anufriev, and N. Morozov. As more and more young artists received their monumental art degrees from various art colleges, the genre became increasingly better developed, drawing an even greater number of talented painters and sculptors into its orbit. This led to the establishment of a workshop of monumental decorative painting within the framework of USSR Art Fund, and later, of a monumental art section in the local branch of the Artists Union who took an uncompromising stance against mediocrity, ensuring high professional level and esthetic value of produced works. Creative works of Odessa monumentalists showed the influence of folk tradition. Since monumental art was meant for public spaces, it was supposed to be accessible and to promote ethical values. Methods and forms of easel work began to filter into monumental work and vice versa, enriching both fields of art. Qualities such as optimism, freshness and clarity of colors, a strong sense of rhythm, and light-imbued imagery manifested strongly in artworks created by Odessa

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monumentalists, who created a number of exquisite artworks in public spaces of the city, as well as the adjacent region and other regional centers in Ukraine. Achievements of the Odessa school of Monumental Art received high appraisal on the Ukrainian Forum of Monumental Artists in Kharkiv in 1988. For Odessa modernists, monumental painting provided a strong catalyst for creative achievement, an invaluable laboratory of modern artistic techniques and forms of expression, and a first-ever chance to expand into territory previously occupied by official art. The last generation of nonconformist artists in Odessa focused on conceptual art throughout the 1980s. Because conceptual art bypassed traditional media techniques and did not strive to solve classic painterly problems, it was a natural progression for Odessa’s artistic milieu, already familiar with non-standard media. Sergei Anufriev, who had grown up among the apartment salons of his parents Aleksandr Anufriev and Margarita Zharkova, carried on the legacy of nonconformism. He was also a part of the collective Inspection Medical Hermeneutics , which he formed with Yuri Leiderman (1963, Odessa) and Pavel Pepperstein (1966, Moscow). They conceived their artwork as illustrations to their texts, and vice versa, commenting on the correlation between image and word, a relationship important to conceptual art globally. These artists continued their artistic resistance to official Socialist Realist dogma even as many began migrating to other cities. Many of them became integrated into Moscow’s unofficial art world, sharing display practices and theoretical interests. Inspection Medical Hermeneutics is now considered part of the Moscow Conceptualist canon. Still, Odessa’s version of conceptualism exhibited unique traits and maintained an independent spirit. It was considered more playful and surreal, reflecting Odessa’s vitality as juxtaposed against Moscow’s cool intellectualism. Undoubtedly, the Zimmerli Collection at Rutgers University, holds the most extensive holdings of Nonconformist art, based on a donation from Norton and Nancy Dodge in 1991.30 There are over 20,000 works by more than 1000 artists from former Soviet Republics. In 30 The collection had been begun by Norton Dodge, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, who had been working in Russia in the 1950s and 1960s and then begun to collect the work. The publication Art of the Baltics, reflecting the Zimmerli Art Museum’s holdings of Nonconformist art, surveys the development of modernist art in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during the post-World War II Soviet period. The book notes the difference between them, as Estonia had closer contact with Scandinavian countries, while Lithuania was more a part of central Europe and influenced by Poland.

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the decades of the Cold War before Glasnost and Perestroika, dissident Soviet artists produced a vital body of art—work that was forbidden and secret, but that survived and flourished despite persecution. Artists risked personal safety, imprisonment, and exile in their quest for individual expression. In opposition to the government-prescribed patriotic style of Socialist Realism, these “unofficial” artists worked in prohibited styles— abstraction, Surrealism, Expressionism, Photorealism, and Conceptualism—and depicted forbidden subject matter concerned with politics, religion, and eroticism. Among the artists represented are Grisha Bruskin (1945 Moscow), Eric Bulatov, Mikhail Chemiakin (1943 Moscow), Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, and Alexander Melamid, Leonid Lamm (Moscow, 1928–2017), Lydia Masterkova (Moscow, 1927–2008), Ernst Neizvestny (Sverdlovsk/Yekaterinburg, 1925–2016), Vladimir Ovchinnikov (village Esipovka near city of Saratov, 1911–1978, Oscar Rabin (Moscow, 1928–2018), Evgenii Rukhin (Saratov, 1943–1976), and Oleg Tselkov (Moscow 1934). In April 2013, Julia Tulovsky, the then Associate curator of the Zimmerli Collection, gave a lecture “Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union” at the Museum. Having been born and studied in Moscow Tulovsky had written her doctorate on Liubov Popova and subsequently joined the Museum to become the associate curator for Russian and Soviet nonconformist art at the Zimmerli. Reporting in The College Reporter on April 21, 2013, Scott Thompson, the Arts and Entertainment editor, gave an account of Julia Tulovsky’s lecture.31 According to Tulovsky, the movement started in Russia with the death of Stalin in 1953. “When Stalin was in power, he sent anyone with a creative spark to labor camps,” Tulovsky said. By 1956, the structures Stalin had imposed on Russia were removed, and artists were once again able to express themselves: “people who could think differently were released.”32 Then in 2015, the exhibition, “Odessa’s Second Avant-Garde: City and Myth” (from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art) was organized by Olena Martynyuk, Dodge Fellow at the Zimmerli and Ph. D. Candidate, Department of Art History at Rutgers.33 Held 31 Scott Thompson, The College Reporter (New Jersey), April 21, 2013. 32 Ibid. 33 In 1979, the catalogue Modern Art of Ukraine. Munich–London–New York–Paris, published in Munich, had given the West the first glimpse into the art of Odessa modernists.

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at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, New Brunswick, (New Jersey), its focus was Nonconformist artists who had worked in Odessa from the 1960s through the late 1980s.34 The exhibition featured 126 works of art, including the leading nonconformist artists as Grisha Bruskin, Eric Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid, Irina Nakhova, and Oleg Vassiliev, among others, in a range of media, from paintings and sculpture to assemblages and installations to works on paper, and collages. Olena Martynyuk who organized the exhibition wrote: As a cosmopolitan harbor at the far edge of the Russian Empire, Odessa embraced residents and transplants from distinct backgrounds – Jewish, Ukrainian, Greek, Russian – and united them in their creative pursuits… These artists experimented together, searching for a local identity that combined diverse ethnicities and cultures, as well as an understanding of their place in the broader context of art history. In contrast to the harsh social and political circumstances throughout the Soviet Union at the time, the sunny climate of Odessa became – and continues to be – a metaphor for autonomy and possibility.35

Part Four Of course, notwithstanding Martynyuk’s optimism, it is difficult to forget the legacy of the war years within the context of Odessa. Here I refer to the Romanian invasion of Odessa in August 1941 that led to an estimated half of the Jewish population fleeing the city with up to 90,000 Jews remaining during the Romanian occupation. After the fall of France, Romania had then turned to Germany and Nazi Germany supported the revisionist demands for Romanian territory of the Soviet Union, Hungary and Bulgaria. But even before Romania fell into the orbit of

34 Through the late Norton T. Dodge and his wife Nancy Ruyle Dodge, some 20,000 works created between 1956 and 1986 by nearly 1,000 artists from Moscow, Leningrad, and the former Soviet Republics began entering the Zimmerli’s holdings. See Moscow Conceptualism in Context, ed. Alla Rosenfeld. Munich/Berlin/London/New York: Zimmerli Art Museum and Prestel, 2011. 35 Cited in Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Newsletter, May 15, 2014.

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Nazi Germany, persecutory antisemitism—particularly against Jews living in eastern borderlands—were falsely associated with Soviet communism.36 After a bomb blast in October 1941 that had killed 67 people including members of the Romanian military, the Romanian army units assembled 19,000 Jews in a public square in the harbor area and shot many of them. Then, at least 20,000 other Jews were taken to the village of Dalnik and were either shot or died in fires. The remaining Jewish people in Odessa were subsequently deported to Romanian administered camps or ghettos in Transnistria and died of starvation, exposure or disease. The Soviet army then liberated Odessa in April 1944. We are reminded of Christian Boltanski’s Jewish father who had grown up in Odessa before escaping to Paris, discussed briefly in my Monuments chapter. This is but one of many shocking events that occurred across Eastern Europe. There have been few examples of art exhibitions in Eastern Europe engaged with the subject. One exception was “Field of Flowers” in 2016 that showed the work of 14 artists from the region, in particular Georgia, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, but also Poland, Israel, Denmark, and Sweden. It was curated by Eugeny Umansky (1961, Nizhni Tagil, Ural, Russia) and Elena Tsvetaeva, Director of the Kaliningrad Branch for the National Center for Contemporary Art. The exhibition name was taken from a poem by the great writer Czeslaw Milosz, written during the time of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. While reminding us of the Holocaust of World War Two, some of the work exhibited was poignantly simple in its subject. Umansky and Oleg Kostyuk (Kaliningrad) capture traces of such histories through photographic installations. Umansky photographs the doorways of empty houses in Shargorod. Abandoned as a result of the disappearance of the families from these houses by force of persecution, Umansky’s work is a silent memorial of loss. Oleg Kostyuk photographs the exterior wall of a former synagogue building in Sovetsk. Although, it had been converted into a storage facility for the Russian military, the brick wall contains traces of its history from 1946 to 1987. Covered with traces of inscriptions, we can read the words of those who either sought to keep alive the memory of the synagogue through their inscriptions or, those of the military who left evidence of their occupation and control of the site. 36 Odessa became the administrative seat of Transnistria (the area of the Ukraine between the Bug and Dniester Rivers which was under Romanian control between 1941 and 1944.

CHAPTER 4

State of Play: Georgian Art Before/After Independence

This chapter focuses on the artistic practice of a number of artists from Georgia, during the period of the 1980s and 1990s, especially between the years 1985–1995. This was a period punctuated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Georgia’s independence.1 With the chapter title State of Play, I wish to suggest that the selected work can be appreciated in two ways. These meanings are quite distinct but, suggest the very different possibilities and the limits of play possible. First a play of formal qualities, its form or color, texture, or composition. Secondly, a play with the subject by exaggeration or mocking portrayal that is able to make indirect reference or allude to the State or the character and quality of everyday life at the time. We may be reminded of the humor and satire in Russian literature in the 1920s, such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s (1891–1940) wonderful novel of Master and Margarita, begun in 1928. In 1991, Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union. And yet, in the next 14 years until 2005, Georgia as an independent

1 An early version of this chapter was published in the catalogue, accompanying an exhibition I curated: State of Play: Georgian Art, 1985-1999. Contemporary Art Gallery, National History Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2016.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_4

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Republic was little more than a “post-Soviet space.”2 The period of transition from Gorbachev on was a long-protracted struggle for true independence from Soviet rule of more than twenty countries of Eastern Europe. It is difficult to overstate the ramifications of this post condition for Georgia and the many countries formerly under Soviet control. Georgia experienced a period of more than ten years of political upheaval and tremendous uncertainty. For many people, especially those who could manage somehow, the turmoil and impoverishment of their lives and well-being in Georgia, led to their resolve to leave for a more stable country. Among them were many artists. Those who remained in Georgia during this time tell hard stories of enduring not only Russia’s aggression against its country but, equally the economic hardship and the social unrest that would spill into the streets leading to riots and, to violent military suppression.3 Notwithstanding, the period from 1985– 2000 was one of the most artistically creative periods in the modern history of Georgia.

Part One In the 1970s and early 1980s many young artists emerged, fearless of being judged and initiatives were made to support and show their work. They had studied at the Tbilisi Academy of Art and other institutions where the Soviet system was still the dominant model of education. Nevertheless, there had been a small but, significant nonconformist movement in Georgia in the 60s, as there had been in Moscow at the time. These young Georgian artists turned against the imposed model of Soviet social realism, questioning the classical, figurative style that harked back to the Nineteenth century Russia such as Ilya Repin and peredvizhniki or “Social Realism.” Nevertheless, abstraction was still strong in 2 This phenomenon was described in detail in: Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Referred to in Viktor Misiano, ‘After Ramishvili,’ in Change. Georgian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011. 3 On the 18–19 November 1984, Aeroflot Flight 6833, en route from Tbilisi to Leningrad, with an intermediate stop in Batumi, was the scene of an attempted aircraft hijacking by seven young Georgians. They were protesting against Georgia being a part of the Soviet Union. The aircraft was the stormed by Soviet Special Forces and resulted in eight dead. The surviving hijackers were subsequently tried and executed.

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Georgia, a style that can be traced back to early Georgian modernism from 1914–1930 and to the 1960s.4 Some of the young artists took abstraction further than their teachers and former generations. They developed other forms of practice, in particular, introducing non-traditional material into their work or making object-based work, and by the 1990s, performances and videos.5 They looked for inspiration to break out of the long repressive dominance of the Soviet model of education and training. Given the period of Perestroika, they were able to look to Western art for inspiration. There were a number of sources that had become available to them, either through travel or magazines. Inspired, the work of some of the younger Georgian artists became unfettered by convention or taste, free in their use of line, colour, form and movement. For example, we may cite the opportunity to see the work of the North American abstract expressionists and Pop artists of the 60s or the Minimalists of the 70s, the 80s generation of New York artists, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel. Or, we may refer to the French “informalists” of the 50s and postwar work being produced in Spain, especially Antonio Tapies, the Japanese Fluxus movement and both the Italian and the German neoexpressionist schools of the 1980s. Two of the most distinguished artists of the younger Georgian artists to emerge in the 1970s were Gia Edzgveradze (Tbilisi, 1953) and Luka Lasareishvili (Tbilisi, 1957).6 Both began to exhibit in Georgia at the beginning of the 1980s but, by the late 1980s, they left Georgia to live in Western Europe. Their work can be loosely associated with nonconformist art movement of the 1960s in Moscow. There was moreover, an

4 See Nana Kipiani and Levan Chogoshvili: “Palimpsest Tbilisi” Unpublished. 2015– 2016 and my essay ‘Redrawing East of the East,’ National Museum of Georgia, Contemporary Art Gallery, 2016, pp. 11–16. 5 Video had developed in Japan and North America in the late 60s with work of Takehisa Kosugi and Nam June Paik. In 1975 the Georgian artist Ushangi Khumarashvili made ‘Ancestor’ (video, 2 min. 1975) in the Georgian countryside. It was one of the first, if not the first video made in Georgia. In one sense the work depicts an essential aspect of rural life in the killing of sheep for subsistence. It was not until the 1990s that video practice will be seen again, becoming more widely used as an artistic medium in Georgia. 6 Georgia on my mind. Four painters from Tbilisi. Alexander Bandzeladze, Gia Edzgveradze, Luka Lasareishvili, Iliko Zautashvili. Ed.: I. Bodesohn-Vogel u. K. Thomas. Exhibition cat. Cologne, 1990.

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Increasing split between public and private realm in Soviet system, especially for Georgia. Both artists rejected social realism, developing distinct forms of abstraction as a basis from which to elaborate their own style. One of the most important influences on the work of these two artists and Georgian art at the time was that of Alexander Bandzeladze (Tbilisi, 1927–1992). In the 1950s, Bandzeladze had led an innovative movement in Georgia (and the Soviet Union in general), pioneering the process of rejuvenating the language of visual arts in Georgia. During his creative pursuit, and as a result of drawing upon the traditions of modernist European oil painting, he developed his own artistic approach, distinguishable in the context of the Georgia and East Europe at the time. Bandzeladze’s family, after having been exiled to the Irkutsk District during the repressions in the 1920s, returned to Tbilisi in 1932. In 1942 he had studied at an art school in Tbilisi and then, in 1947, had enrolled in the Oil Painting Department of the Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts under the tutorship of Sergo Kobuladze, Iosif Charlemagne, and Valentin Sherpilov. Expelled from the Academy in 1949, he received his diploma as late as 1963, with the help of Apolon Kutateladze. He became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1954. During this time Bandzeladze actively collaborated with the editorial teams of various Georgian magazines. He authored milestone works for the development of Georgian book graphic design, such as Arsenas Leksi, Arsena’s Poem (1957) and Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli (1960). From 1978–1988, Bandzeladze painted the murals at the Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Didude. Communism had battled against religious beliefs and activities. In this period on the one hand artifacts of a religious nature were created and functioned in an “underground” atmosphere whereas, on the other hand, in a few instances the authorities proved loyal to artists who made religious murals in churches.7 These churches were painted following direct orders of the Patriarchs of the Georgian Church. The monumental art found in the incomplete wall paintings of the three churches is indicative of the fact that in order to find new solutions to theological and artistic problems Georgian artists

7 After World War II only three churches were painted (be it only partly): Kashveti (St. George’s) Church was painted by Lado Gudiashvili between 1946–1948; Didube (Mother of God’s) Church was painted by Alexander Bandzeladze, 1978–1988; Tbilisi Sioni Cathedral was painted by Levan Tsutskiridze during the 1980s.

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applied traditional as well as new methods and in fact sought to restore and re-establish the traditions of Georgian religious art. After David Kakabadze (1889–1952), Bandzeladze was one of the first to have returned abstract art into Georgia’s artistic context. His work and teaching had an enormous impact on the development of contemporary Georgian visual arts and on nourishing interest in arts among younger generations. In fact, the artist Iliko Zautashvili, (Tbilisi, 1952) (whose early work I discuss in this chapter) wrote in 2013: The formation of post-war art in Georgia in the 1950s was to a large extent led by the inquiries of young painters, who received an academic education and found their vocation in opposition to the predominant aesthetic and ideology that looked for new figurative opportunities. Among them was Bandzeladze. In 1952, following accusations of Formalism, Alexander Bandzeladze was expelled from the Tbilisi State Academy of Art. Although he did in due course receive his diploma, his investigations into the field of abstraction over the course of three decades were well-known only amongst a narrow circle of supporters.8 In the mid-1970s young artists who would later actively participate in international exhibition projects began to gather around Bandzeladze. Zautashvili notes it was after the ‘classical’ abstraction of David Kakabadze in the 1920s, that non-figurative art in Georgia developed against “the background of attempted withdrawals from the dead end of passive, illusionary imagery and thematic clichés.”9

The life and oeuvre of Alexander Bandzeladze was enveloped by the search for inner freedom and the existential meaning of life. His art was the result of constant inquiry. The material, style, and semantics of his oeuvre are within the spheres of investigation, perception, and meditation. The author’s ego does not dominate the work, his works are projections of a more general state of existence. For the artist this position dominated everything; whether making figurative or abstract works, book illustrations or religious paintings, he verbally and graphically expressed and asserted that position.10 He saw in immediate, spontaneous experiences 8 Zautashvili, Iliko, AT THE CROSSROADS: CONTEMPORARY ART FROM THE CAUCASUS AND CENTRAL ASIA. London: Sotheby’s, 4–12 March, 2013. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.

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the potential to turn abstraction into a parallel reality. The abstract work Composition (1967, oil on canvas, 116 × 108 cm), with its theatrical painting planes, broad brushstrokes and linear contours overrunning the confines of the canvas and filling the space surrounding it, is a compelling example of the author’s explorations. Through rich tonal variations, the surface exudes a soft glow, while light and colour engage in complex and conflicting relationships, their mutual urge toward dissipation being contained within a regulated graphic framework that constricts their ever increasing vibrations. Natalia Kolodzei, the art historian and executive director of the Kolodzei Foundation and Collection, (one of the largest collections of Russian and Eastern European art) has written: “In the respect to Abstract art, the name of Alexander Bandzeladze, the founder and mentor of the unofficial abstract school of painting in Georgia, is important to mention.”11 As Kolodzei puts it, many artists, including Edzgveradze, took Bandzeladze’s “secret course in abstract creativity.” Bandzeladze “taught how to separate beautiful curving lines and an open painterly gesture in the painting, and how to emphasize the canvas both as material and spiritual support.”12 In the 1980s both Edzgveradze and Lasareishvili participated in several exhibitions throughout the Soviet Union and within Georgia which was still a Soviet Republic until 1991. Some of these exhibitions included: “Generation-80” at the House of Arts, Tbilisi; “Georgian Abstract Art,” Exhibition Hall at The Hermitage, Moscow; and the “First Group Exhibition of abstract art by Georgian artists,” at the State Paintings Gallery, Tbilisi, all held in 1987. Lasareishvili had studied at the Tbilisi State Art Academy between 1976 and 1982, from which he graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts degree. After then, working in a variety of media: painting, installations, object and video art as an independent, professional artist, he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries. From 1985 until 1988 Lasareishvili lived and worked in Moscow, painting 11 July 2001. Natalia Kolodzei is the Executive Director of the Kolodzei Art Foundation, and an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts. Together with her mother, Tatiana Kolodzei, she owns the Kolodzei Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art, which contains over 7,000 pieces by over 300 artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 12 Natalia Kolodzei, July 2001. Web.

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in 1986, two significant large abstractions. As with the North American artist Robert Motherwell of the 1950s, but unseen in Georgia, Lasareishvili ‘s paintings were a play of monochrome overlapping forms, switching between positive and negative abstract spaces in black and white. But by the late 1980s, Lasareishvil had left Eastern Europe and moved to Western Europe and eventually to New York. Edzgveradze also studied at the Georgian State Academy in Tbilisi from 1974–1980 and very quickly began to exhibit his work. Kolodzei has noted: Interestingly, Edzgveradze describes his first black and white picture as a “Concept of the Concept ” (1974) as a kind of unconscious act (he was just twenty-one at the time and was about to start the State Georgian Academy of Fine Arts). Edzgveradze saw the painting in the dream. One can be reminded of Malevich’s Black Square. Edzgveradze tried to build his black and white painting, as an act of liberation from the studies at the academy as well as from Soviet painting.13

Nevertheless, as Kolodzei goes on to argue the artist seeks to continue Georgian traditions and is not simply an exponent of international trends in modernism. However, Boris Groys suggests a slightly different approach toward the work of Edzgveradze: “…As many nonconformists artists, Edzgveradze choose to “embrace” Western modernism, as well as and spiritual search into the self, in order to avoid the ideological abuse of the Soviet system. On other hand, Edzgveradze’s combination of Eastern philosophy (Hinduism) and contemporary means of expression (Western modernism) can be viewed as one of the characteristics of Georgian culture, which artists always have perceived as a culture of crossroads.14

During his career, Edzgveradze developed two different painterly styles: he painted both colorful, textured abstractions, sometimes with sand, and black and white calligraphic paintings limited to controlled-line drawings. One of Edzgveradze’s early exhibitions was at the “House of Artists” in 13 See online article by Natalia Kolodzei, Gia Edzeveradze: Georgian-Soviet Hybrid within Nonconformist Circles. www.cas.miamioh.edu papers, July 2001. 14 Boris Groys ‘Art-Asket ’ Maksimka No. 5, 2000 (in Russian). Translated by Maksim Raiskin from Kunsforum, BD.142, 1998.

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1985. Photographs of the work, made by the then young Georgian artist Keti Kapanadze (see later discussion of her early work), show Edzgveradze’s free “drawing” style that call to mind Paul Klee’s idea of drawing as corresponding to taking a line for a walk. Calligraphic writings (in Georgian language) on Edzgveradze’s works also contribute to links with Georgian culture. Edzgveradze’s writing-drawing technique…and even Edzgveradze’s signature, in the Georgian script, on his canvases reveals a connection with Georgian tradition. The very fact of Edzgveradze’s interest in combining the heritages of Eastern and Western cultures can be viewed as his identification with tradition of Georgian art and its “hybridity”. Using line, contour and text only, he created formal allusions as well as using plants, vegetables and everyday objects in installations to create an ironic playful humor. Edzgveradze was also the first artist of his generation to use soil in his works.15

According to Edzgveradze, his first use of soil was accidental. He recollects he was working on one of his black and white paintings and out of frustration he brought dirt from the street and covered parts of the surfaces. However, the choice of usage of sand and dirt in later colored abstraction can be viewed in connection with Georgia, where soil can be a symbolic representation of the country. The combination of saturated vivid colors (as in Noise of My Heart, 1986) is also reminiscent of traditions of Georgian painting. By the end of the 1980s, Edzgveradze, like some others, left Georgia never to return permanently. In 1989, filling his car with whatever he could, he drove to Germany and established another home and life, ultimately in Dusseldorf. There his practice, influence, and reputation flourished. Georgia had lost one of the most significant artists of his generation.16 He would rejoin with some of his fellow Georgian artists in 1992 in the exhibition Heat and Conduct: New art from Tbilisi, Georgia: 15 Natalia Kolodzei, op.cit. 16 In Germany, Edgzveradze continued to develop his work. In his early large-scale

paintings of 1989/1990, the white surfaces of paper or canvas becomes the surface for the dynamic force and play of lines in space. This is exemplified for example, with ‘The Big Bra’ (1990), which shows the running movement of line, at times interweaving, overlapping with other lines pushing the viewer’s eye to move across the canvas. Recalling both Barnet Newman and Jackson Pollock, there is no single point of view. Rather, there is a gathering expansiveness, as we follow the line across the surface, seemingly endless then looping back, creating a sense of freedom suggestive of an unfixed form.

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Alexander Bandzeladze, Mamuka Djaparidze, Gia Edzgveradze, curated by Susan Reid for the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield from 21 March–10 May 1992 and Arnolfini, Bristol, 4 July–23 August 1992. As with Lasareishvili and Edzgveradze, a number of this generation of artists in Georgia were pushing abstraction further. IIiko Zautashvili was one of them. Born in Tbilisi in 1952, and therefore belonging to the same generation as Gia Edzgveradze, he graduated from Tbilisi State Art Academy in 1974 where he received his post-graduate Diploma in art history and theory. Between 1974–1976 he was a founder member of unofficial-action exhibitions, Tbilisi and Moscow. ‘Nyingmapa Tantric Festival ’ (1985) is a good example of his early work. With its play of interlocking and overlapping of forms and lines, Zautashvili creates an ambiguity in the work. Directional points, signs, appear between and around the abstract forms. The surface is transformed as if seen as an aerial view of the city streets and buildings. With “Sacred Teaching ” (1990) or “Numbers ” (1991), Zautashvili returns to the monochrome, disrupted by passages along its borders as if belated evidence of narration.

Part Two With almost no private or commercial galleries, a group of young Georgian artists at the time decided to exhibit their work themselves and not depend on the State cultural institutions for exhibiting or funding. This led to the founding of the 10th Floor (situated on the 10th floor of the Fine Arts Academy) and the Marjanishvili Studio at the Marjanishvili theatre in 1986. Many artists and others exhibited or found a place to express their work in these two artist-run spaces.17 The artist and critic Karlo Kacharava (Samtredia, Georgia, 1964–1994, one of the founders of 10th Floor, writes: Given the limited art supplies to non-official artists in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, such displacement, presumably, would not have been lost 17 Those who showed their work in 10th Floor included: the writers Irakli Charkviani (musician, composer and poet), the poet Kote Kubaneishvili and artists Levan Chogoshvili, Gia Dolidze, Manana Dvali, Temo Javakhishvili, Karlo Kacharava, Keti Kapanadze, Ushangi Khumarashvili, Mamuka Japaradidze, Luka Lazareishvili, Niko Lomashvili, Gia Loria, Giorgi Maglakelidze, Koka Ramishvili, Gia Rigvava, Zurab Sumbadze, Oleg Timchenko, Mamuka Tsetskhladze, his sister Maia Tsetskhladze and cousin Niko Tsetskhladze, and Guram Tsibakhashvili and others.

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on Katcharava’s immediate peers and other members of the “10th Floor Group.”18

A sense of irony often characterized the work of these artists during this time. Kacharava own paintings were animated by his figurative drawing and texts, depicting everyday life around him. While drawing inspiration from the work of the Viennese Secessionists, such Egon Schiele and the German expressionists in both their figuration and colour, he rethought the context of his work. The visceral everyday life and experience of the streets of Tbilisi in the 1980s had become the next Berlin of the 1920s. Similarly, Levan Chogoshvili’s early paintings show the street life of Tbilisi at the time. Chogoshvili had graduated from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 1975 and very quickly developed a unique style of figurative painting. An early work, initially made in 1977, uses his own childhood drawing and mixed media. It is a small work, a little bit more than A4, on applique paper, that combines different details taken from a Soviet medal and an orthodox icon. It draws reference to a real incident that occurred in 1924, when the Bolsheviks in West Georgia arrested hundreds of women and men of nobility, farmers and priests, and put them into freight train, then took them to a deserted place and shot them with machine guns. Leaving them there, stray dogs came and carried off torn parts of the bodies. It is said, some families of victims recognized their killed family members by rings on the fingers or scraps of clothing on parts of their bodies.19 Chogoshvili subsequently enlarged and simplified the work, making two versions, one in 1980 and another in 1985, focusing on a marauding red dog in front of a train. Soon after Levan began a new series about contemporary life in Tbilisi. The paintings are somber, dark literally, as if suggesting a brooding imminent reality in the lack of light and clarity in what a viewer sees. Naked girls are pictured in the streets. In “Kalinin and Girls ” (1986), one of the girls is wearing a hooded jacket with a red star and the sign “Vive L’Avant-Garde” in the background. In other works, Chogoshvili depicts street girls waiting or crossing the road to encounter a potential customer. This is continued in equally powerful paintings as the “Russian Revolution” (1986), “Venus and Mars ” (1988) and later in the 1990s. 18 See Karlo Kacharava article published as part of the catalogue by Goethe Institute, Tbilisi, 2014. 19 Thanks to Nana Kipiani and Levan Chogoshvili for this information.

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Chogoshvili treats his subject with a black humor. There is little comparable that is so direct about the degradation of life in Georgia at the time, anticipating life in Georgia in the 1990s. During this same period of the mid 1980s, Chogoshvili began a different series around the former aristocracy of Georgia, including Georgian monarchs or prominent Georgian families. Dressed in their clothes of nobility or as members of the Russian imperial army, they are often seated around a table as if at a reception or meeting. These were based on nineteenth-century photo albums of noble families gathered together to have their portrait made and memory recorded. In a note attached to a work Untitled (from the Destroyed Aristocracy series) of 1986, the artist wrote: This painting depicts the family of Count of Skumnia in Kolkhis and the Iberian Kingdom (ancient kingdoms on current day Georgian territory). Painting-from-photo: The main conceptual and poetic strategy was to use old pre-revolution portrait photography of XIX and XX century aristocracy of Georgia, Russia and the whole of Caucasus, which was physically terminated during the 1920s and 1930s. I employ the language of Early Christian icon painting to assign them with a new content, to transform the old tradition into a new social concept.20

The Russian aristocracy were referred to as the “forgotten people” who were persecuted under the Soviet Union and either killed or fled into exile. The artist also painted this series in tempura, used in orthodox Christian fresco painting. The painting technique had been used in the frescoes at the Achi monastery in Guria, (a province in the southwestern region of Georgia). The mural date from the late thirteenth century and Levan had worked on their conservation. At the heart of such work is the spirit of protest against Soviet occupation. Chogosvili’s work anticipates the impoverishment of Georgia in the 1990s, during its first years of independence from Russia. As he writes later: The horrible economic collapse of 1993-4, the political wars, permanent energy crisis, the purposeful terror nationwide and all over Tbilisi arisen by

20 See Levan Chogoshvili, cited in Sotheby’s London: At the Crossroads: Contemporary Art from the Caucasus and Central Asia (4 March–12 March 2013).

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the armed bands provoked by the authorities, tore all possibilities for not only to continue the contacts but to carry out the artistic activity locally inside Tbilisi. We may date the beginning of the depression period back to 1997-8, though during that period were opened private galleries and were permanently held the exhibitions. However, it was already the beginning of the period of the modernized Soviet aesthetics expressed in the whole range of exhibitions oriented to the official style, supported by officials, propagated by media. These process is very notable in the public space art – too much sculptures and wall paintings, something like neo-socialistic realism.21

During this time both Mamuka Tsetskhladze (Tbilisi, 1960) and his sister Maia (Tbilisi, 1965), had both begun to paint large-scale works. Maia had studied at the State Academy of Arts from 1984–1990 was in personal and group exhibitions in Georgia and abroad 1988–2014. She had also worked in theater in Berlin theater Oblomov from 2001–2003. Her works are symbolic abstractions with their quasi-figurative forms, set in an elaborate and highly colorful fields of form and abstraction, such as Eternal Love (1988, mixed media on canvas, 200 × 300).22 The early paintings by Maia’s older brother Mamuka, were more lyrical and narrative-based, such as “Girl in Roses ” (1987), a gentle, painterly image of a field of flowers, animated by color.23 Mamuka’s art education started at the former Pioneer Palace, (Georgian National Youth Palace) when he was in the 7th–8th grade at school. He relates “My teachers were Mikheil Tsalkalamanidze and Bondo Bakuradze. They explained and demonstrated how to paint different things. After that, I started going to the Nikoladze Art School, where I was taught by Misha

21 Questionnaire, Levan Chogoshvili, Tbilisi, 1 July 2004. The interview of 6000 words was never published except on the web without the interviewer’s name. Permission to quote Levan’s comment has been granted by the artist himself. 22 See reference to the artist in Propaganda: Contemporary Art Archive (online archive). 23 Tsetskhladze has actively participated in exhibitions since the period of his studies.

His one-man exhibitions have been organized in Tbilisi Artist House, Georgia; Francoise Friedrich Gallery, Cologne (Germany); “TBS” bank, Tbilisi, (Georgia); Association “Les Hypocrite”, Paris, (France); He has represented Georgia in international Art Biennales, Festivals and events. His works are held by the Museum of Tsarytsino, Moscow, (Russia); Gerald Portman’s collection; Temur Ugulava’s Private collection and the Modern Art Museum, Baku, (Azerbaijan). He has featured his art works in Germany, Hungary, France, Italy and other countries.

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Gabunia for two years. After the two years it was time to enroll in the Tbilisi State Academy of Art, so I went to Iura Mekvabishvili, who gave me private lessons. I went to the Tbilisi State Academy of Art in 1980 and studied in the studio of famous artist Korneli Sanadze for five years.24

After finishing in 1986 he, together with others, founded the artists group “Archivarius” and at the 10th floor of the Academy, he and the group of Academy students created a new artistic space which became known as the 10th floor. The 10th floor was often visited by many other artists and Mamuka started to exhibit there as well the House of Artists in 1988 and 1990. After the Tenth floor, he moved to the Marjanishvili theater workshop place where the theater director gave him and the tenth floor group, which was added by Niko Tsetskhladze, Oleg Timchenko, Lia Shvelidze and Koka Ramishvili a huge space for working on theatre decorations. Besides decoration of theatre plays in Marjanishvili’s workshop, this group had the opportunity to pursue their creative experience, this period was a kind of self-investigation. In Marjanishvili’s workshop, where they stayed until 1990, artists were leaving and coming, but all of them left works done with great aspiration and enthusiasm. One of Mamuka’s best known series is Cities, fifty of which were shown together in an exhibition in Baku, a city he has visited since being a young boy. The paintings of the artist demonstrate broad range of influences and the breadth of his approach in capturing the grandeur and color of the city. Likewise, the young Lia Shvelidze (Tbilisi, 1962) had begun painting large, figurative abstractions such as “Silvia, Dedicated to European Women” (1988) “Poesis ” (1988) and “Dance” (1989) filled with color and vibrancy of form. The young Shvelidze was educated at the Tbilisi State Academy of Art from 1979–1985, began to show her work. She was only 16 but already knew this was what she was to do. In an interview she related the story. Her father was a painter and taught students so she was already witness to the world of art. When asked if she encountered any opposition under the Soviet system that limited your creativity in painting, she answered:

24 Nini Dakhundaridze, Interview with an Artistic Couple, Part 1: Mamuka Tsetskhladze. Georgia Today, April 2, 2020.

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On the contrary, it strengthened me. During my student years, when I took up painting, it had its own rules and these rules were framed as Soviet Art. Because of the restrictions and limits set by the Soviet government, I decided to move to the Faculty of Theater. It gave me freedom in art in general, because there I didn’t have to paint compositions of limited themes. It was the time of the Iron Curtain and you could only see some art pieces in black and white reproduction. Impressionism was not forbidden in the Soviet Union, Picasso was already a Communist artist and was widely propagated by the Soviet state. The most interesting thing was when I graduated and I thought with a diploma in my hand, they would exhibit my pieces in galleries without any problem. Yet even though I was a daughter of a painter, and had a diploma in my hand, they didn’t accept my work. When I asked why, I was told my painting was too small in size…25

Her studio was in the same building as the Marjanishvili State Academic Drama Theater, and she was able to paint on large canvases and became involved in scenography and costume painting. Early on she had begun painting large, figurative abstractions such as “Silvia, Dedicated to European Women” (1988) “Poesis ” (1988) and “Dance” (1989) filled with color and vibrancy of form. Shvelidze’s works portray most especially Georgian women young and old. In Baku, she presented her work from series such as “Weddings in Georgia”, “Women,” and “Laughter”, which included paintings created on the “My Unknown Sisters” theme. In mid 1987, Mamuka Tseskhladse with four other artists: his cousin Niko Tsetskhladze (Tbilisi, 1959), Mamuka Japaradidze (Tbilisi, 1962), Oleg Timchenko (Tbilisi 1957) and Koka Ramishvili (Tbilisi, 1956) took a train to Moscow and then onto Berlin. Their purpose was to see as much Western contemporary art as they could. The Berlin museums provided this in a way Moscow could not, in particular in the field of contemporary art. They came back after some weeks, having seen the work of the 1970s and 1980s generation of German artists: Anselm Kiefer, Jorg Immendorf, A.R. Penck, and Sigmar Polke and many others. For them it was an invaluable experience. Looking at Mamuka Tseskhladse’s work after his return, the impact is clear. Inspired by the work he saw of the German and North American artists of his generation, his canvases begin to be filled with a 25 Ibid., Nini Dakhundaridze, Interview with an Artistic Couple, Part 2. Lia Shvelidze. Georgia Today, April 2, 2020.

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tumult of paint and color, movement: His painting “Helmet goes to Laos ” (1988) contain passages of both abstraction and figuration. The painting is studded with heads and sea life, as if one is gazing upon the riotous color and life found on a tropical seabed. Here, we may mention the paintings of the North American artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, with his bold, large-scale paintings, composed of thick impasto paint and loose figuration where layers of paint become the vehicle for a movement of gestures, incidents, and signs. Other paintings of this period by Mamuka are more reduced to a language of lines and abstract forms, such as “Untitled” (1989) and later, his diptych “Erendina” (1996). At the same time, there were artists who pushed modernist abstraction conceptually during the late 80s, notably Guia Rigvava and Niko Tsetskhladze. Rigvava (1956), born in Tbilisi, had studied at the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Affairs, Department of International Economic Affairs between 1973–1978 and at the Moscow Surikov Institute of Art, Department of Painting from 1980 to 1986. Returning to Tbilisi, he became a professor at the State Academy of Art from 1986–1991 and began working as an Art Director in several independent film productions in Tbilisi. Subsequently, he moved back to Russia and after to Germany. However, prior to his departure, his early work were paintings, almost minimal gestures sometimes painted, sometimes cut out of paper.26 This included Remembrance, part of series Study for the theme of sublation. (1987), Study for the theme of sublation. Flower. (1987), 10 canvases shot on a military training polygon with Makarov pistol by militia major Mamatshvili (1988) (Rooms Coll. Tbilisi), Star (1988), and Star Stories No. 2. Niko Tsetskhladze had also been making large non-figurative painting such as “Red Star” (1988). In 1987 he painted two diptychs: “Magic Music” and ‘Untitled.’ Each were large monochrome paintings, covered with tar that is then overlaid with letters or linear form. Singular letters or notations emerge from out of the layers of tar. Drawing on the examples of Duchamp and the Dada movement, some of the younger Georgian artists realized during this time, that anything could be used in the making of art and could be brought closer to the reality of contemporary everyday life. Non-traditional material, as well as performance and video, began to be used. They viewed that each 26 In 1992 some of Rigvava’s early work from Tbilisi was included in the Heat and

Conduct exhibition at Mappin Art Gallery and the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol (UK).

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medium represented an element of everyday life, the dimension of time and duration or, capturing the ephemeral actions of everyday life. Timchenko was also one of them who after returning to Tbilisi after his trip to Europe in 1987, began to make videos well as paint. An early example was a video made in 1988. Shot in an underground pass for the subway, the camera focuses on the windows with its mannequins inside. But as people stop to look some of the mannequins begin to move and the audiences realize that some mannequins have been replaced by live models. He would go on working in both mediums. In 1998 he made a video that is captured by the movement of it solo performer. Guram Tsibakhashvili (Tbilisi, 1960) also began to explore art as a book or object. He had shown his early work, a photo documentary (1983–1985), composed of some 100 photographs at the “10th Floor” space in 1987. Soon after, he began his book of photographs, “Ulysses ” (1988/1989) that through 75 photographs explore Georgia like Ulysses. Each photo has handwritten fragments of James Joyce’s novel on them, creating a dialogue between text and image. A second part of Tsibakhashvili’s Ulysses was later created in collaboration with painter Rita Khachaturian in 2012. Their collaboration inspired by the second part of Ulysses—is a stream of consciousness featuring “Penelope,” a female character from the last part of the book—unites 10 pictures. Photos are shot in various locations, on a digital camera. Along with texts, photos feature graphics by Khachaturian, overlaid on the pictures. Often, the artist draws the characters in using spaces on photos. Pictures and lighting accents, along with writings in white, read simultaneously, as if Joyce’s direct, unpunctuated thoughts are streamed directly with digital images. The poet Giorgi Kekelidze later wrote in an introduction to a reissue of the book that Guram Tsibakhashvili’s book is a kind of photographic novel that tells about a strange, even unique time – the time beyond both of the abovementioned models: this is the epoch of desire to escape from one’s self, the territory, the home, the return to one’s inner self and, at the same time, escape forever, return to one’s home and country or escape for good. The book is surprisingly fragmentary, tragic and comic, written by a genius. I would say this is one of the best versions of Ulysses, the best journey of Odysseus with certain resemblances to the story of Prometheus. The

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expectation of chained people with nuances peculiar to the given period, elevated daily routine.27

Signs of change in contemporary Georgian art had become more obvious. Artists were beginning to move away from abstraction to object-based work. In 1989 both Ushangi Khumarashvili and Malkhaz Datuskishvili (Rustavi, Georgia 1956) made significant breakthroughs from their painting, each making object-based work, rarely seen before in Georgia. The two works by Khumarashvili are assemblages of the detritus of everyday life: the discarded matter of rubbish bins or scraps of paper and wood.28 Datuskishvili, on the other hand, made a small work at the time, in which he attached to a canvas nine discarded paint tins with the residue of paint inside. However, it is Avto Varazi (Tbilisi 1926–1977) who was most likely the first in Georgia to use object-based work and collage technique. He had worked mainly in the genre of portraiture and still life, at times reminiscent of Picasso and Braque, and at other times in a more traditional style. Varazi had been working for years on the decoration of the museum exhibition. He made color the main organizing element in artistic decoration, where important objects were highlighted through color accents. Varazi’s breakthrough works were his collage and object-based pieces. Beatrice (սփիւռք, 1963) is a significant example of this for Georgia. Made on board, Varazi has drawn a girl’s face on a piece of paper that is then shaped by a thin piece of bamboo. Below two door bells have been attached representing her breasts. Three years later he made The Bull’s Head representing a lamb’s head (1966), composed of wood, oil, trousers using a pair of his own glued to plaster board.29 Varazi was also the first painter in Georgia to experiment in pop art. For his works in collage, he used everyday items to convey modern reality. Among his pieces in the collage technique is Gitanes (1968) and a later

27 Giorgi Kekelidze, ‘Guram Tsibakhashvili’s Journey to His Inner Self,’ in Ulysses. Tbisili: Pilots Press, 2014, p. 7. 28 The history of the counter-relief can be traced back to the early Russian ‘Faktura’ work, especially that of Vladimir Tatlin from 1914 on. See my essay ‘From Painting into Space: Towards a Culture of Materiality,’ in Fracturing Conceptual Art: The Asian Turn, edited by Kate Lim. Seoul: Art Platform Asia, 2017, pp. 110–127. 29 The painting is permanently housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and another version in the collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University.

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collage with a fish on paper from 1972. Presented on cardboard cluttered with various forms of litter—discarded packs and smoked butts of cigarettes, used matches, dust, fish bones, and assorted labels, “Gitanes” perhaps best expresses the painter’s concept of Soviet reality of the 1960s. But Varazi never had a single individual exhibition during his lifetime. The Soviet leadership could hardly bear such a nonconformist artist who did not fit in with the Soviet system or work in the approved style of Socialist Realism. However, of the one-hundred and twenty known works of Varazi, not one among them depicts any communist leader or commemorates any event in the history of the Soviet Socialist Revolution. He never participated in thematic exhibitions and did not paint on order or by demand. The success of his creative works in conveying a forbidden concept motivated Soviet special services to summon the artist to “advise” him to abandon painting in favor of some “manly job.” Several times, in a fit of depression, Varazi destroyed some of his own paintings, only a few of which could later be restored. He did not have his own studio, but worked in a small room always swarming with people. He never signed his paintings because he believed that paintings, like frescoes, did not need a signature. He could often be seen with a long beard, walking the streets clad in clothes greased with paint. At home, hanging on the wall, he kept a clean outfit which he reserved for walks with his children. Besides his pop art, Varazi is well known for his still-life paintings and portraits.30 His portraits are mainly created in vertical form with emphasis on the faces and other details left unelaborated. The artist was not interested in constructing photographic-like images of his subjects’ faces, but rather in creating expressive representations of the inner world of those whom he painted. He never painted strangers. He would carefully study each model he selected for a portrait in order to gain a deeper understanding of the model’s nature. One characteristic feature of his portraits are the sad, melancholic eyes of the models he painted. His favorite color was ultramarine and most of his paintings are created in that hue. Parallels are often drawn between these works of Varazi and those of Picasso during his Blue Period. Varazi admired Picasso greatly, but considered their universes so vastly different that he saw no deep connection between their respective works. Suffering from diabetes mellitus, Varazi died prematurely at the age of 51. Two months after his death in 1977, the first 30 In 1969 Varazi also artistically directed the film Pirosmani, directed by Giorgi Shengelaia (Moscow 1937–2020), where he also played the role of Pirosmani.

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exhibition of his works was held. A second exhibit followed sometime after. A younger contemporary was Kote Jincharadze (Tbilisi, 1962), who was also a graduate of the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, had moved from dense figurative abstractions such as “Ancestors ” (1986) to a powerful nine-part work photographic-based work “Shadow” (1989–1990). The latter shows streets of Tbilisi, each superimposed by a photo negative of a person who had gone missing or dead at the time. Each of the series look like small mausoleums. He also began a brooding piece “Storm” (1989– 1999), that combines a rough abstract surface over which he placed a fragment of a large-scale classical head in white plaster. The artist recalls thinking of Shakespeare in the conception of his work and the parallels with Georgia during this time.

Part Two In 1989 nationalism in Soviet Georgia gained momentum with the weakening of the Soviet Union. April 9th remains a key date for Georgians, remembered because special Soviet forces had brutally dispersed a peaceful rally with tear gas and sapper shovels. 21 people died with hundreds of participants poisoned with gases or injured by the blades. While resonating throughout the Soviet Union, it brought about a national awakening that would lead to Georgian independence. One artist who was to refer to the violence and war in his work was the young Vakho Bugadze (Tbilisi, 1964) who produced a painting: Untitled (oil on canvas. 160X170cm) in 1993. The canvas depicted a large bunch of flowers, surrounded on all four sides by army tanks.31 The painting represents flowers that had been gathered and laid at the graves of innocent people killed in the conflict, a reminder of the Russian invasion. Bugadze had trained at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1985–1991 in both painting and sculpture. His early painting “Boxer” (1987) was

31 Later referred to as “9 April” (the 9 April Tragedy happened in Tbilisi in 1989. On

the 9th of April 1989, the Soviet army had used tanks and poisonous gas to disperse the peaceful demonstration of several thousand participants supporting the independence of Georgia. As a consequence, 21 people (17 females, 4 males) were killed on Rustaveli Avenue, with hundreds wounded, maimed, and poisoned. This violence was also captured by the artist Niko Lomashvili with his “14 shots ” (1990).

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a powerful rendering of the popular sport of boxing. Later, Bugadze expanded the range of his work. Many of his works move between figuration and abstraction, the figure of a naked woman or man surrounded by abstract form. In 1997–98 he made two works “Skin” (1997) and “Still life” (1997–1998), with both works using a leopard skin as a point of departure to explore abstraction. The drama of life around him with the large-scale painting “Drowned” (1999). Bugadze has continued to paint ever since his early work with major exhibitions in both Georgia and Europe. In 2013 he was shown at the National Gallery for the first time in the group exhibition “Victoria” presented by the Gala Gallery. His series “Tbilisi Hippodrome” was exhibited together with the art works of the artists, Oleg Timchenko and Ushangi Khumarashvili and curated by Dedika Bulia.32 In 2015, he showed a series called Suburb that, painted from 2013– 2015, was shown at the National Gallery in Tbilisi. He wrote of the work: “These are my childhood memories… I used to live near “closed market” in my childhood. Then we moved to Gldani. The construction of the suburb just started, and there were standing a few buildings” … recalls artist. The paintings from the series “Suburb” are “on the edge of abstraction”. The contour of the same house (building) sunk in the twilight appears nearly on every canvas. This is the childhood icon of the “grand” event - a little boy suddenly moved from the miniature old Tbilisi district to completely different urban environment, - overlaid with memories and fantasies. Time helps me to transform particular stores and memories. Time distance makes me to find the shape, texture, materials …33

By 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of Georgia created a volatile, unstable situation. The Kremlin had endorsed South Ossetian nationalism as a counter against the Georgian independence movement. But, on 11 December 1990, Georgia responded to South Ossetia’s attempt at secession, annulled the region’s autonomy and by January 1991, a military conflict had broken out between Georgia

32 Khatuna Khabuliani, Vakho Bugadze’s Series “Hippodrome” - “History and Memory in Painting,” Magazine Arili, #35 (225), 2014, pp. 53–57. 33 Cited in Teona Japaridze, a copy of which was sent to me by the artist.

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and South Ossetian separatists. Georgia declared its restoration of independence in April 1991. This was followed by a violent military coup d’etat in December 22, 1991 and the subsequent uprising of the President of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, in an attempt to regain power in 1993.34 By June 1992, the possibility of a full-scale war between Russia and Georgia increased as bombing of Georgian capital Tbilisi in support of South Ossetian separatists was promised by Russian authorities. Georgia endorsed a cease-fire agreement on 24 June 1992 to prevent the escalation of the conflict with Russia. Guram Tsibakhashvili had made a mixed media work “Time,” “Soldiers, Save our Bodies ” (1989) composed of three small wooden tablets with inlays. Then, in 1991, he made a set of 3 paintings “Lenin,” using old photographic portraits of Lenin, placed sideways as if laid to rest, no longer in power. The portraits are then almost completely covered with red paint and stars. The symbolic gesture was clear and timely. Georgia and Russia were undergoing a radical transformation with the independence of Georgia and collapse of the Soviet Union. After the period of 1991, Niko Tsetskhladze made two works that show the changes occurring both in his work and in contemporary Georgian art in the 1990s. This included “Untitled” (1992) composed of two monitors showing lips with sound. Similarly, Koka Ramishvili (Tbilisi, 1956) made a series of photographs from his window in Tbilisi. “War from my Window” (1991) captures the bombing in the surrounding foothills around Tbilisi. This work is a stark, unadorned document of the war, a form of cinema verite.35 Ramishvili had been already active in rethinking painting, disrupting the painterly surface, such as “SOS” (1990) or “EDNICMPSSR No. 2” (1990), an installation which dismantles the traditional frame and canvas, deconstructing the essence of its construction. We see its bare bones: the canvas material, the wooden

34 The military coup d’état lasted from December 22, 1991–December 31, 1993. Over the course of these years, a Georgian Civil War also raged with inter-ethnic and intranational conflicts in the regions of South Ossetia, leaving parts of Southern Ossetia under de facto control of Russian separatists. This was followed by war in Abkhazia (1992– 1993). 35 Ramishvili got wide attention thanks to his participation in the Venice Biennial of 2009. Apart from that, institutions such as the MAMCO in Geneva (2004) and the MHKA in Antwerp (2011) have showed his work extensively. Ramishvili now lives and works in Geneva.

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frame. This exploration is continued as with Gallery 1990-1991, an installation occupying one gallery room of hung empty frames with attached black military textile strings running gathering together in a heap at the center of the gallery floor. This was shown in the exhibition “Heat and Conduct ” at Mappin Gallery, Sheffield and Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (UK), in 1992. By 1994 Ramishvili was starting to make video as with “Signal ” (1994). As Viktor Misiano notes, much of Ramishvili’s work is based on a collision of documentary materials with purely abstract geometric animation…This is the way modernism with its tendency towards rationalistic and universal abstractions collides with concreteness of the present, anti-modernistic criticism insisted on so much.36

Mamuka Japaridze (Tbilisi, 1962) was also beginning to establish himself as major Georgian artist. In 1991 he graduated from Department of Sculpture at Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and begun with painting: abstractions with signs, symbols, and motifs such as “Composition” (1990). In 1991, he was part of the Bristol exhibition “Heat and Conduct” along with Rigvava, Ramishvili and others. There he exhibited a hand-knitted jersey with a floor piece as part of a series of painted wooden works that included pieces on the wall and floor. Over time, Japaridze became known as a conceptual/multimedia artist also known for environmental art practice and art education. Since 1987 made performances and “actions,” coordinated arts projects and exchanges, and curated exhibitions.37 In 1992, artist created conceptual gallery called “Ramsesmzera”, involving several projects where other artists participated. In 1999, he was chosen to exhibit at the 48th Venice Biennale, with Georgi Alexi-Meshkishvili. Japharidze represented Georgia, curated by Irena Popiashvili. Looking back on his practice, Japaridze wrote in 2003:

36 Viktor Misiano, op.cit., ‘After Ramishvili,’ in Change, edited by Georgian Pavilion. Venice Biennale, 2011, pp. 12–13. 37 Japaridze has aways been engaged with language, ecology and processed-based art. He runs Shindisi Field Academy, also known as ‘Cloud Library,’ 7 km. from Tbilisi, where, together with CCA Tbilisi, he is teaching a special course on bio-farming in relation to art.

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Since 1987 I have been working in an international arena; working with language; using language frame as the basic construction and conceptual base of a work. Often using bi-lingual sound-play to find new trans-cultural subjective meanings. The poetic language sound-play can be manifested as sound vibration, concrete text and also the actual object/event itself…I am investigating the way that objects exist in a separate time/world beyond human’s utilitarian interpretation of time/object. The state of potential before objects/things are manifested is for me a real metaphysical state of existence…One basic principle is an investigation of the threshold between an art event and on art…My target is the actual moment of an event and not towards building a product.38

The early canvases of Temo Javakhishvili (Tbilisi, 1961) incorporates non-artistic materials. As Niko Tsetskhladze, Javakhishvili used tar—reminiscent of the great Italian artist Alberto Burri (Citta de Castello, Italy 1915–1995) from the postwar period—in his triptych “The Main Prayer” (1985). One sees a minimal interruption of surface by the incidence of movement and subtle appearance of signs. By the end of the 80s, Javakhishvili had begun to move away from painted canvases to that of the object. In 1990, he made “Mail Art Object ” then “Rusted Poems ” (1993), reminiscent of “mail art” by Fluxus artists in both Japan and North America in the 1960s. At this time, Javakhishvili was expanding his range of work from his “Rusted Poems ” (1993) to objects that were reminiscent of early Zurich and Berlin Dada, exemplified by three works in 1994: a small glowing neon work “Man and the Woman” and “Wound,” a tableau of suspended shoe castes and a suspended chair “Sit Down.” Engaged with photography, object-based work and performance, Jincharadze became more engaged with the exploration of the different objects, values and their hierarchy of positions, making work that was in part, inspired by his interpretation of Pop art. He published “The Pop Art” in April 1991 that begins: “Pop Art is the continuation of expressionism, Pop Art is the universe between abstracted and concrete. ‘Flatness’ surface is accented in the Pop Art. In Pop Art one can use every thing is spite of its form, contents,

38 Cited in Mamuka Japaridze, see Wikipedia.

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outlook and property…If art is the speech of symbols, then every detail, thing, form is pictured as symbols.39

Also, at the time, the young Keti Kapanadze (Tbilisi, 1962) produced “Erotik of Numbers.” Made of nickel mirrors, the series teases out the double entendre inherent in numbers if looked at visually. She had already painted “8 Minutes ” (1986), “Helicopters ” (1988), and “The Cucumber Path” (1988) on black matt boards, each a playful reading of the ambiguity of form. But the playfulness of her work in the 1980s was replaced by two powerful photo series, “Long day in night,” (1991) and “Kazan Story” (1992). The first series, reminiscent of Japanese photography of the 1960s, is imbued with a sense of melancholy, reflecting the bare solitariness of life in Georgia. This was followed by “Kazan Story,” a group of 8 photographs that captures the harsh daily life of the streets and bare cold interiors in the city of Kazan.40 Contemporary with Kapanadze was Misha Gogrichiani (Tbilisi, 1967) and his early canvases are a good example of a sober sense of play that characterized the poverty of living conditions in Tbilisi and Georgia during these years. His work takes the everyday reality that surrounds him. There is nothing grandiose in his subjects but, rather the everyday, mundane surroundings of his daily life in Tbilisi, such as “Soviet Toy” (1991), a mechanical bird toy still popular in the period or with sardonic wit, “Ceiling ” (1991) or “Elevator” (1991). It is as if painting directly corresponds to the immediate reality around hm. In 1994, Kote Sulaberidze (Tbilisi, 1968) began a series of works that in a quite different manner uses the subject of war as a point of reference. He makes “War Games” (1994–95) followed by “Shamil’s Battle against the Russian Army” (1998) and “Koika in Psychiatric Hospital ” (1999). At the time, Tsibakhashvili had begun also at the time, to compose a book of photographs “Autobiography before Birth” (1992–94) in which he explores Tbilisi as Dublin. The photographs are a raw portrait of the

39 Kote Jincharadze ‘The Pop Art,’ Karvasla: Mirror as an Object Reflection in Space (April 1991). Later in 2005, Jincharadze founded the ‘Arteli Ratcha’ foundation, organizing contemporary art workshops in the village of Chkvishi in the Ratcha region of Georgia. 40 Kazan is the capital of the Tatarstan Republic in Russia. See discussion of this work by Kathrin Becker in ‘On Keti Kapanadze’s Photo series of the 1990’s,’ in Keti Kapanadze: What is Love? edited by Gia Edzgvradze. Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 2016, pp. 100–101.

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streets of Tbilisi, a city still suffering from violence and impoverishment, set off by Soviet intervention. In 1997 he produced a series of some 200 photo-based work “Definition.” Using photographs taken of daily life in Georgia, he then supplements each with drawings in colour and phrases. Sometimes ironic, other times humorous, they depict the ordinary, at times romantic dreams or harsh realities of life as it was and remains in Georgia.

CHAPTER 5

Rise and Fall of Monuments

We are living in what could be called a “memorial age.” On the one hand, new monuments are being built to commemorate and question violent events of the past.1 On the other, monuments are being destroyed as a way of symbolizing the end of an era. Their destruction represents a desire to put the past behind. But is this possible? The most recent widespread expression of this desire has been the toppling of monuments throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union after 1989, which came to symbolize the fall of Communism. Another anti-monument movement has begun more recently in North America and as far as Australia, with isolated cases again in Europe. More often than not, the toppling of monuments occurs after the overthrow of a state, and for this reason among others, monuments are part of the turbulent legacy of the past; they cannot stand outside history. For long after the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Soviet World War II monuments in many of these countries continued to arouse significant debate as to whether they should be preserved or dismantled by law.2 There is no doubt, however, that to ignore or attempt to erase

1 An early version of this chapter was published in New York: Grand Street, No. 68, pp. 183–191, 1999. 2 See Antony Kalashnikov, DPhil candidate in History, University of Oxford.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_5

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this legacy through the destruction of monuments is to risk engaging in a dangerous form of historical revizionism. What is a monument? Monuments make certain historical claims based on a conservative impulse to commemorate an epoch, ideology, event, or figure. Monuments construct and preserve a record; they are symbols intended to stand over the vagaries of memory and apart from the contingencies of history. They are literally larger than life, and lend a sense of permanence to an idea, or a regime, by seeming almost part of nature. The emperor or general on his horse, the leader with his arm raised to the sky—these images are all part of an iconography of triumph that projects the past onto the future, from one generation of people to the next. Monuments celebrate—and try to ensure—the reign of the perpetual present. In the state’s eyes, the monument functions as both a physical representation of the leader and of those who later claim his mantle. The state seeks legitimization through representation; its authority is embodied in its representations of itself and in its hegemony over competing images (and therefore ideologies). As the French philosopher Guy Debord suggests in his book Society of the Spectacle of 1967, this spectacle is “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power.” Any discussion of monuments reveals the great power attributed to them as with images, imbued with an afterlife, embodiment, and manifestation of power. Hans Belting in his An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body, explores the residual power of images in general.3 According to Belting, images “live in our bodies”.4 Our bodies store archives of images and feelings. Our bodies censor or transform the beheld medium into an “image” by endowing it with meaning, connecting it to past images, and projecting our own desires onto it. In this way images maintain their presence within asocial group and in the present. On the other hand, when the body becomes an image it undergoes what the French historian Louis Marin (1931–1992) has called an “ontological transfer.” The image is given the power to act in the name and place of the body. This is just the kind of transfer of power that normally

3 Hans Belting in his An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011, Ch. 4, p. 86. 4 Ibid., p. 306.

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takes place between bodies, and it effectively endows the image with new kind of authority. The image…acquires “Being” in the name of that body. Its presence, precisely because it is delegated to the image, surpasses that of an ordinary body…Through images and their use, the social realm is now expanded to include the realm of the dead.5 In Marin’s book The Power of the Image, suggests that the power of a portrait of a king or emperor gains its authority from living beyond its subject.6 It assumes authority from that subject, as if it has overcome death. It is this uncanny power, this force that haunts those who live, that people try to destroy. Russia has always been occupied and preoccupied by its monuments, and has a history of destroying them. With the advent of the Soviet State many monuments were destroyed, renamed, or built. On April 12, 1918, under Lenin, the Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree ordering the Tsarist monuments to be replaced before the first anniversary of the October Revolution. After Lenin’s death, Stalin set up a Committee for the Immortalization of Lenin’s Memory, which was responsible for the “correct manufacture of busts, bas-reliefs and pictures showing V. I. Lenin.” In the 1920s and 1930s Bolsheviks destroyed old churches and renamed Moscow streets in order to obliterate the past. The first act of the perestroika years was to give streets back their old names and pull down Soviet monuments. The way a society thinks about its monuments reflects the way it deals with its own history. In recent years, the question of what to do with the monuments of Communism has preoccupied historians, politicians, and artists throughout former Communist countries. While Soviet-era war monuments often refer to liberation from the Nazis and the defence of the freedom and independence of Eastern European states, this liberation was followed by the imposition of pro-Soviet communist regimes and the long-term presence of the Soviet military in Eastern Europe. As a result some call for the swift destruction of these monuments, others for their conservation; still others, like the Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko (Warsaw, 1943), believe they should neither be destroyed nor conserved, but somehow altered, in a manner that suggests the passage of history.7 5 Ibid., Ch. 4, p. 86. 6 Louis Marin, The Power of the Image. The Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural

Materialism. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1993. 7 Wodiczko received an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1968. He immigrated to Canada in 1977 and established residency in New York City in 1983. He

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Muscovites were faced with this question shortly before midnight on August 22, 1991, in the aftermath of an aborted Communist coup against former Soviet President Gorbachev, when a group of pro-democracy Muscovites tried to dismantle the larger-than-life-size bronze statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926). Born in Lithuania to a Polish landowning family, Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the Cheka (Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage) in 1917, a precursor to the KGB. Lenin had defined the Cheka as a special system of organized violence established to impose a proletarian dictatorship which, under the leadership of Dzerzhinsky, would seek to exterminate the middle class. Dzerzhinsky has been both reviled as a symbol of the tyranny of Communist repression and defended for his love of Russian street children, whom he rescued and for whom he built special orphanages. Although he acquired the nickname “Iron Felix” for his fanatical party loyalty, incorruptible asceticism, and priesthood of terror and ruthlessness, a 1989 edition of the State-published guidebook to Moscow describes him as an eminent Party leader, Soviet statesman, and a close comrade of Lenin. The monument to Dzerzhinsky, built by the once—revered sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich in 1956, resembled the KGB itself—an organization cloaked in secrecy. Like a mask, the monument hid as much as it revealed. The monument itself is unremarkable. There are no distinguishing gestures or purposeful expressions, as is the case with many Lenin monuments. Rather it is characterized by equanimity and constraint. In front of Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad—a prominent square in the center of the city—this nondescript monument had become a looming presence—a symbol of the KGB and a reminder that the organization functioned outside Lubyanka’s prison walls, in a public sphere. Earlier in the day protestors had painted the words EXECUTIONER and FELIX, THIS IS YOUR END around the base. They then climbed onto the statue, wrapped a chain around its neck, like a noose, and attempted to topple it with the help of a small bus. The monument could not be uprooted that day, but eventually Russia’s new leader, Boris Yeltsin,

lives and works in New York City; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Warsaw. Wodiczko was recognized with the Hiroshima Art Prize in 1999 for his contribution as an artist to world peace, and the 2004 College Art Association Award for a distinguished body of work. He received an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1968.

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ordered its removal. The monument was temporarily placed in a quasi— “sculpture graveyard” in Gorky Park along with other uprooted statues, including those of Lenin, Stalin, Mikhail Kalinin (the second head of the Soviet state), and Yakov Sverdlov, one of the creators of the Communist Party apparatus. In 1991, Col. Vladimir Maslennikov, first deputy chief of the KGB press center, had lamented “I’ve worked for a year and a half to create a new image,” “Now, it’s smashed—suddenly smashed. The coup has thrown the KGB back to 1953 or 1954.”8 The monument’s removal was a moment of triumph for many not directly involved as well. Soon after learning of the toppling of Dzerzhinsky’s statue, Father Gleb Yakunin, an Orthodox priest and the leader of the radical reform movement of Democratic Russia, remarked, “This is the fruit of our victory! It symbolizes that we are now dismantling the system and will destroy the enormous, dangerous, totalitarian machine of the KGB.”9 Or as Anatoly Malykhin, a leader of the Russian coal miners’ labor movement, noted, “This is a normal procedure of purification. It is neither revenge nor a reward. It is a restoration of justice. We are cleaning away the waste from our lives.”10 But the former Soviet dissident artists Vitaly Komar and Alexis Melamid, who were by then living in New York, thought otherwise. The first thing we saw was the crowds outside the KGB dismantling the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky…We could accept that. It was ecstatic, like the storming of the Bastille, or a natural phenomenon, like an earthquake. But it was the next event that got to us: angry crowds tearing down the main statue of Lenin. This was not a revolution already: This was a very old habit, a conservative tradition, of toppling the old gods, erasing history and remaking it to suit the new regime…(They) devised the idea for a competition that would pose the question: How can we preserve the old monuments while giving them a new context that would celebrate the anti-communist revolution, but without erasing history? “Moscow could become a phantasmagoric garden of post-totalitarian art,” they wrote in a manifesto. “Why not erect a cage or a great aquarium with fish and octopi swimming around the statue of some great historical figure? Or why not 8 See Kathy Lally, ‘KGB Leader’s Coup Role Derails PR Push Spy Agency Set Back by Kryuchkov’s Act THE SOVIET CRISIS,’ in The Baltimore Sun, August 28, 1991. 9 Elizabeth Shogren, ‘Hated Symbol of KGB Torn Down by Crowd,’ Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1991. 10 Ibid.

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lift a statue by hydraulic cranes, as if to remove it, but instead leave it hanging in the air, ambiguously arresting the moment of dismantlement, extending it into ETERNAL RETRIBUTION?”11

In 1992, Komar and Melamid had decided to make an open call in the art magazine Art Forum, asking artists to submit proposals for saving and transforming the monuments rather than destroying them. In their statement, the artists wrote (not without irony), “History should be preserved for future generations. But these monuments are not just history for us, they are our lives. It’s not so much the monuments themselves we want to preserve as the beautiful sweet world of our childhood.”12 The result of their call led an exhibition called “Monumental Propaganda,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow and at the Courtyard Gallery of the World Financial Center in Manhattan. In an interview with Lawrence Weschler in The New Yorker the following year of 1993, they spoke about the “old Moscow technique” that either “worships or destroys.” It is like a form of patricide in which one leader displaces the one who preceded him. “Each time it is history, the country’s true past, that is conveniently being obliterated.”13 The sense of loss that gives rise to their irony brings to mind the Russian historian Andrei Zorin’s remark that Russia had always sacrificed its heritage in order to build a new Utopia. It was precisely the class of thinkers, poets, and artists to which Komar and Melamid belong, that people such as Dzerzhinsky were most active in eliminating, and it is some of these people who now seek to break the cycle by not eliminating the monuments. But why preserve monuments? What value do they hold, especially if they symbolize repressive regimes? Eastern Europe’s division over the handling of its monuments is directly related to the question of how to handle the inheritance of a monumental and oppressive history. In some sense, the monument is not only symbolic of a larger violence that has been inflicted on society; in fact, violence is inherent to its conception. Many monuments either commemorate those who have fallen in battle or 11 Cited in David Remnick, ‘What Becomes a Lenin Most,’ The Washington Post, July 25, 1993. 12 Komar & Melamid, ‘What Is To Be Done with Monumental Progaganda?” Art Forum, vol. 30, No. 10, May 1992. 13 Lawrence Weschler, ‘Slide Modifications,’ The New Yorker, No. 30, September 20, 1993.

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celebrate a victory or conquest. They therefore mark a moment of transition or change between the past and the future that is gained through violence. To destroy or erect a monument implicates its destroyers in its violence. Revenge begets revenge. Wodiczko, who for several years has been projecting counterimages onto existing memorials, commented, “Watching the monuments to Lenin being destroyed made me think that there should be a public discussion before any of this is irreversible. The sculptures are witnesses to the past, memorabilia of the monstrous past.” For Wodiczko, “the past must be infused with the present to create a critical history.”14 His belief that the monuments must be transformed into a reflection of historical change is related to Michel Foucault’s concept of counter-memory. Counter-memory would unveil or expose the initial events of the construction of monumental history and its subsequent effects; it involves breaking the claim of permanence by giving voice to, and somehow embodying, historical change. The problem with monumental history is that it confuses the past with the future, while critical history calls upon and judges the past in order to measure the service it renders the present. It conceals its own historical conditions and is, as Nietzsche suggests in his book Untimely Meditations, that man is quite incapable of distinguishing between a monumentalized past and mythical fiction. Wodiczko has remarked that “My projections … are works of critical history… But they have to revive monumental history in order to turn it into a critical history. By illuminating it, no matter what I project, no matter how critical I want to be, I bring to it its former glory, its presence. It still reemerges from the darkness as a glorious symbol, as Nietzsche would say, giving us ‘a sense that grand things did happen.’15

The monument to Peter the Great recently commissioned by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, and erected on the banks of the Moscow River by the sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, is an example of Nietzsche’s monumental history. The statue, which marks the three-hundred-year anniversary of

14 See Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, p. 189. 15 Ibid.

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the Russian navy, depicts Peter waving atop a miniaturized eighteenthcentury Russian navy vessel crashing through rough waves. The thirtystory structure, the cost of which was estimated at $25 million, provoked a wave of protest. A poll found the public against the project by a ratio of 2 to 1; many see the commission as an act of favoritism on the part of the mayor. Soon after, an obscure group called the Revolutionary Military Council made an attempt to destroy Tsereteli’s statue. This same group protested against calls to remove Lenin’s body from its mausoleum. In April 1997, the group claimed responsibility for the destruction of a statue of Nicholas II that was built on the anniversary of the Tsar’s coronation. A second statue of Nicholas II was blown up early in November 1998. Referring to these incidents, as well as to Dzerzhinsky‘s statue, Gennady Melnik, a spokesman for the Moscow regional police department, said, “We don’t respect our own history and, like savages, tend to take revenge on statues.”16 Alexei Komech, an architectural historian and the head of the Russian Art Research Institute, has noted that the recent rebuilding of Moscow has led to the “substitution of historic sites with modern reproductions and theatrical imitations.”17 One example is the reconstructed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Originally built in 1882 near the Kremlin, the cathedral was demolished in 1931 to make way for a proposed Palace of Soviets. Under the direction of the architect and sculptor Boris lofan, the Palace of Soviets would have included a statue of Lenin modeled on the Statue of Liberty. The plan was abandoned and the space was finally filled in 1961 by a public swimming pool. Komech says that Mayor Luzhkov simply does not recognize the difference between reproduction and restoration, between a copy and the original. “He thinks if he pulls down an old building and puts up a modern copy in its place he is restoring the past. In fact, he is falsifying it.”18 For Andrei Zorin, however, the boom in monument-building is a form of conservation that accepts successive changes: “We see an unprecedented attempt to reconcile the Russian and Soviet past in a country

16 Reported by Julia Solovyova, ‘Another of Tsar Blown to Bits,’Moscow Times, November 3, 1998. 17 Alexei Komech, ‘Heritage Champion Battles City Hall’, Moscow Times, February 3, 2004. 18 Ibid. See also Leora Moldovsky, Replica Russe, Financial Review, October 28, 2005.

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that has always sacrificed its heritage in order to build a new Utopia.”19 Zorin believes that the future of Russia lies in living with competing legacies symbolized by monuments. “This is part of the new national idea. Peter the Great is God and so is Dzerzhinsky; Stalin’s wedding cakes [skyscrapers] are wonderful and so is the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Solzhenitsyn and his idea of repentance are not popular, however. To recall bloodshed and injustice is as rude these days as to shout in a silent room.”20 In 1992, in the square where the Dzerzhinsky statue had once stood, a monument to the victims of totalitarianism was unveiled. And in July, Yanis Bramzis, a Cossack, erected a cross on what had been the statue’s pedestal. By 1997, a plain granite boulder had been brought from a prison camp in the Arctic Circle and placed in front of the KGB headquarters with the inscription “In memory of the millions who died in the political terror of the Soviet era.” Then, on December 2, 1998, a motion to reinstate the statue of Dzerzhinsky was successfully put forward by the Agrarian faction, a Communist splinter group, and supported by the Communists and nationalists who were dominating the State Duma, the Lower House of Parliament at the time. Nikolai Kharitonov, leader of the Agrarian faction, noted that “replacing the statue will reassure the nation that the Russian government is dedicated to the ongoing struggle against crime. Dzerzhinsky will serve as a symbol in the fight for order in society.”21 Yuly Rybakov, an independent deputy and member of Russia’s Democratic Choice Party, argued against any reinstatement of the monument: “Dzerzhinsky was one of the most horrible butchers in history, with a multitude of innocent victims on his conscience. How can we possibly reinstate his statue in the center of the Russian capital?”22 For Rybakov, the fact that such monuments continue to occupy the city is a kind of recurring nightmare. It is as if the symbolic power invested in the monument goes beyond itself, and takes on a phantasmagoric afterlife. This 19 Cited in Iain Lauchlan, ‘Guardians of the People’s Total Happiness: The Origins and Impact of the Cult of the Cheka.’ Journal Politics, Religion & Ideology, vol. 14, No. 4, 2013, pp. 522–540. 20 David Remnick, ‘Exit the Saints,’ New Yorker, July 11, 1994. 21 Nikolai Kharitonov, cited in Jamestown Foundation Monitor, vol. 6, No. 132, July

3, 2000. 22 Cited in William Englund, ‘Russians Looking Back in Anger Symbols..Control History,’ Baltimore Sun, December 4, 1998.

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power has to do with the strange temporal presence of monuments; they contain an absolute force, belonging to the present and the past. Louis Marin suggests that the power of a portrait of a king or emperor gains its authority from living beyond its subject.23 It assumes authority from that subject, as if it has overcome death. It is this uncanny power, this force that haunts those who live, that people try to destroy.

Part Two: East European Memory Politics While many Soviet war monuments in Eastern Europe were demolished or relocated in the 1990s, in certain countries the past few years have seen a spike in these activities. Boris Groys explained this second iconoclastic wave in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of May 11, 2007: Every upheaval leads to a certain period of iconoclasm. It comes in waves. For a while people tolerate certain symbols, but these too will be destroyed. During the communist iconoclasm the destruction of churches and monuments continued for many decades after the October Revolution. And the current destruction of images will go on as well.24

In an article in the Voix du Luxembourg on May 4, 2007, the Luxembourger Laurent Moyse tried to understand why the past is a subject that comes up time and again all over Central and Eastern Europe: More to the west, we have at times taken a lot longer to look back on painful episodes of History. … National reconciliation has always been a painful ordeal in countries that have experienced trauma. Europe has indeed been living at peace with itself for 60 years, but in many cases, it maintains the hypersensitive memory of someone skinned alive.25

The existence of certain monuments has remained a bone of contention for many years, especially between Russia’s view of history and that of the other former communist states. In the complex game of East European memory politics, the independent effect of Soviet war monuments has

23 Louis Marin, The Power of the Image. op.cit. 24 Cited in Forssman, Berthold, The Controversy over Soviet Monuments in Eastern

Europe in Eurotopics, May 30, 2007. 25 Laurent Moyse, Voix du Luxembourg, May 4, 2007.

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been negative, providing evidence of the artificial nature of the “Soviets as liberators” narrative, and the way it was imposed on these countries, as to support it. According to Soviet history, the May 9, 1945 was the end of the Second World War and liberation Eastern Europe from Fascism. However, this date for many countries of Eastern Europe, marked the beginning of a new occupation after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. At the root of these developments are conflicting interpretations of the aftermath of World War II. Soviet-era war monuments tend to refer to liberation from the Nazis and the defence of the freedom and independence of Eastern European states. But for many people in Eastern Europe, this liberation was followed by the imposition of pro-Soviet communist regimes and the long-term presence of the Soviet military in Eastern Europe, something experienced more as an occupation. The first major war monuments commissioned by the Soviet government were not built in the USSR but Eastern and Central European cities—such as Vienna, Warsaw, and Berlin. Local communist authorities also commissioned monuments marking their gratitude for liberation and the commitment to friendship and brotherhood with the Soviet Union. It is ironic that these monuments, oriented as they were toward future generations—in part, toward those who now decide their fate—are today far more likely to provoke antipathy toward Russia than goodwill. In the Czech Republic, the inscription on a monument honoring Marshal Ivan Konev, who was twice designated a Hero of the Soviet Union by Stalin, has been rewritten to highlight the marshal’s prominent role in suppressing the Prague Spring in 1968. In Bulgaria, monuments have become targets of sporadic defacement and vandalism, compared to other East European countries including those in which Soviet war monuments are protected by law. The Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, Bulgaria, is a good example. It was painted over on the night of February 24, 2014 by unknown activists, in solidarity with the Euromaidan Revolution against Ukraine’s pro-Russian regime. This is the most famous instance of defacement, but the monument has been the subject of several similar actions over the years, which show no signs of abating. In the final weeks of the war, Lieutenant-General Aleksandr Semenovich Gundorov of the Soviet Union with members of the pan-Slavic

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Committee made a trip to Bulgaria.26 While they were there, they saw a number of old Russian military monuments dedicated to the fallen of the Russo-Turkish War of 1886–1887, which resulted in the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the modern Bulgarian state. On May 4, 1945, Gundorov wrote to the Central Committee of the Soviet communist party, saying there were no city or large settlement in this country, in which there were no such monuments and, that the town of Plevna and Shipka Pass had been turned into huge museums dedicated to the liberation of Bulgaria by the Russian people. Gundorov saw an interesting connection: Without a doubt, they played a huge role in instilling in the present generation of Bulgarians a passionate love for the Russian people, which we saw during our stay. Gundorov commented: Unlike in other Slavic countries, in Bulgaria you find less chapels, crosses, figures of Madonnas, and other [religious] monuments that usually decorate villages, crossroads, and other places, as they are replaced by the graves of Russian soldiers. So, in order to encourage goodwill toward the USSR among future generations, Gundorov suggested issuing a call to the public and to local communist branches to embark on a wide program of building memorials. While Gundorov’s proposal was not implemented formally, it was carried out in practice.27 The controversy about the relocation of a Soviet monument from the center of the Tallinn in Estonia provides another illustration of Eastern Europe’s approach to history and of relations between Russia and Europe.28 The monument was more than two meters tall depicting a Soviet soldier bowing his head in mourning for those killed in the war. It was erected in a rather inconspicuous place in the center of Tallinn in 1947 and for a long time received little attention. That only changed after Estonia became independent, when an increasing number of the Russian minority in Estonia began laying flowers at the statue every year on 9 May, Soviet Victory Day. For a long time this did not particularly bother anyone. 26 The pan-Slavic Committee was created in 1941 to bolster support for the Soviet war effort among East European emigres. 27 See Anthony Kalashnikov, ‘Soviet War Memorials in Eastern Europe Continue to Strain Relations with Russia,’ The Conversation, August 20, 2018. 28 see Forssman, Berthold, op.cit., The Controversy over Soviet Monuments in Eastern Europe.

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As Kalle Muuli wrote in the Estonian newspaper Postimees in May 2006: “…although this is not a pleasant sight for most Estonians, it’s not so unbearable that they can’t put up with it for a couple of days each year for the sake of peaceful coexistence. Moreover, Estonians, too, have come to the statue to mourn.”29 But, in the same month, Estonia’s prime minister, Andrus Ansip, declared that the monument symbolized the occupation of the country and should therefore be removed. A few months later a law to this effect was passed, even though there had been repeated warnings that Russia would regard this as a provocation. When the decision went into effect on April 27, 2007 and the bronze statue was removed from the city and taken to a cemetery on the edge of town, riots that went on for several days broke out in Tallinn. Thereafter the Estonian embassy in Moscow was besieged by youth groups loyal to the Kremlin, relations between Estonia and Russia deteriorated dramatically and Estonia called on the EU and NATO to show solidarity.

Ukraine In Kiev on August 26, 1991 the executive committee of Kiev voted to remove all the monuments of “Communist heroes” from public places, including the Lenin monument on the central October Revolution Square (now named Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). This was followed by the First Lady Kateryna Yushchenko call on all Ukrainians to pull down monuments to the Communist past on October 6, 2009. According to her, the Communist regime had been consistently active in destroying the Ukrainian church. “Having destroyed age-long belief in Christ, the Communists proposed their own idols instead; the culture and faith of Ukrainians was deformed and are in need of renovation,” according to Kateryna Yushchenko. One example of this was a statue of Lenin that had been erected in 1946 and stood in front of Bessarasky Market in Kiev. But on June 30, 2009, the nose of the statue and part of the left hand were destroyed. The statue was then restored (at the expense of the Communist Party of Ukraine and re-unveiled on November 27, 2009 by Petro Symonenko, leader of the Communist Part of Ukraine. During this ceremony two representatives of Svoboda or All-Ukrainian

29 Muuli, Kalle, Postimees, Tallinn (Estonian newspaper), May, 2006.

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Union, threw a bottle of red paint at the monument, who were then attacked by attending Communists.30 Since Ukrainian independence in 1991, communist monuments had been already being removed and until 2014 new monuments were also erected. In the aftermath of the 2013–2014 Euromaidan protests many of them were recently toppled. The removal or destruction of Lenin monuments and statues gained particular momentum during the Euromaiden movement in the beginning of 2014. Under the motto “Leninopad” (Leninopad, translated into English as “Leninfall”), activists pulled down a dozen monuments in the Kiev region, Zhytomyr, Khmelnitsky, and elsewhere, or damaged them. On December 8, 2013, the statue of Lenin in front of Bessarasky Market in Kiev finally fell. In Andriyevo-Ivanove (Rozdilnianskyi district, Odessa Oblast), a statue of Lenin was broken in half on January 4, 2014, followed by similar actions on February 20 in Zhytomyr and Boyarka and the next day in Khmelnytsky.31 In other cities and towns, monuments were removed by organized heavy equipment and transported to scrapyards or dumps. By February 25, 2014 an estimate ran of over 90 statues and monuments being pulled down, removed, or relocated. Since February 2014 and mid-April 2015, more than 500 statues of Lenin were dismantled in Ukraine, and nearly 1,700 were still standing. In Dnipropetrovsk, two Lenin monuments had been removed by the city in 2014 and in March 2014 the city’s Lenin Square was renamed “Heroes of Independence Square” in honor of the people killed during Euromaidan The statue of Lenin on the square was removed. In June 2014 another Lenin monument was removed (parts of the monument were moved to a local history museum) and replaced by a monument for the Ukrainian military fighting against armed insurgents in the Donbass region of Ukraine. By April 9, 2015 the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation, submitted by the Second Yatsenyuk Government, banning the promotion of symbols of “‘Communist and National Socialist Totalitarian regimes.” One of the main provisions of the bill was the recognition of the Soviet Union as “criminal” and that it “pursued a state terror policy.” 30 Svoboda is a Ukrainian nationalist political party founded in 1991. 31 The statue of Lenin in Khmelnytsky was mounted from 1970 to 1992, designed by

E. Kuntsevych, architects—O. Ihnashchenko, Ye. Perekrest. It was then relocated to the park of Culture and Recreation.

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This “decommunisation law” opened the way for the removal of public art bearing communist symbolism.32 While war monuments were officially exempt, the political climate has encouraged sporadic destruction and vandalism (particularly in the western regions of Ukraine—Lviv’s Memorial of Glory to Heroes Fallen in World War II , for instance, was vandalized. This led immediately to all Ukrainian monuments to Lenin and other Soviet-era monuments being made illegal. The law mandated the monuments be removed within a six months period that started on May 15, 2015. By December 2015, 1,300 Lenin monuments were still standing, compared to the 5,500 Lenin monuments in 1991. In Zaporizhia on March 2016, statues of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Sergey Kirov and a Komsomol monument were removed or taken down. The statue of Lenin overlooking the Dniper Hydroelectric Station (formerly named Lenin Dam) was the largest remaining Lenin statue in Ukraine. The Lenin statue in Odessa mounted in 1967 to 2006 and designed by O.M.Manizer, architects—I. Ye. Rozin, Yu. S. Lapin, M. M. Volkov was relocated to the park of Lenin’s Komsomol. By January 16, 2017 the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance announced that 1,320 Lenin monuments were dismantled during decommunization.33

Poland Having grown up in this environment, Wodiczko responded directly to the subject of monuments. He began developing his public projections in 1980 interfacing the facades of urban architecture—whether public monuments, public buildings, or corporate architecture—with images of the body to juxtapose the physical space of architecture with the psychosocial space of the public realm. This led to a series of large-scale slide and video projections of politically charged images on architectural façades and monuments worldwide. By focusing our attention on ways in which architecture and monuments reflect collective memory and history, his work challenges the silent, stark 32 Draft Law on Condemning Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) Totalitarian Regimes in Ukraine and Prohibiting the Propaganda of Their Symbols, Ukraine, 2015. 33 There are only two remaining statues of Lenin in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

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monumentality of buildings, activating them in an examination of notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence, alienation, and inhumanity that underlie countless aspects of social interaction in presentday society.34

Wodiczko’s words remind us of Piotrowski last book in which he explored forms of art that represented the activation of democratic values in Eastern Europe.35 In late 1984, Wodiczko projected an image of the hand of Ronald Reagan, in formal dress shirt with cufflinks, posed in the pledge of allegiance, onto the north face of the AT&T Long Lines Building in the financial district of New York City four days before the presidential election of 1984. With its overt, politically loaded imagery—including two hands, one gripping a revolver and the other a lit candle, alongside four microphones, as if at a press conference—the project was a response to Reagan-era social policies and the heated presidential campaigns of George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis.” By creating a spectacle in which a fragment of the governing body, the presidential hand, was asked to stand for corporate business,” writes Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Wodiczko offered a suggestion about the class identity of those forces that—hidden under the guise of God, State, and Nation—are the actual receivers of the pledge of allegiance.”36 . In the following year Wodiczko created a projection for Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, London. The South African government was at that time petitioning the British government for financial support. Wodiczko turned one of his projectors away from Nelson’s column projecting a swastika onto the tympanum of the temple-like façade of South Africa House. Though the image remained only two hours before the police suspended the intervention as a “public nuisance” it lingered in public awareness much longer as an example of successful urban guerrilla cultural tactics. In 1990 Wodiczko produced a pair of projections in former West and East Berlin, one on the Huth-Haus in Potsdammer Platz, the other 34 Cited in Art 21. 35 Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, trans. Anna Brzyski.

London: Reaktion Books, 2012. 36 Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, ‘Understanding Wodiczko,’ Counter-Monuments: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Public Projections. Cambridge, MA: Hayden Gallery, List Visual ArtsCenter, MIT, 1987.

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on the Lenin monument in Leninplatz. The Leninplatz monument was transformed into a consumer with a shopping cart filled with electronic equipment. Not only does Wodiczko appear to be suggesting the transformation of a Communist Utopia under Lenin into a post-Soviet culture of consumption, but he also transforms the spectacle, and spectral power, of world Communism into a world telecommunications network. Within a year the monument was dismantled and removed—a victim of an iconoclastic backlash against communist rule. The act of erasing the past had won the day. In this way, Wodiczko‘s visual repertoire for his projections expanded beyond the body (ears, eyes, and hands as indicators of human sensibility) to include chains, missiles, tanks, coins, cameras, boots, swastikas, guns, candles, food baskets, and corporate logos. By 1996, Wodiczko had added sound and motion to the projections and, began to collaborate with communities around chosen projection sites, giving voice to the concerns of marginalized citizens who live in the monuments’ shadows. Projecting images of community members’ hands, faces, or entire bodies onto architectural façades, and combining those images with voiced testimonies, Wodiczko disrupts our traditional understanding of the functions of public space and architecture. In subsequent projections, the artist layered iconic representations of global capitalism, militarism, and consumerism with images of fragments of the body to suggest a consideration of our relation to public space that is contingent both to history and social and political ideologies of the present. Wodiczko and other artists have attempted to draw attention to this discourse by exposing the violence inherent in the construction of these monuments. In explaining the potential of cultural projects in the public sphere, the artist writes: I try to understand what is happening in the city, how the city can operate as a communicative environment… It is important to understand the circumstances under which communication is reduced or destroyed, and under what possible new conditions it can be provoked to reappear. How can aesthetic practice in the built environment contribute to critical discourse between the inhabitants themselves and the environment? How can aesthetic practice make existing symbolic structures respond to contemporary events?.37

37 Krzysztof Wodiczko, ‘Projections,’ Perspecta 26, Theatre, Theatricality, and Architecture (1990): 273.

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For Wodiczko, disrupting the complacency of perception is imperative for passersby to stop, reflect, and perhaps even change their thinking; so he built his visual repertoire to evoke both the historical past and the political present. As he has noted, speaking of his projections: I wanted to break the distance from the monument by creating something frighteningly real and living, like a ghost haunting the monument…. There are things the city doesn’t want to talk about, and these are meaningful silences, which must be read. My projections are attempts to read and carve those silences into the monuments and spaces, which propagate civic and dramatic fictions within the social sphere.38

Then, in 1998 The Act on the Institute of National Remembrance— Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation ´ (Ustawy o Instytucie Pami˛eci Narodowej —Komisji Scigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu) was created.39 Article 55 of the Act criminalized historical negationism of crimes committed against Poles or Polish citizens by Nazi or communist polities, of crimes against peace or humanity; of war crimes; of political repression. These were listed in Sections 1a. and 1b. of Article 1.40 In Poland, the government had gone through a long period of debate about getting rid of all monuments commemorating the victory of the Red Army. The first monuments of gratitude had appeared already in 1944 in the most prestigious locations in most Polish cities. The initiators of building monuments were Soviets, emphatically underlying their dominance. Whether based on genuine popular resentment or stirred by nationalist ideology and government, the treatment of these monuments as symbolic markers of Soviet imperialism has been a continuous source of strain in relations with Russia. The state’s attempt to control how events and figures are represented is part of its spectacle of power. Most of the monuments were built in the first decade of the Polish People’s

38 Bruce W. Ferguson, ‘A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko,’ in Instruments, Projections, Vehicles. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1992. 39 The Act on the Institute of National Remembrance Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation law was amended twice, in 2007 and 2018. 40 Nikolay Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia. Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 162.

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Republic. As Wodiczko has remarked “Individuals don’t own images, the State does.” But 1989 proved to be a turning point for Poland that led to the exit of Soviet troops. However, not all of the monuments of gratitude were removed. The Russian civil rights campaigner Boris Timoshenko explained in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita on June 21, 2006: “People in Russia can’t understand it when the Baltic states and Poland compare the Soviet occupation with that of the Nazis. The Russians are still expecting the discussion about the past to end with a ‘thanks for liberating us.’”41 In 2011, Dr. Paweł Ukielski, the then-incumbent Polish EU Presidency founded the Platform of European Memory and Conscience wrote that “One of the main long-term objectives of the Platform is to establish an international tribunal which would deal with the crimes of Communism.”42 By 2015 Ukielski had been re-elected to the Council and made the Deputy President of the Institute of National Remembrance and explained why free Poland wanted to get rid of symbols of dependence on the Soviet Union in a monograph by Dominika Czarnecka, Pomniki Wdzi˛eczno´sci « Armii Czerwonej w Polsce Ludowej i w III Rzeczypospolitej (Monuments of Gratitude of the Red Army in the Polish People’s Republic and the Third Republic). Ukielski wrote that, after the war, monuments “popped up like mushrooms.”43 Significantly, he added: But they were not erected by the society—they were the work of the Soviet Army. Under the false guise of gratitude, they hid the true symbolism—the Polish enslavement and dependence on the totalitarian Soviet Union. The

41 Cited in Berthold Forssman, The Controversy over Soviet Monuments in Eastern Europe Eurotopics, 2005. 42 The Platform is an international non-governmental, non-profit organization that was established in 2011. It brought together 51 public and social organizations from the European Union, Moldova, Ukraine, Canada and the US that deal with researching and documenting European totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. It also runs publishing and educational activity, including various exhibitions. 43 See Dominika Czarnecka, Monuments of Gratitude of the Red Army in the Polish

People’s Republic and the Third Republic and her article ‘The Familiar Converted into the Other: Constructing Otherness Through the Monumental Representations of the Red Army in Poland (1940s–1950s),’ in War Matters. Constructing the Images of the Other (1930s to 1950s), eds. D. Demski, L. Laineste, K. Baraniecka-Olszewska. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2015, pp. 368–389.

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director of Public Education Office Andrzej Zawistowski noted that Czarnecka’s book was the first attempt at a synthetic presentation of the fate of monuments of glory of the Red Army in postwar Poland. Out of nearly 500 monuments, which were erected in Poland, about a hundred were still standing.” Ukielski proposed that “towns should follow the example of Pieni˛ezno ˙ (a small municipality in north-eastern Poland), where by the decision of local authorities the monument of Gen. Ivan Chernyakhovsky was demolished. Chernyakhovsky had commanded one of the armies at the battle of Kursk and been responsible, among other things, for the liquidation of the Home Army in the Vilnius region, was dismantled.”44 He also oversaw the disarmament and arrest of eight thousand Army soldiers, most of them being sent to labor camps or forcibly annexed by the Red Army.45 The monument in Pieni˛ezno ˙ had been built in the 1970s near the place where the Soviet commander was mortally wounded during the East Prussian operations. He died on February 18, 1945 and was buried in Vilnius. After Lithuania regained its independence, his remains were moved to the cemetery in Moscow. The Vilnius statue of the General was then taken to the Russian Voronezh. This had led to a Polish-Russian dispute about the Soviet memorials. According to Polish historians, the Soviet commander is a symbol of “imposing a Communist system in Poland, against the will of the people and in violation of the law.” The removal of the monument was launched on the anniversary of the Soviet aggression of September 17, 1939. The attack on Poland had been the consequence of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had been signed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Referring to the date, Łukasz Kaminski, ´ president of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) had said it was inappropriate. Writing at that time, he noted: the armed forces of the Soviet Union became a tool for violent annexation of half of the territory of the Republic” and “Soviet policy in the coming years prevented the restoration of an independent Polish state and became the primary tool to protect the forcibly introduced Communist totalitarian system.

44 The Home Army was the armed force of the Polish legitimate government in exile. 45 Chernyakhovsky had been promoted to lieutenant general and awarded the title Hero

of the Soviet Union for his contribution on the battlefield and forcing the Dnieper.

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The Pieni˛ezno ˙ authorities’ actions should be an example to follow for other places where there are still similar monuments. The Russian pressure on Polish authorities are considered inappropriate Kaminski said at the time. As a result, the Polish government then introduced an amended “decommunisation law” in October 2017. The new law was supplemented with a list of 469 monuments all over Poland that fulfilled the criteria for removal; the list was prepared by the Polish State Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) and the regional administrations. This allowed for the removal of up to 230 Soviet war monuments by local authorities within the year, after which remaining decisions were made at the regional level. The primary justification for this move was that the monuments could allegedly be used by those who wish to propagate communist and totalitarian ideas. However, as… points out, these monuments have come to serve as spaces for nationalist and anti-communist agitation, often publicly condemned as “Monuments of Shame” by those who wish to tout the honor and purity of the Polish nation.46 One artist who cannot be forgotten in regard to monuments is Christian Boltanski (Paris, 1944). From the mid-1980s on, he began a series of works which were photo-based installations he called monuments. They were photos of children who had died in the Holocaust. Among the many works he made, one of only monuments he made Monument/Odessa was done so in the context of Eastern Europe. First made in 1988, two further versions in 1990 and 1991 followed. The work of 1990 is composed of 10 photographs consisting of ten black-and-white portrait photographs of unknown children, tin biscuit boxes, lightbulbs, glass, and electrical cords. The series is rendered anonymous by the close cropping of dark, blurry images. Their identities are further shrouded by tangled electrical cords, which power dozens of small lights that create a glare on the glass over the photographs. The overall effect is that of a shrine or altar that memorializes an ineffable loss. For while Boltanski was born in Paris to

46 Nancy Waldmann, Local Memories Dismantled: Reactions to De-communization in Northern and Western Poland. Culture of History Forum online publication. March 23, 2018.

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a Corsican mother, his father was Jewish of Ukranian heritage.47 Boltanski’s early years were marked by the Nazi occupation of France, which forced his father to go into hiding in a space under the floorboards of the family apartment for a year and a half. Another striking work that captures the reaction to public monuments in Eastern Europe was an installation titled “A Personal Monument,” (2012) by Mikhail Gulin (Gomel, Belarus 1977), the Belarussian artist and curator. In the central square of Minsk, Gulin used four painted rectangular blocks of wood, then constructed plinths or made different combination of them together. A video and a series of photographs were also shown alongside the plinths. These showed how he had placed them in different parts of Minsk, including on October Square in central Minsk. The project happened within the framework of an “International project. Going public: about the difficulties of public utterance,” initiated under the auspices of the Goethe Institute. But the police intervened, seizing the sculpture, then arresting Gulin and beating his two assistants. They were then taken to trial for violating public law. They were subsequently acquitted. In 2016 Taus Makhacheva (Moscow, 1983) made “Super Taus” (Performance/video (2016). (For a more extensive discussion of her work see later Chapter) Makhacheva developed Super Taus “in recognition and homage to all my female relatives who perform heroic tasks in their daily lives,” she says. As there were not many monuments to particular women in Dagestan, Taus decided to set up a monument to Maria Korkmasova and Khamisat Abdulaeva, two Dagestan museum attendants who, in the early 1990s, saved the canvas “Abstract Composition” by Alexander Rodchenko, seizing it from a robber’s hands. Dressed in the cheapest daily wear of women living in northern Dagestan, the video shows the artist looking for a place to set up her monument in Makhachkala (capital city of the Republic of Dagestan), after which she installed it in Moscow and finally in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The video shows her hiking to Moscow with the 300kg. monument on her back.

47 The anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire were large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting that first began in the nineteenth century. Looking up the word Pogrom, one discovers it is a Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” And that “Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries. The first such incident to be labeled a pogrom is believed to be anti-Jewish rioting in Odessa in 1821.” Such pogroms continued after the Bolsheviks took power, especially Civil war and for a long time after.

CHAPTER 6

Contemporary Russia

By the end of the 1980s the Berlin Wall fell, opening up the East to the West and, the Soviet Union began to break down leading to its fall in 1991. This chapter focuses on certain important artists in Russia in the 1990s: Irina Nakhova (Moscow, 1955), Guia Rigvava (Tbilisi, 1956), Dimitry Gutov (Moscow, 1960), Elena Kovylina (Moscow, 1971) then the work of Olga Chernysheva (Moscow, 1962) and more recently, Taus Makhacheva (Moscow, 1983). In the final years of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Russian art world opened up dramatically. Conceptualism emerged in Russia, introducing performance and the birth of Video Art. By the end of the 1980s video cameras could be purchased in shops, although their high prices prevented its rapid and widespread diffusion among the art community.1 Nevertheless, those artists working with video were well aware that this was a medium that could align Russian contemporary art with the rest of the world. By the beginning of the 1990s galleries “imported” videos from abroad. Moreover, the use of video correlated with the increasing power of media in everyday lives. For instance, in 1992 the TV Gallery (http:// www.tvgallery.ru) in Moscow organized popular shows of videoart from Japan and the United States. Nevertheless, due to the sporadic nature of these events, coupled with the fact that no academic institution at this 1 Correspondence with Guia Rigvava.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_6

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stage had taken an interest in video, influences, and knowledge of what was going on abroad in the realm of video art was limited. The “marginal” role played by the video artist in the beginning draws a parallel with the Russian Underground. In a way, video took the place left vacant in the underground at exactly the same time as artists such as Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov and Komar & Melamid—only to name a few—were emerging to the surface and rapidly gaining international status. Without taking into consideration any ideological connotation, the similarities between the “official” underground and the new generation of video artists are congruous. First of all, both were well aware of belonging to a category of outsiders that was ignored by critics and not wanted by the official institutions. Artists such as Sergey Shutov (Potsdam, 1955), and Kirill Preobrazhensky (Moscow, 1970) showed their “experimental works” mostly within their own circles of friends. Secondly, in both cases their works were not made to be sold. As a result, this independence from market rules meant that video was an artistic space where artists felt completely free to express their creativity without falling prey to any sort of compromise that the art market or curatorial schemes might impose on them.

Part One Guia Rigvava was the first artist to work with video in Russia. After having studied in Moscow, he had returned to Tbilisi in the late 1980s then back again to Moscow in the early 1990s (see earlier chapter). He held a number of solo and group exhibitions during these early years both in Moscow and elsewhere in Europe. They included solo exhibitions at Triohprudny Gallery (Moscow), and “You are Powerless or All in All It Does Not Seem so Bad” at the Contemporary Art Centre (Moscow) in 1993; then “I Hate State” at 1.0 Gallery (Moscow) in 1994 and “Golden words,” Guelman Gallery (Moscow) in 1996. These exhibitions were accompanied by his participation in group exhibitions in Berlin, Helsinki, and an exhibition of Georgian artists, Heat and Conduct at the Mappin Art Gallery and the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1992.2 Rigvava’s video “Don’t Believe Them: They Are All Lying ” (1993) was the first single-channel video to be shown in Russia. In it, he analyzed

2 See earlier reference.

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the new role taken by the artist finally freed by the constrictions of the State which, before Perestroika, had regulated the production of official art. The work he showed was part of a non-profit-making exhibition, In the press release, aptly entitled “Identity: Post-Soviet,” he wrote: In today’s ever-growing state of integration into the world culture a new artist and new cultural workers have appeared. They are creating right now a new identity: the post-Soviet one.3

The first issue of the Moscow Art Magazine contains a detailed review of Rigvava’s “video performance,” You Are Powerless, or All in All It Does Not Seem So Bad, 1993. Realized before his immigration to Germany, Rigvava’s five-channel video installation, This World is leaving (1995), directly comments on the disappearance of the Second World” and presents an artistic meditation on the status of post-Soviet Russia…The video is comprised of a group of people, men and women of different ages who, after fifteen seconds of standing still, hear in Russian: ‘Go!’ or ‘You may go now’ or ‘It is time to leave!’ And they leave the frame of the video, walking away in four different directions. Guia made his mise-en-scène by dressing the people in the Eastern European fashion that is easily recognizable as ‘Soviet.’4 According to the artist, the video installation was meant to breathe by inhaling and exhaling the slowed down images of people who keep standing and then leaving the contemporary Russian art scene, a world that was not theirs. The artwork communicates the very unpresentability of violence that was inflicted not only on Russian citizens but, also on persons displaced and oppressed by the Soviets, those other citizens of countries, such as Georgia.5 By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rigvava made several editions of cybachrome prints mounted on round aluminium plates, which as he later remarked he used “with an idea of capturing an immaterial stuff in a form

3 Gia Rigvava, “Identity: Post-Soviet”, press release for the work “Don’t Believe Them.

They Are All Lying.” Exhibition. Moscow: Guelman Gallery, April 1993. Referred to in Antonio Guesa, ‘From Underground to Foreground: The Rise and Rise of Video Art in Russia,’ The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. ISEA Newsletter, No. 95. Part 2, January–February 2004. 4 Correspondence with Guia Rigvava. 5 Email correspondence with artist between May 24 and June 2, 2020.

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of a still life.”6 This included Future dates, Two portions of a love sigh and Love songs, exhibited with two prints together. Each print of Future dates had a future date printed with very small letters in the center of the print. The dates are all different (some dates eventually became a past date). The colors of the prints were each slightly different but all are same in size of 78 cm in diameter. Several times they were incorporated into an installation as with: We are friends (2001) which presented multiple face performances, edited into a twenty-five-minute-long video. This self portrait communicates Guia’s anxieties of being in political and personal exile in Germany since 1997. Since Guia performed this video at different times of the day, he shows different facial expressions. Sometimes he says: we are friends, just before the balloons burst into his face. There are multiple explosions of the balloons, which provoke a painful grimace on the artist’s face that seems to last forever, as the video is edited in slow motion. Later, We are friends was mounted in the exhibition “Anteprima Bovisa - Milano Europa 2000” at the Palazzo della Triennale in Milan and shown in Gallery Skuc, Ljubljana in 2002. Another video of this time by Rigvava was Frau Zinocker: My Neighbour Is a Russian Artist (2001), which incorporates some footage from the previous video. In it, he further contextualizes the status of the foreigner in Germany, creating an uncanny Doppelgänger (a device through which he can speak his mind freely) in the guise of his actual neighbor, an elderly German woman Frau Zinocker. Rigvava videotapes his subject during her visits to his house and complements the video with a critical dialogue: I am Tilly Zinocker; this is my sister Rosy. And our neighbor is a Russian artist. He says that culture repeats all the borders set by politics. It’s very sad. He says that freedom manifested in Germany in reduced to flying to Majorca when you are young and flying to Philippines, when you are old. It’s very sad. He is one of them who has to leave. Here he says: “we are friends.” He says is often, like some kind of therapy. He lives in Germany now, a life of a foreigner.

6 Email correspondence with artist between 24 May and 2 June, 2020.

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We, Germans, don’t recognize those others from the east as agents of culture. The piece “Filling up the wall” when shown at the Gallery Skuc exhibition in 2002 was a screen canvas. approx. 10 m long and 2 m in height, stretched slightly diagonally in the exhibition space, with small video projections like bricks on the wall. There were approximately 10 video bricks, each of which were 3 min. or 5 min. long videos composed of very simple actions videotaped with almost no editing and reminiscent of Bruce Nauman’s early videos. This included: – singing lessons: singing scales while drinking water from the kitchen tap. (1998) – my pregnant wife reads the letter where is written that my presence in Germany is not in the interests of Germany. (1998) – I am entering a garden. there is balloon (in the beginning not seeable) in the middle of a mill wheel. nearby is a pump. I am starting to pump the balloon. time after time making a pause. sit myself on a chair and contemplate thoughtfully the balloon, which is growing. then pump again. until it bursts. then am staying for a while thoughtfully. then leave the scene. title: “I kill time, time is killing me.” (1995) – I am pointing my camera on passersby, speaking my inner voice, asking: is he rich? is she rich? are they rich? Rigvava’s piece, I Am a Measure of Your Intelligence (2004), is performance-based work featured on multiple T-shirts. It communicates that we can no longer take anything and anybody for granted. The artist’s wry sense of humor and tongue-in-cheek message engages the other by creating an on-the-spot” confrontation that, as the artist hoped would start a meaningful exchange of ideas. However, the artist seems to be asking himself what kind of language he can use to contextualize the strangeness he experiences in a foreign land.7

7 Email correspondence with artist between 24 May and 2 June, 2020.

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Part 2 Irina Nakhova (Moscow 1955), a contemporary of Rigvava, has exhibited internationally for more than 30 years. She graduated from the Moscow Institute of Graphic Arts in 1978 and after having graduated, her mother took her to the atelier of Victor Pivovarov, who was to play an important role in her life and later become her mentor. In the 1980s Nakhova created disorienting immersive installations in a room in her apartment she called Komnaty (“Rooms”). Over five years from 1983 to 1987, she converted her own apartment into a living painting that became for her a space in which she could escape from the mind-numbing boredom and oppression of Soviet everyday reality. For Room 2 (1984), she painted the space with a stark black-and-white pattern that gave the illusion that fissures and caves had opened in the walls, floor, and ceiling of her apartment. Once a year, Nakhova would completely renovate one of the rooms in her apartment. She would either get rid of the furniture or keep it, then repaint or cover the walls in white paper and fill them with images from fashion magazines, manufacturing new spatial experiences for herself. In an interview she commented: Spaces are difficult to categorise because they can be spaces of remembrance, spaces of the past and spaces of the future. Each space reveals its possibilities to me. I know what may activate it. When a person is not familiar with an environment, then she finds herself in a challenging situation because she needs to adjust to this space, otherwise she does not know how to behave…When you find yourself in a space that is new and unexpected, you begin to think about it. It stimulates your brain, your sight: your entire body engages with this space.8

The work achieved wide acclaim as the first “total installation” in Russia, characterizing not only the duration of the process, but also that whole lives are lived in such installations. Moreover, her project was influential on a generation of Moscow conceptualists, including Ilya Kabakov (1933), whose relatively early installation The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1988) would have been impossible without Nakhova’s Rooms. It was this series by Nakhova that Kabakov named “total installation.” Inspired. By Nakhova’s work, the installation 8 Irina Nakharova Interview with Natasha Kurchanova in London: Studio International, published 29 April 2019.

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by Kabakov of 1988 was composed of a very cluttered room displaying the tokens of meagre communal living. However, there is a catapult right in the middle of the room and a hole in the ceiling—the man has flown away. As with his installation Toilet (1992) we see a typical railway station toilet, with the signs for the “gents” and the ladies’, and everything else that comes with it. However, inside the room, in addition to the ordinary toilet facilities, one finds oneself in the typical, even cosy, atmosphere of a standard Soviet apartment. From 1986 on, Nakhova became a member of the Moscow Union of Artists of the USSR and part of the founding of an unofficial artists’ group, now known as the Moscow Conceptual School.9 Nakhova was one of the few women Moscow Conceptualists and critiqued art history’s gender bias. An early work Koroleva (Queen, 1996/1997) is a good example in which as the viewer approaches a sculpture, made of iron wire of natural height, reminiscent of a medieval statue, wrapped in parachute silk, swells into a giant condom. Finally, the fabric completely obscures the “queen” before collapsing and once again becoming her soft drapery. Playful yet poignant, the piece illustrates how such binary qualities as masculine and feminine or carnal and spiritual, depend on and support each other. Nakhova relates the origin of the work in an interview: This work was partly made in Detroit, where I lived at the time, and partly made in Sweden, for an exhibition celebrating the 600th anniversary of the Kalmar Union, which made Queen Margaret I the ruler of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The union lasted more than 100 years and she is historically recognised as a great, strong leader. My idea was that we can understand certain things and historical phenomena only by looking at them from a distance. The Queen is almost a literal illustration of this phenomenon: you see her from a distance as a queen, but as you approach her to look closer, she turns into a giant phallus.10

9 This included friends and colleagues, notably Ilya Kabakov, Georgia Kisevalter (Moscow, 1955) one of the original members of the Russian conceptual performance group Collective Actions, the novelist Vladmir Sorokin (born near Moscow, 1955), Dmitrii Prigov, and Andrei Monastyrsky (Sumnin, Pechenga, Murmansk Oblast, 1949), an author, poet, artist and art theorist, and one of the leaders of the Moscow Conceptualist movement. 10 Irina Nakharova Interview with Natasha Kurchanova in London: Studio International, published 29 April 2019.

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In the following year 1998, Nakhova showed Big Red (Bol’šoj krasnyj) at the XL Gallery in Moscow.11 Using only 2 inflated parachutes, electronics, and sound in her installation, she presented a large and very red inflatable creature. What appears as a giant red phallus (140 × 450 × 100 cm) adorned with many other small phalluses swell up slowly as the visitor approaches. If the viewer walks away, the work deflates. Adopting gigantic dimensions that parody their potentially pornographic character. The scale reaches a level of absurdity, triggering a playful humor about human relations and sexuality in general, and more specifically about the relationship between the art and its viewer. Sergie Khripoun later wrote a review of the exhibition: Both are alive, interactive, curious, and a bit nervous; both cannot wait until they meet and move towards each other. One is Big Red, the other is Homo Sapiens. Big Red is actually big and red, resembling a zeppelin, a cucumber, an amoeba, a condom, a sock – depending on his activity status. Made of parachute silk, he either lies on the floor if nobody is with him, or inflates and floats towards whoever has trespassed on the invisible boundary of his dwelling…. Big Red inflates and drags towards whoever has encroached on his space, simultaneously ousting the source of his excitement. Action generates counteraction. It is one step from love to hate. Russian friendship strangles (foreigners can hardly understand this). Western reflex protects privacy (for which there is not even a word in Russian). Curiosity, aggression, fear – all in a single balloon. His secret is as simple as his electric circuit.12

Later in 2002, Nakhova exhibited Pobud’ so mnoj (Stay with me) in Moscow, representing a vagina made with a huge cube lined externally by black cloth and internally pink silk. Two gigantic pink lips make up the entrance through which the visitor is invited to come in and listen to the voice of a woman who speaks on the phone and complains to someone, presumably a child, reproving him because he never wants to follow her advice and begs him to stay there a little longer in the mother’s uterus. Meanwhile the pink cloth of the interior swells slowly giving the visitor a sense of suffocation and claustrophobia that finally forces him to leave the 11 Between 1994 and 1997 Nakhova was a professor in a University in Detroit in the

US. 12 Sergie Khripoun, ‘Are You Ready…? Big Red,’ Moscow: XL Gallery, 2000.

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mother’s uterus, metaphorically repeating the act of birth, a consequence of penetration made at the beginning. Even more than in her previous installations, the visitor is forced to act and interact with the object, thus also reflecting on the complexity of meanings that it represents avoiding and overcoming the risk of superficial pornographic titillations. In 2001, Nakhova presented Ironing Boards (installation of fabric, foam board, foam rubber, vinyl, irons, thermal printing. Each piece: 118 × 36 × 3 cm.). Related to the subject of gender, the viewer sees the actual ironing boards in front of him, each painted with the images of women whose naked backs face the audience. Near the boards on the floor, there are electric irons with the “imprints” of the women’s skin, a reflection on the place of woman in the modern world, the complexities, and stereotypes that she has to overcome. By 2011, Nakhova was featured as a special guest with a large-scale retrospective at the Fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. As part of Nakhova’s work, her seminal installation Room No. 2 of 1984 was included. In 2013, she won Russia’s prestigious Kandinsky Prize in the category of Project of the Year, one of the highest honors in contemporary Russian art, with an installation Without a Title. The installation used manipulated photographs in a variety of media from Nakhova’s personal and family archive that date from the 1920s to the present.13 Nakhova described her installation as my reckoning with history as comprehended through the history of my family – my grandma, executed grandpa, mom, dad and my past self. This is my attempt to understand the inexplicable state of affairs that has reigned in my country for the last century, and to understand through private imagery how millions of people were erased from history and happily forgotten; how people have been blinded and their souls destroyed so that they can live without memory and history.14

The exhibition also included Nakhova’s interactive sculpture Resuscitation (2008–2009) and Skins (2009). According to Butakova’s description Resuscitation was silk skin of:

13 Also featured in the 2013 exhibition were Skins (2009), photo sculptures Pillows (1997) and several paintings from the installation Renovation (2012). 14 Nakhova, Anna, Kandinsky prize speech, 2013.

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half gunmetal grey, half desiccated white; animated by the presence of the audience, the sculpture inflates and stiffens under the scrutiny of the viewers’ probing eyes, but its awakening is short-lived and ultimately ends in a relapse to its original prone state, deflated and defeated. The eyes of its many heads are unseeing, their mouths stuffed and silenced, inhaling and exhaling into a fixed circuit of auto-erotic failure. What a contrast to Nakhova’s previous interactive installations, such as Big Red (1998), a phallic protuberance attached to the gallery’s wall, virile and barbed, its scarlet colour announcing its vitality even when flaccid and spent….15

Made of latex, the series Skins (2009) was hung like medical samples, showing printed sections of bodies, headless and visually anonymous except for their tattoos. Each “skin” is accompanied by a printed text that succinctly tells the story of the tragic and absurd fate of each of the tattooed subjects. Skin 3 tells the story of Svetlana, whose skin was sent through the mail to her parents after she was kidnapped and stabbed to death. In an interview with Natasha Kurchanova in Studio International, Nakharova discussed her work: Interv: When I looked at this exhibition, I noticed that your works combine tactile and optical sensations…Visual art has to do with vision, so your interest in optical sensations is well understood, but could you explain your persistent interest in tactility? IN: I began my career as a painter. So, in the beginning, I was interested in illusion. Then, in Rooms, this illusion was applied to my works in three dimensions, which later came to be called installations. Visuality is more than the eye; it includes tactility, which is a primary sense… Interv: In this exhibition, dedicated to the museum as an institution, you have several works related to museums. For example, in Seven Masterpieces (2013), you came up with hilarious “museum guides”, which mix fact and fiction in providing explanations of non-existent works of art.

Like Skins, Seven Masterpieces references absurdities we encounter in our everyday life. I started doing them a long time ago, to highlight the importance of imagination in our psychological makeup. Some people ask

15 Elizaveta Butakova, ‘Moscow Partisan Conceptualism: Irina Nakhova and Pavel Pepperstein,’ Third Text (vol. 24, No. 5, 2010), pp. 627–631.

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me: “Are these real stories? Are these real skins?” I am open to any kind of interpretation with these works.16 By 2015, Nakhova had been chosen to represent Russia in its pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She was the first female artist to represent Russia in a solo pavilion. Curated by Margarita Tupitsyn, the project The Green Pavilion involved work with the site-specific nature of the space. Based on a dialogue with the pavilion structure itself designed by Aleksai Shchusev in 1914, she painted the entire floor of the pavilion with a red-and-green camouflage pattern, referencing Russia’s siege mentality and nationalist leanings, as well as her own installation history. “The Green Pavilion relates to installation art as much as it does to architecture,” writes Stella Kesaeva (President of Stella Art Foundation), in the catalogue for the installation: As with [Vadim] Zakharov’s project, the architectural features of the pavilion comprise an important component of Nakhova’s installation. This time, an opening has again been created between the first and second floors of Schusev’s building, plus the exterior is painted green. The result: the Russian Pavilion takes on the appearance of a romantic gazebo, while concealing within itself the spatial metaphor of Malevich’s Black Square of 1915. Another installation presented in this pavilion was her project Rooms which were a complex of five different spaces between art, architecture and the viewers point of view.17

In 2019 a retrospective of her work “Museum on the Edge,” was held at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum, owner of the world’s largest collection of unofficial Soviet art. Composed of nearly 40 works, the focus of the exhibition was her work from the post-Soviet period, which dealt with art history and the workings of the museum as an institution intended to house great art. The exhibition included Nakhova’s pioneering Apartment installations (Rooms ), represented only through photographic documentation as well as other work, such as the painting Vanitas 1 (2017). A copy of Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Woman (ca. 1650–1655), the work depicts Nakhova’s face, ghostly white

16 Irina Nakharova Interview with Natasha Kurchanova in London: Studio International, published 29 April 2019. 17 See Kasaeva, Stella, Foreword, in Irina Nakhova, The Green Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. Moscow: Stella Art Foundation, p. 27.

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and eyes closed, painted over the composition, blocking out everything but the old woman’s head and right hand. The work is a rumination on death, namely, the death of the artist, and on the immortality afforded through art. In a series of short videos, “Gaze” (2016–2019), images of paintings from the museum collection were also presented, blurred except for small, roving circles that suggest lenses that brought certain areas into focus. In each work, the moving circle is meant to imitate the meandering gaze of a particular viewer—an unidentified woman or man, or child, or in one case, the artist herself—who is revealed in a photograph at the end. While slightly ironic, the work suggests deep reverence toward museums and the cultural engagement they allow. The centerpiece of the exhibition at the Zimmerli Art Museum was an interactive installation The Battle of Invalids (2017). A section of the museum floor is marked as a playing field with two teams of papier-mâché figures on wheeled platforms, operated remotely with joysticks. Members of one team are modeled on a fragmentary Greek sculpture of an athlete’s torso, while the others replicate a Japanese wood carving of a warrior with missing legs. Nakhova remarked: I made this piece two years ago for the Pop/Off/Art gallery in Moscow. In that gallery, the installation could be viewed from above. These Invalids were battling with each other under the control and direction of the visitors who stood on a balcony above. There is no such balcony in this museum, so the visitors stand on the floor next to the work to control the moving figures. The work is a commentary on the absurdity and senselessness of our everyday life, which is the focus of my work. If you are living in this world, you cannot avoid its violence. In Battle of the Invalids, the invalids are on “wheelchairs”– platforms, operated by the viewers using joysticks. One of the triggers for the Invalids was my observation of Russian war veterans begging for money in Moscow subways. A mafia guy, who exploited them by taking the money they made, managed these disabled veterans. It was horrible to see.18

The source for both of these works are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A video projection shows the game in action: the abject lopsided figures wheel around mindlessly, occasionally crashing into the

18 Nakharova Interview with Natasha Kurchanova, op.cit., Fn. 197.

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walls and one another. The illusion of order in the gamelike installation barely masks the chaotic play of uncontrollable forces. The fatalism resonates with the hopeless mood pervasive of the politics and culture in both the United States and Russia. But the work, also relates to the wounded veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War, some of them amputees who depended on crude wooden dollies to move around and who beg for money in Moscow Metro stations.

Part Three Another Russian artist who produced significant work in this immediate post-Soviet era was Dmitry Gutov. Born in Moscow in 1960, Gutov first studied psychology at the Moscow State Pedagogical University between 1978 and 1980. In parallel, he also studied academic drawing under Mikhail Kukunov in the Faculty of General Education. Then in 1985, he graduated from the Faculty of Easel Painting in the studio of Nikolay Kasatkin at the Public Correspondence University of the Arts. In 1992 he graduated from the Department of History and Theory of Visual Arts of the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.19 While Gutov was painting early on in his career, first exhibiting his work in 1988, his installations stood out. Gutov made a series of 4 works on paper in 1988 called Cosmos, using paper, photos and pencil and acrylic. Then in 1991, he made Hammock, made with Konstantin Bohorov (Moscow, 1961), as part of an exhibition Exercises Esthetiques for the Kuskovo Museum in Moscow. The work is a hammock suspended above the trees, which could only be reached by a rope ladder. In the following year he made Shuttlecocks (1992) also with Bohorov, composed of 3000 shuttlecocks and fishing-line installation. It was part of the exhibition “On Transparency,” in 1992, organized by Oleg Kulik for the Village Zimenki, Gagarin Pioneer Camp, Moscow. Gutov wrote for a later catalogue: An abandoned Pioneer camp named after Yuri Gagarin was selected for the exhibition. We set off to examine the site. Decrepit buildings, sports grounds overgrown with weeds and faded boards around a flagstaff. I

19 See Gutov’s marvelous How I became an artist, text written in 1997, artist’s website.

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prefer to forget my youth, but here there was no escape. Gagarin, weightlessness, the soil of the Pioneer camp impregnated with sperm, and rage at the burden of physical existence in Moscow in 1992 should all have crystallised in a single image. After reflecting for a couple of months I decided to hang a cloud of badminton shuttlecocks over the camp.20

Perhaps the first or certainly the most important early installation by Gutov was Above Black Mud (Nad chernoi griaziu) (1995).21 The work was a large-scale installation of black soil, and some roughly sawn planks of light-colored wood laid on top across the whole floor of the Ridzhina Gallery. Visitors could only walk through the premises on these boards, trying to keep their balance. He would later exhibit the work at the Biennale of Sydney in 2006. In correspondence with him, Gutov wrote: At the Sydney Biennale of 2006 I exhibited a variation on the theme of Above the Black Mud. More precisely, the exact opposite of this installation. Above the Black Mud has light boards over black mud and the viewer is constantly looking under his feet so as not to fall off. At the Sydney Biennale of 2006, there was exactly the same visual image, only on the ceiling. The ceiling was composed of burned wooden boards and one could see the light through the gaps between them. The gaps were in the same shapes as the wooden boards in the Above the Black Mud installation. This image goes back to the design of the thaw era, in particular to the sideboard door of the early 1960s, with which I once worked in the 1980s and wrote for myself an analysis of these light stripes.22

The motif of muddy earth in this installation, anticipated Gutov’s later video The Thaw (3.40 min., 2006), while the blackness and the alignment of the superimposed, light-colored planks were reminiscent of the motif of duckboards over spring mud and the painting Svadba na zavtrashnei ulitse 20 From the ‘Bons Baisers de Russie’ exhibition catalogue, Festival Garonne 2000, Toulouse. 21 Gutov participated in the 3rd Istanbul Biennale in 1992 he showed Dust (1992).

Then in 1993 he participated in three exhibitions: Mozart (rope, cords, strings, music) for the exhibition: Trio acoustico: Gutov, YuLeiderman and Osmolovski at Centre pour la Creation Contemporaine in Tours; ‘Sixties, once more about love’ (sawdust, video-projector, what not, shoes) with Ye. Andreeva at the Contemporary Art Centre in Moscow and Shostakowitsch—in memory of Sollertinsky (wire, cartridges) in exhibition ‘Conversion at Central House of Artists,’ Guelman Gallery, Moscow. 22 Correspondence with author, June 1, 2020.

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(A Wedding on Tomorrow’s Street, 1962) by the famous Soviet painter Yuri Pimenov. Pimenov had depicted a young, newly married couple walking on planks over a churned-up suburban street, flanked by construction sites with new blocks of flats going up. The scene is flooded with spring sunshine, as the young couple stride forward into their future life, a new marriage, a new city, and country. (It was a popular, hopeful image and later used on a stamp in 1973.) In 1995 Gutov was invited to participate in the Russian pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Curated by Viktor Misiano: REASON IS SOMETHING THE WORLD MUST OBTAIN WHETHER IT WANTS TO OR NOT, it included Gutov together with Evgeny Asse (b. 1946), and Vadim Fishkin (b. 1965). In 1999 Gutov made Blind Singers composed of 5 photos and 5 videos and exhibited in Lightness of the inspiration at the Centre for Art (Neglinnaja 14), Moscow and in the exhibition Blind at the Museum of Nonconformist Art, St. Petersburg 2001. Gutov wrote about the work: I shot blind singers at the entrances to the Moscow metro, then exposed this video along with their gigantic black and white photo portraits. The work was also connected to poverty and the horror of life for a huge number of people in Russia and Moscow in the 1990s.

And in 2002 he presented the video “From flat to flat ” (“Moving house”) in the 25th Bienal de Sao Paulo: Iconografias Metropolitanas. Pavilhao Ciccillo Matarazzo, Parque Ibirapuera. It is showing the way through Moscow in a wagon. “If you are in a dark wagon with a hole in a wall, then the image of the city appears upside down on the opposite wall. I saw it with my own eyes and made a video of that. The video was made in January 2002 when it was -25c when recording the video. The video is accompanied with Tchaikovsky’s “Mid the Din of the Ball,” with lyrics by A. K. Tolstoi and sung by A. Solovyanenko.23 In 2005 David Riff, a translator of Mikhail Lifshitz into English, asked Gutov a series of questions that were published in the Newspaper What is to be done? 24 David Riff (DR) asked him:

23 Gutov, as cited in the artist’s website. 24 David Riff interview with Dmitri Gutov, in What is to be done? Issue № 9, May

2005.

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DR: How did the (Mikhail) Lifshitz Institute form? Was it your own initiative? Or did the group come together collectively? Could you tell me a little about how you came together? DG: Everything in it is built on the joy of recognition, when in the interweaving of the lines of old Soviet iron fences you begin to see Chinese and Japanese ink painting and manuscripts of the geniuses of the past. (Love for these fences unites me with Olga Chernysheva).

By 2006 Gutov had made a video titled The Thaw (3.40 min., 2006). The video is based in this sense on his favorite painting by the Russian artist Fyodor Vasiliyev The Thaw (1871). As Gutov notes: The word ‘Thaw’ in the Russian language has two opposite meanings: (A) The end of winter and hopes for the best. (B) Hopeless slaughter and deadly dumps. In general, the work marked a transition from the hopes that were still alive when I did “Above the Black Mud,” to the hopelessness of Putin’s time.25 Not only did it suggest the hopes and disappointments of the 1960s under Khrushchev and the generation of Gutov’s parents but his own generation in the time of Perestroika. As Viktor Misiano would later write: its main motive is the artist himself, standing on a country road into the spring thaw. However, it is obvious that the title of the work is reference not only to the landscape captured by the artist, but is also a historical and cultural allusion…In painting and films of those years, we most often see a new existential hero who has entered into a tragic confrontation with the world, from which he sometimes emerges as a loser. At the same time, the world with which the hero comes into conflict is most often embodied through the natural principle—the earth’s surface, but no longer flimsy and flooded with the spring sun, but a hard, frozen scab.26

In 2007, Gutov’s Fence (2007) was chosen for documenta 12 in Kassel. Bokhorov wrote for the catalogue the following: A fence can symbolise the protection of private property but also oppression, coercion or punishment. Gutov adds a further interpretation to these two possibilities…pick(ing) up on the spontaneous creativity of urban

25 Correspondence with author, June 1, 2020. 26 Viktor Misiano, ‘“Thaw” and soil poetics’ in Sweet Sixties: Specters and Spirits of a

Parallel Avant-Garde. Edited by Georg Schöllhammer and Ruben Arevshatyan. Sternberg Press and tranzit, 2014.

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gardeners who use discarded material to enclose cultivated areas bordering on rubbish dumps and wooded parkland. The city’s loosely interconnected industrial debris occurs along the fractures of social space where individuals cannot live according to the soulless rules of late capitalism, surviving instead despite these strictures. This is the locus where natural self-awareness is concentrated, revealed in the ecstatic creativity of people who have found a terra incognita to cultivate and give concrete form to their strivings for a better, unconstrained life on this tangible material substrate. The spontaneity in the design of Gutov’s Fence is complemented by snippets of writing from various authors… (seen in) the twisting lines of a wire in the characteristic patterns of these manuscripts…27

In 2010, Gutov was invited to participate in Imperfetto, curated by Daria Khan in Bologna, and presented Parallax 11. Made of metal, rope, screw, pipes, planks, metals, and plastic in a manner that corresponded to a Malevich Suprematist drawing, the installation was suspended from the ceiling painted with a fresco. The work was the realization of a project he had dreamt of making at this scale for Jean-Hubert Martin’s Third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Against exclusion at the Garage in Moscow in 2009. Nevertheless, he made a smaller version for the Biennale. In 2012 he presented Gondola at the Art Museum Riga Bourse, again a suspended installation. He recalls “In all these works, I relied on the final scene of the explosion from Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni, which shocked my imagination when I was a child. It was impossible to watch the film in my childhood, but when I was 11 years old in 1972, the screenplay was published in the Soviet journal Foreign Literature and I knew it by heart.”28 Increasingly Gutov began devote much of his time and energy to the study of Mikhail Lipchitz. Gutov had begun the Lifshitz Institute in Moscow in 1993 and since that time had held regularly conduct seminars, organized exhibitions, and produced publications dedicated to him. This led to an invitation in 2015 by the Moscow Garage Museum to Gutov together with his colleague David Riff to hold a huge exhibition dedicated to Lifshitz in 2018.

27 Constantin Bokhorov, Kassel: documenta 12 catalogue, p. 256. 28 See Gutov’s Website.

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The co-curator was Anastasia Mityushina. Gutov was given a space of 800 square meters. Between November 2015 and the exhibition in 2018, the initial field research project through which the Garage exhibition was developed, involved a combination of archival mining, translation, and public discussions of the controversial themes and dramatic historical contexts of Lifshitz’s work. The research team reviewed more than 200 folders of documents from public archives, such as the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, the Central Archive of Sociopolitical History of Moscow, and the State Tretyakov Gallery, as well as the private archives of Lifshitz’s daughter, Anna Pichikyan, and others. As part of the field research project, the first English translation of The Crisis of Ugliness was made by David Riff.29 The result of the three-year project, If our soup can could speak takes as its starting point Lifshitz’s book and related writings to re-explore the vexed relations between so-called progressive art and politics in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, as well as the motivations and implications of Lifshitz’s singular crusade against the modern classics. His appraisal of the crisis in twentieth-century art differs fundamentally from the standard attacks on modernism in government-issue Soviet art criticism, and in fact can be read as a direct critique of such attacks. The exhibition unfolded as a narrative of archival documents, art works, and text fragments, which were situated in a sequence of ten interiors that could be seen as spatial forms for landmark moments in the evolution of modernism, or in Lifshitz’s thinking. It aimed to provoke a discussion about art after the triumph of modernism and its contradictory position in a crisis-ridden world where Lifshitz’s radical diagnoses seemed more relevant than ever. Other artists also included in the exhibition were Albrecht Dürer, Oleg Filatchev, Valery Khabarov, Larisa Kirillova, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol.

Part Four For more than 25 years, the Russian artist Olga Chernysheva (1962) has developed a form of documentary practice that, in portraying contemporary Russian life today seeks to recapture the promise of community, latent 29 Mikhail Lifshitz, The Crisis of Ugliness (translated by David Riff), Volume 158 of Brill’s Historical Materialism series produced in collaboration with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. February 2018.

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within the folds of the contemporary, evident in the tactile proximity to that of the everyday.30 Chernysheva holds a BA from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, graduating Moscow Cinema Academy in 1986. She then went to Amsterdam in 1995, studying at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (Amsterdam), graduating in 1996. Returning to Moscow, she developed her practice in the post 1989 era, a period in which the artist witnessed not simply the fall of communism but, the overwhelming disruption and transformation of daily life for the Russian people. Perestroika and the period of the 90s had not ushered in a radical improvement of life for people who had suffered under the rule of communism. Rather, with the privatization of financial resources, it exposed more crudely the longestablished division between those with power and privilege and the deterioration of the social and economic conditions of the average Russian citizen. In these terms the promise of community and the public sphere became chimeral at best, a form of promise infinitely deferred. In an early video Marmot (1999), Cherysheva captures an old woman pausing in the street. Clutching her purse, she is seen searching among her small bundle of possessions until she uncovers a treasured portrait of Stalin. As if relieved, the woman moves forward, appearing to enter a march taking place in the street. As Viktor Misiano has observed, there is neither sentimentality nor idealization or grand narratives against we caste the story of our lives. In this regard the point of view of the work is a recognition of their lives.31 There are other contemporary artists who seek to unfold this history in order to reveal the seeds of great aspiration, if not utopian yearnings. As Victor Misiano remarks in the introduction to his book Progressive Nostalgia, this is an era that today may be characterized as a “phantom limb.”32 Rather than recovering the lineaments of that promise as outlined by earlier generations of artists, Chernysheva seeks out the location of the dreams of a people in the patterns of daily life today. From this perspective, it is important to recognize the informing legacy of the great era of writers and artists from the nineteenth and twentieth 30 For an elaboration of this idea, see Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 31 See Victor Misiano’s marvellous discussion of her work in Progressive Nostalgia: Contemporary Art of the Former USSR, published by WAM, 2008, p. 11. 32 Victor Misiano, ibid., p. 12.

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centuries, such as of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkin, to that of the early Soviets of the 20s, of Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam to name a few writers, alongside artists. These writers explored how the past is filtered through the light of the present and, in this way, help shape experience and aspirations in the image of a future. We may think here too of photographers such as Boris Mikhailov and members of Vremia, discussed in an earlier chapter. Throughout their work, we see both an affectionate portrayal of the humdrum life of common people as well as the grim, ugly underbelly of daily life. In many respects, they mimic the modern early Soviet traditions of factography and photojournalism in the 1920s but, without the belief and elan of those Soviet times. This can be found for instance, in the “Man with a Movie Camera” by Dziga Vertov and the early photo-essays by Rodchenko or El Lissitzky, among others. Their work championed the achievements of social modernity and industrialization in photo-magazines, such as USSR in Construction. For the Vremia Group however, the focus was with the hindsight of the era of Stalin and the indelible effects the realization of these years had on its people as manifest in Socialist Realism of the 30s and onwards. Referred to as a form of “radical realism,” Vremia photographers present the human body as scarred, carrying the brutal legacy of a system gone profoundly wrong. Their images embody a deep sense of loss, of a humanity reduced from the early flush of grand optimism and sense of promise with which we associate the Soviet 20s. For Mikhailov, there is also, a strongly autobiographic dimension to his practice that, resonant of a Russian tradition of writers and artists, seeks an almost aristocratic projection of themselves. Their values and way of life aspire to a form of idealism that reflects the extraordinarily persistence of a strand of utopian thought in Russian culture. However, as an epoch whose effects, if not legacy, lingers deep within the history of its people, it resonates differently between the work of Vremia Group and Chernysheva. Perhaps, the difference is simply generational or, at least, point toward the difference between two contemporary positions: one reflecting back and the other forward. Misiano proposes a reading of the work of the contemporary period as one of “progressive nostalgia,” that is “not only about the past that was, but one that could have been—in other words, nostalgia for the future.”33 He is not wrong but, Chernysheva brings a

33 Victor Misiano, ibid., p. 13.

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further dimension to this. She reinvigorates the ordinary everyday not in a way that is about the pragmatic mundane or truth to the real, so much as witness to a life that contains a kernel of belief and therefore tacit hope. In Chernysheva’s video The Train (7 min., 2003), for instance, offers a marvelous moment of recognition in the power of literature and song to be shared in the mind of the people. We follow an almost blind beggar passing between the passengers on an intercity train. The video captures the play of relations between the beggar and group of commuters, of not belonging and yet perhaps more the always-remaining-possibility of finding a common thread of connection. This possibility is to be found in the aspirations they cherish and what gives them comfort, a space to dream imagine otherwise. The beggar recites, not a popular or sentimental song, but a long poem “A message to Yudin,” written by the beloved poet Pushkin in his youth. We see the beggar anew in this moment not with pity or embarrassment but, rather ennobled by his embrace of Pushkin. As the Victoria & Albert Museum noted in their presentation that Chernysheva’s juxtaposition of these images heightens her portrayal of what a critic has described as “the diffuse area of life between the struggle for survival and forms of recreation and pleasure.”34 More than that, the video brings the non-visual dimension to the work, a dimension that opens onto a different horizon, a horizon in which the song of the blind beggar exposes the visual as insufficient to the promise that lies in the heart of his fellow-citizens. These are not stories disguising moral tales or ethical lessons but, those who, in belonging to Russian life, are constitutive of Russian life. As the artist wrote: “Of these small bare essentials our life was made.”35 They are nothing more nor less, neither paradigms for the construction of life through the idea of the national, nor a sense of disillusionment or lament of the impoverished lives of these figures. For Chernysheva, her practice represents a carrying forward of what has remained, the kernel of the past. Like Vertov, she explores and documents the world around her. Chernysheva writes: The flaneur with the video camera stops in surprise and tries to understand, to investigate thoroughly what is going on, trying to allow the aesthetic 34 Cited in White Space Gallery (London) website for exhibition “Flight of Fools: Russian photography today.” 35 Olga Chernysheva, ‘Kind People! The Snow reflects the Sky.’ See Artist’s Website.

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form of reality to emerge like ‘The Man with the Camera,’ simply to fix something extraneous ‘just in case.’ Not every recording can become a document of its time. It is hard to count on any observation’s capacity for symbolization.36

Misiano quote an unknown author of the line: “History is (no longer) an ‘equestrian statue,’ but the hide of a flayed horse turned inside out.”37 Again, Chernysheva says of her work: “to make visible the cumulative effects of time by gathering fragments from the routine of daily life; the seemingly insignificant things that often go unnoticed, and representing these as an everyday part of life.”38 This is especially the case where the norm of everyday life, as the artist perceives it, is the fragmentation or atomization of people’s lives as opposed to “great whole of the past.” Her characters live out their meagre lives in solidarity with one another. She creates something out of chance itself, and yet what form is this if not that which lies embedded in her invocation of rhythm that may not necessarily be found in the visual regime or order of things or even in its blind spots. Misiano refers to the post-Soviet era as between epochs.39 Yet, what is this “between,” what do we make of the art of that time in terms of its significance that goes beyond the immediacy or contingency of its periodization? Is it an interregnum that, as Gramsci once observed, was a transitional period in which signs of decadence appear. Or, to ask differently: are we witness to an illumination that flickers before us as constitutive of its momentary condition or, does it expose what remains and reveal signs of emergent epoch to follow? Where are these signs, how do we distinguish let alone recognize within them residual traces or latency? Moreover, how then is this to be identified even articulated within the visual regime? This approach is most sharply articulated in her 16-screen video installation Windows produced some years later in 2007. There is nothing irregular or transgressive of the norm to which we are involuntary witness as in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window in 1954 or the fictional stories

36 Olga Chernysheva, ‘March,’ Artist’s Website. 37 Cited without reference by Victor Misiano, op.cit., p. 13. 38 Olga Chernysheva, Artist’s Website. 39 Misiano, op.cit., p. 10.

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of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film Decalogue of 1989 that, loosely based on the Ten Commandments, portray the impoverished lives of ordinary Polish citizens in a modern housing estate. Rather, Chernysheva simply gathers together over time short clips of an apartment building opposite to where she lives. Shot after nightfall, people are seen going about their lives. There is nothing eventful about its passing, except in the simple gathering together by the artist as evidence of the everyday. As with her other work, the artist concerns herself with the details of the non-event. There is nothing dramatic in its passing but rather a certain tenderness toward its subject. Life goes on, somehow. In this regard, it reminds us of the film-essays by Chantal Ackerman, of seeing again the subject that lie buried in the continuum of the everyday, to which we are blind. In March (2005), the artist uses her camera to record a chance encounter with a parade of little boys, aged between eight to ten years of age. Performing for a Corporate event in front of the Theater of the Soviet Army they find themselves opposite a group of scantily clad girls who are also there as cheerleaders. The camera simply records as each group perform their roles for the occasion but, in so doing, captures the latent eroticism being played out in the interaction between the groups. In Festive Dream (2005) she follows the activities of a village festival and the quiet joy and happiness between its participants. Captured in its beautiful wistful title is the simple irony of a promise, a sense of fulfillment and the promise tomorrow may bring to people. Chernysheva’s work is a portrayal of the small incidental happening of daily life, of its ordinary, mundane occurrence that make up the pattern of our lives. Through its viewing, we discover a significance that lies precisely in its persistence, its idiosyncratic being. And, while perhaps no longer sufficient, we discover the germ of a promise within the fragmented time of the present, a promise to which we might aspire. What then, do we make of this body of work? Misiano argues for a reading of the period in terms of a return of memory and the end of forced amnesia, of a return to memory and hence the symptom of the new time, “the time of the storytellers.”40 But if she is a storyteller then they are told in the light of the present. Chernysheva writes: “I wanted what was absent to radiate joy…These

40 Misiano, ibid., p. 10

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images are not journeys to an imaginary world, but journeys of the imagination to that era, to its forward thrust into the future, its lyricism, its mood of shared enthusiasm, its spirit of bold scientific discovery, and its attraction to the open sky.”41 Her work tacitly responds to ordinary daily life around her. The images she creates are not so much the return of memory but, a sudden awakening to the “now” time in which we live. There are no lessons or morals to be learnt from the past as if it is past or best forgotten. There is a certain continuum, a “now” time that lies between past and future, between the known and unknown. Chernysheva’s focus on the rituals of everyday—small gestures, transitory moments, blind spots in the urban space—is captured in an exhibition Inner Dialog (2009) that brings together photographic and video works from 2003. All are set in interior spaces—in a dual sense, they deal with topographical and mental interior spaces. The photo series On Duty is composed of eleven large, black-and-white photographs of employees of the Moscow underground transport system, wearing uniforms and severe demeanours that seem to hark back to the Soviet era. Each photograph is cropped tightly so as to capture the attendant sitting in the booth that forms their working environment, with the subject sat in three-quarters profile at the center of the composition. A number of the photographs are shot through the glass window of the booth, so that reflections of the surroundings and passersby are made visible. The subjects, most of whom are women, sit in their subterranean booths in a state of perpetual readiness. They appear attentive, with their gaze glancing outward, but also immersed in their own thoughts. Similarly, both the series Guards (2009) and Moscow Area (2008) show people and their sameness of actions silent and freeze-framed. On the one hand, we have the professional guard, omnipresent in Russia. And, on the other, the Moscow underground official on duty—watchful, but introspective, present but overlooked, “simultaneously on and off,” as the artist formulates it. In 2008 Chernysheva made a video Untitled: Dedicated to Sengai (2008), a young woman stands in the middle of an urban whirl. Every second or so, she throws a quick glance in front of her, attentive and stern, and then lowers her eyes while moving her hand. Life is running around, plain and pedestrian, mundane and meagre, on the edge of survival. Sandwich-women smile, oblivious to their humiliation; anonymous men

41 Olga Chernysheva in Progressive Nostalgia, ibid., p. 23.

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carry their heavy bags toward a Moscow underground station; unearthly high heels reveal desperate attempts at dressing up. As such, Chernysheva neither sees nor creates a heroic portrait but, recognizes that this era is nothing less than anti-monumental, mundane, the “small bare essentials our life,” as she says. In an 2016 interview, Ksenia Nouril, a New York based art historian and curator, asked about her motivations behind an exhibition of new drawings, Vague Accent presented at The Drawing Center (New York), made after a month-long residency there. Olga Chernysheva responded: It’s quite difficult for me to step outside of myself and describe the exhibition. It was about relations. Life consists of resonances. The works in the exhibition talked to one another, sometimes in ways I never imagined. I wanted the exhibition to look ordinary—to compare it to a casual conversation or even a whisper. I did not want the viewer to enter with any predisposed notions. I simply wanted to show what makes me happy, what I call “miracles”—small discoveries that make me stop and marvel. The works included are about humanity and the ability of a person to be open to these miracles that occur when things shift. Things—people, places, objects—are alive and pulsate. This is the miracle that I try to capture in my drawings. Ideally, I want people to see this pulsation, the living system.42

Throughout Chernysheva’s body of work, there is a central dialectic to her practice in which she perceives a promise found in the smallest of social rituals and incident of everyday life. For not only do they reveal a melancholic reflection as to the diminished world of opportunity but also, within these bounds, a quiet celebration of the incidents of everyday life and social encounter. This approach is a form of witnessing at close proximity, an almost tactile form of recognition that is more than governed by sight. Tacitly, this approach suggests that sight is overly conditioned by values that resist forms of recognition or acknowledgment based on a notion of the sensory real. Chernysheva responds to the world around her, seeking incidents of daily life in Russia which carry an embedded sign of the past, of a modernity whose potential remains unrealized, a form of geometry gone awry. Her work is about moments that are not simply a chance encounter so 42 Ksenia Nouril interview with Olga Chernysheva, Art Margins, 21 May 2017. It is based on three interviews with the artist in October 2016.

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much as making anew that which already exists, of a manifest desire to, as the artist remarks, “give a rhythm to chance.” This is not simply a redemptive moment of hope but a form of re-collection. Through this form, through the folds of the communal body and everyday lives of its inhabitants, she seeks to inscribe out of the past as found within the present, the material lineaments of the future.

Part Five Elena Kovylina (1971) is one of the few contemporary Russian artists who also engages as an artist with Russian culture and history through performance, video, film, and installation. She studied at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow from 1993 until 1995, the F + F School for Art and Media Design in Zurich, 1996–1998, and between 2001 and 2003, at the Universitat der Kunste Berlin, where she worked under the supervision of Rebecca Horn. Kovylina questions social behavior and the status of performance in public actions in which she is involved until she becomes physically in danger. She does not shy away from confrontation. Indeed, many of her actions emphasize social critique in harsh or satirical ways. Her targets are conceptions of identity and Russia’s political and social structures. Later she opened her School of Performance Pyrfyr, which was the first one in Russia. Lives and works in Moscow. Kovylina uses a range of media including video, film, installation, painting, and performance. There are often overtones of eroticism in her work as she frequently uses her naked body as canvas. Her first performances took place in the late 1990s, when she was testing the strength of her body—as well as the emotions of her audience. Kovylina does not shy away from confrontation. Indeed, many of her actions emphasize social critique in harsh or satirical ways. Her targets are conceptions of identity and Russia’s political and social structures. Kovylina’s performances are often scathing in their critiques of modern Russian society, and her unique experience of growing up in the Soviet Union, pursuing a western European contemporary art education and living in post-Communist Russia have influenced her work considerably. It is perhaps surprising that there hasn’t been more criticism of her work, as she does not shy away from open social and political commentary, but she is more likely to critique than to be critiqued. She credits the Moscow Actionist movement of the 1990s for creating an intellectual climate in

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which performance art can thrive. She is inspired by the works of artists such as Marina Abramovic, the theorist, curator, teacher, and one of the founders of Moscow actionism Anatoly Osmolovsky (Moscow, b. 1969, Moscow), the Russian artist-actionist and a filmmaker Oleg Mavromatti (Volgograd, 1965) and Yoko Ono. In 1998, while performing “The Rate of the Ruble” (Kypc Pybl), her first piece to be performed in Russia after her return from Western Europe, Kovylina was taken into custody after taking her piece to the Central Bank, and attempting to speak with the director. After being refused, she exclaimed, “Long live the Russian ruble! Hurrah!” A crowd had followed her but she was immediately arrested. Soon thereafter she was released. Kovylina’s performances seek to engage and create a relationship with her audience, while still attempting to portray real-life experiences based on issues facing Russia today. Her physically demanding performances spare neither herself nor her spectators. This is exemplified by her signature piece Waltz (2001) a performance in Berlin that was documented on video.43 As she danced, she invited spectators to dance with her and is engaged in a strange ritual of decorating herself with military badges, downing shots of vodka, and smashing the empty glasses on the ground, all the while becoming precariously smashed herself. The audience’s role gradually shifts: whereas at the beginning of the performance Kovylina offers them a pleasant dance, by the end of the piece they’re confronted with having to support the slumping, wobbling, artist who has become increasingly intoxicated, eventually stumbling and nearing incapacitation. In an interview she spoke of her performance as follows: When I conceived Waltz in 2001, I was just coming to Germany to participate in Rebecca Horn’s classes and tried to think about my situation. I guess my generation is the last one that experienced its Otherness in such a strong way. Such shocks of difference are not possible any longer. Moscow looks as “cool” as Berlin or any other global city and every Russian artist knows who Joseph Beuys is. Back then, I questioned myself: who am I in this new world and how am I connected to it? WWII was for me a strong point of reference because of my Soviet education and because of the war’s place in the Soviet collective memory. I had an image of women veterans

43 The work later shown in the exhibition Russia Redux #1 at the New York gallery Schroeder Romero (September–October, 2005).

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of the WWII in my mind. They would gather for celebrations in public spaces, as was usual for the 1st of May or other holidays, and I suddenly realized the cultural specificity of this image…44

Kovylina sees this performance as a symbol for a forced “reconciliation” between Russians and Germans and as a subtle commentary on a supposed cliché in the 1990s that the “Russian Woman” was willing to use her body as an instrument for the growth of the Russian economy. The implication of the audience in a moral game is crucial to Kovylina’s performances. This game is also explored in another work the following year: Live Concert (July, 2004, in the center of Mozart Square, Salzburg, Austria). The artist lay naked on a piano, exposing her nude body to the mercy of onlookers. At the same time a musician plays Mozart’s sonatas just at this piano. In the end of the performance she receives flowers as a prize. In her 2005 piece Boxing, performed in Moscow, she interacted with the audience, challenging the public to box with her in a ring. The fights were themselves were referred by other members of the audience. She never knew whether she will win or lose, and her aim is to focus attention on the plights of violence and victimization. Her art not only helped her to define problems facing Russian society today, but also to redefine herself. In order to create her pieces, she has had to locate herself within the broader social context as both a Russian and a post-Soviet. A major theme running through Kovylina’s work is the role of women in modern Russian. Pick Up a Girl, performed at the Biennale of Sydney in 2006, was a reinterpretation of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, in which she encouraged spectators to choose a magazine cut-out from a selection that she has affixed to her body with surgical needles. Viewers are then asked to remove the surgical needles used by the artist to affix magazine images of pin-up girls directly into her body. She wants her audience to throw away the photo rather than keep it, in order to highlight the situation of women residing in post-Communist Russia. When asked about the work by Elena Sorokina, Kovylina responded: I am talking about the condition of the post-Soviet individual, and more concretely, about the post-Soviet feminine condition. I have lived between 44 Elena Sorokina interview with Kovylina. See The Business of Art: A Conversation with Elena Sorokina. New York Foundation for the Arts. 25 January 2006.

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Russia and Germany for a while and have experienced Russia’s “sociopolitical context” directly, straightforwardly. It starts when you ask for a visa. Being a young, single, traveling woman, don’t even try to imagine a welcoming treatment at the consulate. When you cross the border, guards order all young women off the bus and ask lots of unfriendly questions. The specter of communism became a specter of prostitution; such is the context and I am a part of it.45

In 2008, Helsinki played host to a video installation of Kovylina’s work entitled Dying Swans. The piece was an open criticism of contemporary Russian society of the state’s attempts to control mass media in order to regulate what image of Russia is portrayed to its citizens and the world. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the carefully crafted portrayal of Russian high culture took a backseat to the media’s attention to more pressing matters, and so the most effective way of controlling what the world saw of the new Russia was by heavy control of journalists. The installation was created to pay homage to the over 200 reporters who were murdered or who had simply disappeared in the last decade, and the inspiration is drawn from the Soviet tradition of playing Swan Lake after the passing of influential statesmen. Garnering inspiration for her work from other artists as well as her early life in the Soviet Union and experiences in post-Soviet Russia, Kovylina’s work represents a fresh and critical view on issues facing Russia today. She takes a bold stand on topics which often remain sensitive, such as the role of women in Russia and the disappearance and murder of hundreds of journalists. Coming two short years after the high-profile death of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the installation was displayed in Switzerland, France and Finland, yet no Moscow museum or gallery have shown it. In 2014, she staged Egalite (2014) a performance (and later a videoinstallation) at Palace Square, St. Petersburg in preparation for her project at MANIFESTA 10, the Biennial of Contemporary Art.“Egalite” is an octave poem of people, rhymed in four-legged footstools, demonstrating the impossibility of any global “golden age” of equality and freedom. The footstools’ legs have been extended, so that the people standing on them (who all differ in terms of gender, age, nationality, profession, and even health) are all on one level. Though they otherwise appear as they usually would, bearing all the marks of those everyday jobs they always perform, 45 Elena Sorokina, op.cit.

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the tops of their heads have now been equalized and lined up in a row. The resulting “horizon” is illusory to the extreme, and has nothing in common with reality. But if you look down from their cheerless smiles, you can clearly see the groundlessness of their equal footing.46 The project was a statement by the artist of a modern democratic society, which, in her opinion exists as a utopian idea of modernity, Kovylina believes this society differs by its duality in political, social, and cultural spheres which do not allow for social inequality to be overcome. As such, it was a brutal satire on democracy in Russian society today. She created a clear image of the many double standards in postSoviet society. The real difference is that today, you don’t “try to fit in:” instead, participation in contemporary society is an inevitability that has become impossible to avoid. Deliberate social security, the declaration of rights and freedoms, and other slogans and formulas characteristic of Russian society are expressed with visual simplicity, and one might even say that they have gained a human face. But if “egalite” is a century-long project that has continued in Europe since the Enlightenment, its Russian version is very different after the fall of the Soviet Union. Illusory financial equality has been replaced with a so-called civic equality that has become no less utopian than its Soviet counterpart.

Part Six Taus Makhacheva is a performance-based artist who has questioned traditional forms of history-making, as well as cultural and gender stereotypes. Motivated by her Dagestani-Russian identity, her works look at the structure of Caucasian society and the relationship between its history, the politics of collective memory, and contemporary life. Her early work such as Carpet (video/1.06 min., color, silent/Dagestan, 2006), offers an ambivalent message conveyed by the simple action of the artist rolling in a carpet and out again, in an endless loop. The carpet represents a traditional craft, characteristic of the Caucasian region. The pattern of the carpet is a stylized depiction of the Garden of Eden with the Tree of Life, a symbol of the afterlife, immortality, and hope. The action suggests

46 During MANIFESTA 10, a video of the performance was also shown in the General Staff building of the State Hermitage, as it had been presented in 2007 and 2009 in Paris and Moscow respectively.

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both a sense of belonging to a ethnic community and an urge to unravel this tie and be set free. By 2010 Makhacheva’s work had become more explicitly engaged, seen in Portrait of Avar, performed in 2010 (video documentation 46.49 min. color, silent. Moscow, 2010). The videos in this work document a performance in Moscow. For this event, the artist made a traditional Avar dress out of flesh-coloured material instead of the customary blue or red. She also created latex moulds from traditional jewellery. Dressed in this costume, she travelled on public transport to the exhibition space. She stood there for thirty minutes, mimicking a doll from the ethnographic museum, and then gave away the latex jewellery to the audience. Portrait of Avar asks if one is born with a certain identity, or if one can choose how to identify oneself.47

Although Dagestan has more than twenty different nationalities, with fourteen recognized state languages, the indiscriminate term “the face of Caucasian nationality” is often used in the media. She notes pointedly that: Avar is the ethnic group in Dagestan to which I belong. The Republic of Dagestan became a part of Russia in 1860, after the Caucasian War. Today, as a result of domestic politics, migrants from the North Caucasus are viewed with prejudice, especially in Moscow. There are many racist killings, and nationalist parties from the far right demonstrate using the slogan ‘Russia for the Russians’.48

At the same time, Makhacheva was exploring other subjects with a black humor about human endeavor and folly. Endeavour (video 9.00 min., 2010) was performed near Tsada, a mountain village in Dagestan. As suggested by its title, the piece shows a human figure engaged in the impossible task of moving a massive rock. The angle of the camera emphasizes the subordination of the body but, the whole action shows the hopelessness and funny absurdity of her undertaking. This humor is pursued again in a later Landscape (a series of objects/wood, dimensions variable, 2013—). A collection of wooden objects representing human noses, modeled after North Caucasian faces, 47 Reported in Universe in Universe, Sharjah Biennial 11, 2013. 48 Makhacheva, Taus, Statement, Sharjah Biennial 11, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2013.

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the artist speaks of the many legends in Dagestan, referring to men losing their noses. According to the legend, the men, in order to find them again, and thereby to prove their manliness, they set off to the mountains. In the Avar language, the word merlep means “mountain” as well as “nose.” In Tightrope (2015), Rasul Abakarov, a tightrope walker from the fifth generation of a Dagestani tightrope dynasty, crossed a canyon in the Caucausus Mountains. Instead of a balancing pole he used copies from the collection of the Dagestani Museum of Fine Art before placing them in a structure that resembles a museum storage unit. The works, according to Makhacheva, encapsulate the history of twentieth-century art in the region. There’s even a picture of her famous poet grandfather, Rasul Gamzatov, meeting Che Guevara. “The work questions how we collect things and the general situation with museums around the world— their constant balancing and the constant precarity of existence for anyone involved in any creative field,” she says. “It is also about the doubts that you have when you make a work. Will it make it across the tightrope or not?”49 By 2016 Makhacheva had made “Super Taus ” (Performance/video [2016] searching for a place to install a monument to two museum attendants in Dagestan. (See the Monuments chapter.) In the following year she made Stomach It, a performance that was commissioned by V-A-C Foundation for the Venice Biennale of 2017. In the work, eight waiters offer guests dishes on the theme of “the politics of food.” These consisted of two carrots wrapped in edible paper printed with a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky; inedible bread made from flour of dried leaves and hay; a dish consisting of a smell developed by a perfumer to imitate the aroma of fatty soup; a loudspeaker on a plate emitting the sound of hungry stomachs; and lollipops in the shape of Lenin’s head. “For me food is the quickest way of accessing different points within the intellectual and the emotional,” She continues: “All these dishes led to a kind of kinesthetic time travel which evoked the pain of hunger experienced by the millions who suffered starvation and death because of Soviet policies, especially in the 1950s in Ukraine and the Caucasus.”50

49 Louisa Black, London: Art Newspaper, 18 July 2018. 50 See Taus Makhacheva Portfolio/Selected works. Website.

CHAPTER 7

After Maidan: Contemporary Ukraine

Over the past 20 years Ukrainian art has developed independently from Russia while at the same time, cognizant of the presence of Russia as it neighbor, most notably in its occupation if not control of Eastern Ukraine. Tragically, the conflict between the Ukraine and Russia has divided the country and people and, as a consequence, dominated its cultural and artistic life and practice. In fact, the events around Maidan mobilized artists in a way that was unprecedented and sustained in the years that followed.1 However, the choice of artists whose work I explore, is not determined by the political elements but shaped by an aesthetic engagement with their practice. These artists are Nikita Kadan, Lada Nakonechna, Mykola Ridnyi, Zhanna Kadyrova, Anna Zvyagintseva who have responded to life around them and the events of 2014 in different ways.

Part One Both Nikita Kadan (Kiev, 1982) and Lada Nakonechna (Kiev, 1981) were members of R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) group founded in 1 Alisa Lozhkina, ‘Between War and Rave. Ukrainian Art After the 2013 Revolution,’ BLOK, 23 December, 2019. This led to her book on post-Maidan Ukrainian art: Alisa Lozhkina, Permanent Revolution: Art of Ukraine of the 20th—early 21st century. Kyiv: Arthuss, 2019.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_7

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2005 and the curatorial and activist union Hudrada founded in 2008. By the time the events leading to Maidan in 2014 happened, they were in their early 30s and already producing major work. Kadan graduated from National Academy of Fine Art (Kyiv) in 2007 where he studied in the department of monumental painting under professor Mykola Storozhenko. His paintings, charcoal drawings, and collages are based on combining images which relate to three different thematic fields: (1) the fate of socialist monuments in Ukraine, destroyed during the “decommunisation politics” period which started in 2014; (2) the Ukrainian avant-garde art of 1920s and the debates about it’s “national” and “universalist” interpretations; and (3) the critique of the neocapitalist order that had come to replace socialist ideals and values in former Soviet countries that left behind a social vacuum that still remains to be filled. One of central questions posed by Kadan’s work “The Beautiful Colonizer” in 2014, was whether one could speak about the Soviet period of Ukrainian history as “colonization” and how relevant it was to look at the post-Soviet contemporaniety of the country through post-colonial lenses. According to the art historian and curator, Katerina Gregos, Nikita Kadan’s work navigates the intricate terrain between different political ideologies, transcending their one-dimensional definitions of utopia or dystopia to examine the consequences of their practices with a more objective eye. At the same time, his practice criticizes the neo-capitalist order that has replaced socialist ideals and values in the former Soviet countries - however flawed - that have left a social vacuum that has yet to be filled.2

In an installation “Everybody Wants to Live by the Sea” (2014, archival documents, neon, photo, gouache graphite) Kadan made drawings of the geometrical shapes of modernist architecture, reminiscent of the Soviet paradise built on the Crimean Tatars’ territory after its ethnic cleansing. These are then superimposed on documentary photographs of the new Tatar settlements. He wrote for an exhibition, apropos of this: Hidden memories of the peoples, nations and states struggling for possession of the Crimea peninsula along with the artist’s personal memories

2 Katerina Gregos, ‘On the Politics of Transformation’, from ‘Nikita Kadan. Yesterday, Today, Today’, edited by Transit gallery, Mechelen, 2015.

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are transformed in a semi-documentary display of imagery and distinctive architectural forms that tells the story of the land, its past and, consequently, its future. Historically Crimea was home to different ethnic and religious groups. In 1944, the Crimean Tatars were deported by Stalin’s orders, leaving a shameful yet invisible mark on one of the most famous Soviet resorts. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Crimean Tatars returned to their ancestral homeland and started to re-occupy the territory with self-built settlements. These fragile architectural shelters are often left unfinished or are ruined by local authorities driven by a new wave of xenophobia toward Crimean Tatars, who are again becoming an object of exclusion in the new ‘Russian Crimea.’3

Historically Crimea was home to different ethnic and religious groups. In 1944, the Crimean Tatars were deported by Stalin’s orders, leaving a shameful, yet invisible mark on one of the most famous Soviet resorts. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many Crimean Tatars returned to their ancestral homeland and started to re-occupy the territory with self-built settlements. These fragile architectural shelters were often left unfinished or ruined by local authorities driven by a new wave of xenophobia toward Crimean Tatars, who are again becoming an object of exclusion in the new “Russian Crimea.” Memories of people, states, and nations struggling for possession of the Crimea peninsula, along with the artist’s own personal memories, are transformed in a semi-documentary display of imagery and distinctive architectural forms that tells the story of the land, its past and consequently, its future. Kadan then showed in the 2014 exhibition Limits of Responsibility, a series of color slides that document the protests against the scheduled removal of the protesters’ camp on Independence Square in Kiev or Maidan in the spring of 2014. In the series, the focus is on the Maidan gardens that activists had planted, cultivating vegetables, grains, and herbs around their tents and barricades during their months of occupation, in the contested Kiev ground. They cultivated the occupied area to survive, to sustain themselves self-sufficiently, while simultaneously carrying out their resistance, highlighting their presence, and literally rooting their claim deep in the earth of Maidan. Cabbage and lettuce, onions and

3 Nikita Kadan, ‘Artist’s statement’ Catalogue: From the Shores of the Black Sea. Exhibition: Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi History Museum: Contemporary Art Gallery, September 2016.

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tomatoes grew and rippened among the monuments, improvized homesteads, flags, and barricades. The garden became both an instrument of protest and a slice of domesticated nature. As the gardens of Maidan grew in safe, orderly, labeled rows, they marked the square as a habitat and its very earth as taken and occupied. On September 19, 2014, the Pinchuk Centre opened an exhibition entitled Fear and Hope in Ukraine that included Kadan, together with other artists Zhanna Kadyrova, and Artem Volokitin. The exhibition was “inspired by the dramatic events that had changed Ukraine forever, inviting guests to reflect on the Maidan protests that resulted in tragedy, violence and political change in Ukraine—and to think about the future.”4 More recently, Kadan has addressed monuments as have others, with his exhibition Project of Ruins at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (mumok). Held between June 27 and October 6, 2019, Kadan installed unstatued pedestals that rose up to the museum ceiling. Reshaped, these Soviet-era hero-tipped plinth sculptures became hero-less sculptural pedestals, illustrating the suppression of the political heritage in Ukraine and demolition of Communist monuments. Kadan’s reinterpretations of monuments are a form of political iconoclasm directed against the suppression of history, simultaneously creating a link to the present. At the center of Kadan’s project was his exploration of the role of avant-garde art during the Soviet period in Ukraine and its significance for the present day as well as the public response to it. To highlight the significance of the Ukrainian avant-garde in constructivist modernism, Kadan references two key historical figures: Ivan Kavaleridze (1887– 1978) and Vasyl Yermilov (1894–1968). Kavaleridze had become famous as a screenwriter and film director, he had also created monumental propaganda sculptures in Ukraine. Yermilov was known as a central figure in Ukrainian constructivism and cofounder of an artists’ workshop similar to the German Bauhaus. Works of both artists are cited and transformed by Kadan. He reproduced pedestals of Kavaleridze’s monuments that were already partly demolished by the Nazis and the Stalinists, but he left the statues off. He transforms a revolutionary monument by Yermilov into a sculpture that rather than serving as a pedestal to the political symbols, now memorializes a somber recent wartime relic.

4 Katya Soldak, Forbes magazine International, New Jersey, May 19, 2014.

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Monument removal had been applied after the collapse of the Soviet Union and state-sanctioned by the decommunization law, passed in April 9th, 2015. Ukrainian monuments were eliminated by pro-Russian forces in order to undermine the country’s national identity and, as the war between Ukraine and Russia proceeded, it threatened to overshadow historical reality. While war monuments were officially exempt, sporadic destruction and vandalism occurred especially in the western regions of Ukraine, such as Lviv’s Memorial of Glory to Heroes Fallen in World War II . Much of this reaction can be seen in connection with the Russian invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Kadan’s work suggests the naïve glorification of the present. He commemorates not only the anti-Soviet and anti-Stalinist aspects within historical communism but, also the avantgardist facets of the propagandistic monuments currently under threat of destruction. Kadan’s installations, objects, drawings, and videos show the extent to which the emancipatory side of the communist avant-garde has been repressed today, in the context of both military conflict with Russia and nationalist glorification of the past. He illustrates this with reference to the present state’s approach to monuments from the communist period, which have been left to decay or been destroyed. In such work, Kadan advocates a more complex view of the past and its utopias.

Part Two The artist Lada Nakonechna (1981) is a contemporary of Kadan. Born in Dnipropetrovsk, she graduated from the National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture in Kiev. In her works she uses graphic techniques, video, and installation.5 Nakonechna, uses various artistic tools—drawings, public space actions, installations, films, and performances—as means of referring to the current political and social issues.6 She uses art to explore the social

5 Nakonechna was shortlisted for the prestigious Pinchuk Art Prize for young Ukrainian artists in 2009 and 2011 and was a finalist for the Malevich Prize in 2008. 6 Nakonechna has participated in numerous international and Ukrainian exhibitions including the National Art Museum of Ukraine (Kyiv, 2011, 2012, 2017), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2015), CSW Zamek Ujazdowsky, Warsaw (2012), Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2015), Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2015), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2015), Palais Populaire, Berlin (2018), Museum of

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ramifications of political phenomena, examining the economics of nationality, memory, history, identity, society, and economics. While not offering ready hypotheses, she encourages the viewer to personal reflection upon these issues. In 2008, she had co-founded with Yevgenia Belorusets (Kiev, 1980), an artist and writer Prostory (net au), a journal for literature, art and politics. Later in December 2016, Belorusets would write: Prostory was conceived…uses the experience of literary translation to look at a wide—perhaps too wide—range of practices: literature, social criticism and modern art. Nearly all the editors of Prostory during its first phase from 2009 to 2013 saw themselves as translators, and were so dedicated to their work that they never found time for discussion of the magazine’s concept…Viewing literature through the process of its re-telling or translation, through literary texts, was a way to guard the magazine against dogmatism and a limited vocabulary of received wisdoms. Social criticism existed as our fundamental initial position.7

Even before Maidan, Nakonechna’s work was engaged in bridging the personal stories and social histories of the country. The video installation entitled “Somebody else’s (hi)story” (2009) is a record of a monologue of Nakonechna’s grandmother. Authentic family stories from the woman’s life are in fact combined into one single tale made out of a number of small episodes. The story could go on without an ending. Being used to her grandmother talking, the family stopped listening to the contents of her stories at some point and started treating the sounds produced by her as similar to regular TV noise present in the background. The work demonstrates how impossible it is to explain and truly comprehend the reality by the means of TV coverage, in what way we perceive the information presented by the media and how it affects our picture of the world.

Contemporary Art Zagreb (2018), Foundation Center for Contemporary Art (Kiev, 2009), PinchukArtCentre (Kiev, 2016), WUK Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna, 2016). 7 Yevgenia Belorusets, Prostory (December 2016). Belorusets works with photography and video on the intersection of art, literature, journalism and social activism. She was also a member of the curatorial group “Hudrada” and has taken part in a number of Ukrainian and international exhibitions in the context of social critique and socially engaged art.

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Nakonechna then made Monument for 2 (2011) and Cards (2011– 2012). The first was a minimalist object resembling two tomb stalls leaning against each other and offering two laconic epitaphs—press articles informing about two suicides committed for economic reasons—in Switzerland during the global crisis and in Ukraine in the transformation period. Cards, on the other hand, was a series of strikingly similar landscape drawings of sights based on the Internet photos, shown in an exhibition entitled Weekdays a selection of Lada Nakonechna’s works from 2009 to 2012 at Ujazdowski Castle, Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. In every country the artist has worked in since 2010, she has made kitschy landscapes in the Ukraine and Switzerland. All of them have the same format and are based on photos from the Internet that she copies mechanically in the course of a day. The project documented how the ideas of a picturesque landscape in different countries are very similar, but how much the social conditions differ. The comparison of the value of work invested, and thus of the given work of art, looks quite dramatic with reference to the economic zone in which it was drawn. Below the respective cliché motifs, Nakonechna notes down how long she worked on it, the country of origin, the average hourly wage there, and the price of her work based on this amount. The price of drawing is hence determined by the median wage paid to common workers in the country where the drawing is created. For example, the handwritten caption under the Swiss drawing reads “Swiss made \ one working day \ from 8 a.m. till 5.30 p.m. \ 9 hours \ average price per hour - 35 Fr \ total 315Fr.” The drawing produced in Ukraine is captioned: “Ukrainian made\one working day \ from 8 a.m. till 5p.m. \ 9 hours \ average price per hour – 13 hours \ total 104 hours.” Such work exemplifies Nakonechna’s looking for a coincidence between a collective and a personal view in these works. While creating her works, Nakonechna constantly thinks of clearing up space and leaving it free for others. To some extent, her works can be seen as manifesting the need for a spectator. In a certain sense, only this kind of reflection makes possible something common that does not belong to anybody but can be shared by everybody. How to remove yourself from view, thus, freeing up space for something to happen or potentially happen? How to stop producing, accumulating, appropriating and instead start eliciting, watching, and analyzing all that has already been produced, accumulated

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and appropriated? Maybe this gesture of clearing up can be seen as a human being’s last chance for dealing with the impossibility of life? To make herself visible as a spectator who acts even when motionless (as inertia is the most dangerous gesture for one who has declared her desire to change the world)—could be Lada Nakonechna’s artistic statement. Having escaped from the natural order and declared themselves the rivals of nature, people took upon themselves the responsibility of self-reflection. Any representation of the world seems incomplete without somebody contemplating it, without attention to the quality and specificity of that looking. The unfinished landscapes on the top portion of the incomplete wall are waiting for someone’s arrival to populate the landscape, but there is nothing to look at except the bodies of viewers filling the empty space. The artist’s gesture turns the viewer’s gaze back upon herself: to see herself looking at herself in this unfinished landscape. This approach is explored in her exhibition Constructing the New Landscape, an exhibition held at EIGEN + Art in Leipzig/Berlin in 2012. This new scenery, which looks civilized, is not clearer or more livable than the forest full of danger and chimeras that people escaped. People have produced a reality where images of street fights predominate over natural landscapes. But these pictures are as incomprehensible as the abandoned and menacing forest. Why does the world invented by people revolt against them? Why is it that the living space apparently made unthreatening, presents new threats to humans? Perhaps the fear experienced by man in nature is radically different from that of modern man? Is it possible that the fear of the forest is more comprehensible because it was caused by natural conditions and demanded simple actions like attacking an enemy, defending oneself against danger, or hunting for prey? Having protected themselves from natural threats, humans have not eliminated fear. In the Summer of 2012, she joined the residency program at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw for three months. In June, the museum also hosted an exhibition of her works Personal shield, based on an object which the artist noticed during her stay in Switzerland.8 As the curator Marianna Dobkowska, noted

8 The exhibition Personal shield was curated by Marianna Dobkowska at Ujazdowski Castle, Centre for Contemporary Art within the framework of the TRANSFER PolishUkrainian Exchange 2012, set up in cooperation with the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev.

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It is a small fence erected between buildings in order to separate the access to the space between them. It was turned into a mobile object for personal use, a personal shield, which makes it possible to set borderlines between its user and his or her environment. The work was prepared for the artist’s exhibition in Switzerland, made relatively cheaper in Ukraine and transported by the artists across the Schengen border as hand luggage.9

With Personal Shield, Nakonechna exhibited the civilized person’s fear— of the other, of the world, and of oneself. This fear does not disappear, even in the relative safety of today’s society. This fear has accumulated because the ways of realizing it and living through it have been lost. Lesia Kulchynska, curator and guest art editor of Prostory, noted that “A personal shield is a tool of self-defense, an instrument that helps sustain a personal” safety zone. “Referring to the familiar elements of an urban landscape, Lada Nakonechna reinterprets the emblematic attributes of war as an everyday sign of social life .A desire to isolate from other people’s problems and needs, which goes along with the everyday struggle for personal comfort, is materialized in her functional work revealing her hidden bellicosity.”10

Violence and idylls in her video work Constructing the New Landscape (2012), Nakonechna has reportage photography collide with Romantic landscape painting. Again and again, a painting of a dramatic cloud-filled sky moves over a shot of a demonstrator who is overpowered by men in uniform. It’s the kind of photography that is continually shown in the media. The horizontal line where the two motifs meet on the monitor trembles, stands still, before moving up or down a little. But the line never moves so far that one of the two pictures is completely visible. The viewer’s continual “disappointment” imbues Constructing a New Landscape with an astonishing tension. It seems that the “new landscape,” or new conditions, constructed here can only be enforced with violence. The powers that be, on behalf of which the two uniformed men act, remain anonymous, as does the demonstrator they take away. The faces of everyone involved are concealed behind the clouds of the painting. 9 Newsletter, ‘Marianna Dobkowska on Lada Nakonechna,’ Ujazdowski Castle, Centre for Contemporary Art. 2012. 10 Lesia Kulchynska, ‘Lada Nakonechna, Personal Shield,’ The Site Magazine. Volume 35: Borders. 2011.

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Everything is opaque—like the current situation in Ukraine, the artist’s home country. Nakonechna also uses the title Constructing the New Landscape for a series of pencil drawings she executed in 2012, bought for the Deutsche Bank Collection. In these works, the artist also combines landscape impressions with pictures of demonstrators and street fights, modeled on images she found on the Internet. “The two different types of images are not in as much opposition as it might initially seem,” explains Nakonechna. “Nowadays, the critical potential of Romantic landscape paintings is not clearly discernible to the contemporary viewer. Their beautiful appearance distracts and comforts us, while nature pacifies us by shielding reality. For this reason, in constructing this artwork, I’ve tried to create a feeling of anxiety to disrupt an uncritical perception.”11 Nakonechna’s 13-part series Popular view. Gaze through the lilac in Kiev Botanical Garden, directed towards the river Dnepr, also acquired for the Deutsche Bank Collection, is also based on Internet pictures and visual clichés. Reviewing this work Achim Drucks writes: Like Monet’s “Haystacks,” painted at different times of the day and the year, this series repeatedly shows similar views of the same motif. Nakonechna’s drawings are devoted to the lilacs at Kiev’s Botanical Garden, a tourist attraction whose spectacular blossoms are admired and photographed by hundreds of visitors every May. But unlike Monet, she is not interested in showing different light moods. “I deal with the nature of given images that constitute our reality. In the series Popular view, I claim that these ‘documented views’ aren’t really any different from one another,” says the artist. “The creation of images mainly happens unconsciously—everyone has a photographic device and presses the button frequently without giving it much thought.” Despite the flood of images we are bombarded with day in, day out, “we’re strangely incapable of understanding and sizing up the visual information we take in,” she said. For the artist the difference between information and propaganda dissolved, sayIng “we can no longer trust visual information.”12

11 Achim Drucks, ‘Alienation Effects: Lada Nakonechna’s Conceptual Drawings,’ ArtMag, Deutsche Bank, Issue 88 July 15, 2017. 12 ibid.

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With a work that was shown in the exhibition Through Maidan and Beyond at the Architekturzenrum in Vienna in November 2014, the artist reacts directly to this situation: It consists of two small elements—an eyehole mounted in the wall of the gallery and a small object with a photo of the injured eye of the journalist who witnessed the events on Maidan Square. Seeing can pose a real danger, it’s not a passive act. Journalists and people who were at the Maidan made live streams—they became the eyes of the people who followed the events at home and were ready at a moment’s notice to switch to the other side of the monitor if needed.13

It was around this time in 2015 that Nakonechna co-founded the Method Fund in Kiev with a group of artists, curators, art historians, architects, and teachers. As a response to Maidan, the Fund was developed as a non-profit cultural and educational organization that was independent. It operated like an art school but, was self-organized with volunteer teachers and artists, and supportive of young artists in their specific local context and in response to current political urgencies. In 2015, the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg (Germany), opened an exhibition of Nakonechna’s work Walk The Line. New Paths in Drawing. The work was supplemented by a wall drawing with the title Incomplete. In other words, the work is not complete because the artist does not include the demonstrators, having transferred only the landscape motif to the wall in the exhibition space. The part of the wall beneath it remains white. “This room is reserved for visitors, who make the work complete with their presence,” explains Holger Broeker, the curator of the show. Lada Nakonechna integrates the viewer into the action not only visually, but also in a physically active way. The Romantic illusory space becomes a (contrasting) framework for the social space in which the viewer becomes conscious of himself. Nakonechna wants to activate passive viewers, to expand their “conceptual apparatus,” as she puts it, and sensitize them to the hidden messages of pictures or the social conditions manifested in them. So it comes as no surprise that the work of the artist, frequently alludes to Brecht’s Epic Theater, which works with the so-called “alienation effect.” The plot is interrupted by comments or songs to prevent the viewers from 13 Ducks, ibid.

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identifying with the characters in the play. The critical distance to the action on the stage aims at encouraging the spectators to draw their own conclusions—also in regard to the social situation.14

Between January 14 and February 6, 2016, Nakonechna held at exhibition at Eigen + Art in Berlin called Die Musik bricht ab. Die Gäste sind verlegen. Pause. (The Music stops. The guests are embarrassed. Pause.) Ruth Amelung wrote a review noting that the exhibition was: …Strong references to the epic theatre, a term coined by Bertold Brecht, become apparent when in the space alongside the static performance. Like Brecht’s theatre, which suggested that a play should provoke rational self-reflection and critique rather than an emotional connection or even identification with the characters, the artist considers her work to be a catalyst for social and political change. Upon entering the gallery, the audience is subtly invited to become a participant, rather than a mere observer. There is a dress-like piece made out of white army camouflage material hanging on the wall which, like the rest of the exhibition—the metal objects, the lamps, the edited photos and the video on loop—becomes a prop in a play that visitors enter and suddenly star in, without realising.15

As an artist from the Ukraine, who works, travels and exhibits regularly across Europe, Nakonechna touches on themes of migration, bordercrossing, and conflict in her work, especially as they relate to her own life and history. Besides her camouflage reference, these themes, though entirely unintentionally, also became part of her show in a different way, in the shape of a small black box that holds a sound, a sort of vibration. The original piece, however, never made it past customs at the airport in Germany. In light of the exhibition’s title, the audience cannot be sure at what stage they are entering the performance when observing it. Has it started, has it finished or is it paused? The photos are of objects, cropped from larger ones and stuck to metal palettes, displayed and laid out on the floor. One of them shows a piece of crushed metal, but the rest of the photo

14 Holger Broeker, cited in Achim Drucks, op.cit. 15 Ruth Amelung, Review, Berlin Art Link Online Magazine. For contemporary Art and

Culture, January 21, 2016.

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that would offer context is missing, the artist simply added some pencil drawings. The highly adaptable metal stands, of different shapes and sizes, have lamps attached that shine a spotlight on the objects. The artist calls them “helpers,” a positive connotation in most contexts. But a more critical, perhaps even slightly cynical eye could consider these helpers too influential in how the work is seen, where the light is cast, where the shadow falls, or where they perhaps trick an ordinary pair of eyes. Three simple lamp constructions lean on one of the walls: small square frames with a stick at the end and a light bulb in the middle. Here, again, the exhibition turns participatory. They are Nakonechna’s interpretation of the popular phenomenon that is the selfie stick. It is perhaps the most obvious push for the audience to self-reflect on society, as well as particularly personal habits, as the underlying message of this work becomes obvious very quickly; holding up one of her “selfie sticks,” you see nothing as the light is too blinding. Nakonechna has also included a piece of video installation in her show, playing strongly with the perception of reality on film. The exhibition is an intimate conversation between exhibited work and audience. It does not lead and it does not suggest, but leaves the reaction and level of involvement up to the viewer and, if successful, manages to connect on a highly personal level, causing visitors to reflect on their own history and identity within society. The only work that hangs apart from this scene is encountered on entering the gallery; predating the other works by a couple of years. Image from abroad (2017) is a framed photograph of a river, its banks thick with bushy trees. The landscape appears generic at first but on closer inspection, faint pixels reveal that the image, sourced from “the collective mind” of the internet, as Nakonechna calls it, has been photographed from a monitor. The digital white hand of the editor tool floats in the treetops, as though waving for attention: a reminder that this landscape is subject to manipulation, and is by no means necessarily permanent, locatable, or “natural.” This sense of unease quietly develops in the main installation. In several of the stacked works, cropped selections of treetop foliage have been semi-abstracted through the process of transfer-printing their images onto paper, the tonal range reduced, so that the foliage might resemble a satellite image of a section of land. The prints are further manipulated, with sections hand-colored in crayon, which have particular resonance when a block of color sharply divides the foliage down the middle, the image now

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evoking a scrap of flag. Certain linear shapes might belong to a manmade ruin picked out amidst the bush in red, evoking infrared imaging.

Part Three Mykola Ridnyi (Kharkiv, 1985) is an artist, filmmaker, and freelance curator, working across media ranging from early collective actions in public space to a combination of site-specific installations, sculpture, and photography Currently he lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine.16 He graduated in 2008 from the National Academy of Design and Arts in Kharkiv, where he obtained his MA degree in the sculpture department. In 2005, he was a founding member and curator of the SOSKa group, an art collective laboratory and gallery space for the development of local culture. Based in an abandoned house in a center of Kharkiv, the gallery-lab under Ridnyi’s lead, was instrumental in the developing the artistic scene in the region before it was closed in 2012. In 2011 Ridnyi showed two video woks at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Poland.17 The first Monument (2011) documents the demolition of a Soviet public monument in Kharkiv, part of the process of “cleansing” the city of relics of the past ahead of the upcoming Euro 2012 football cup. Removing a memorial of an abolished ideology, workers create room for other manifestations of state power. The second video work Anthill (2011) showed the work of iron ore miners in Komsomolsk, comparing it to the work of ants. Manual labor, once a guarantee of pride and national-hero status, has become 16 Ridnyi has curated a number of international exhibitions in Ukraine, among them New History (Kharkiv Museum of Art, 2009); After the Victory (CCA Yermilov Centre, Kharkiv, 2014), The School of Kyiv–Kyiv Biennale (2015); All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale for contemporary art (2015); Photography Today: Distant Realities at Pinakotek der Moderne in Munich (2016); The Image of War at Bonniers konsthall in Stockholm (2017); and Transmediale at HKW in Berlin (2019), 35-th Kassel documentary film festival (2018), His works are in the public collections of Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Museum of modern art in Warsaw, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, V-A-C foundation in Moscow and others. He was winner of the numerous prizes and awards: the Pinchuk Art Centre Special Prize (2011); in 2012: the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award, the Sergey Kuryokhin Modern Art Award for Public Art, the Grand Prix of the Kyiv Sculpture Project and the Pinchuk Art Centre Prize 2013. 17 The exhibition of Ridnyi was curated by Marianna Dobkowska and presented in the framework of the project Transfer: Polish-Ukrainian Exchange 2012 in cooperation with the Pinchuk Art Center in Kiev.

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a domain of the “excluded” and “invisible.” Rydnyi’s piece tells about the degradation of the work-leader ethos and asks about the cost the ordinary people pay for political and economic changes. In 2014 violence erupted on the streets of Kharkiv as the city became divided between the opponents and supporters of Maidan; each group occupying its own spot in the centrally located Freedom Square. Many of the ousted supporters Yanukovych, President of Ukraine, who had come from Kharkiv. Then in the spring of 2014, a group of pro-Russian activists seized the Kharkiv Regional State Administration and proclaimed the Kharkiv People’s Republic. However, Ukrainian special forces managed to quickly re-establish control of the city as pro-Ukrainian activists flooded the streets. Kharkiv remained loyal to Kiev. Ridnyi documents this history of the city with an interest in what remains after the event. The afterimages of the Kharkiv turmoil of 2014 are addressed directly in 3 works: Regular Places, NO! NO! NO! and Blind Spot. All of them demonstrate the dialectical work of memory and oblivion, of remembering and forgetting. Regular Places features a series of images of Kharkiv streets and squares, observed by a static camera on a tripod. The weather is warm, life is lived at an unhurried pace, urban spaces appear calm and unpopulated. Nothing is essentially happening. Standing in stark contrast to this idleness, however, is the film’s soundtrack. We hear documentary recordings of the sounds of events that had unfolded in the same places few months before: the noise of violent demonstrations, conflicts between ideologically polarized groups.18 In the following year of 2015, Ridnyi presented In Pieces, a set of billboards and banners produced for the Artboom Festival in Krakow, participated in the Venice Biennale “All the World’s Future” and exhibited in “Lest the Two Seas Meet” at the Museum on Modern Art in Warsaw. In December he published Culture and Political Transformations: Footprints of the Recent Past in the Post-Socialist Region in Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique) that captured the complexities and manipulations of Ukrainian history. This is also brought out his film Grey Horses (2016). Deploying the montage principles used also by both Kadan and Nakonechna, the film tells the story of the artist’s great-grandfather Ivan 18 Jakub Majmurek, Fragments from war-torn Ukraine. Text for exhibition: Facing the Wall ’ by Mykola Ridnyi at Galeria Labirynt (Lublin), 28 May 2018. Majmurek notes ˙ Ridnyi’s approach to the documentary genre in art differs from that of Artur Zmijewski (Polish), Tomáš Rafa (Slovakian) or Oleksiej Radynski (Kiev, Ukraine).

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Krupskyi, an anarchist who fought in the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army led by Nestor Makhno. The story is told in subtitles that run alongside footage of journeys to the places where Krupskyi lived, fought and worked; an excursus in which the street names mentioned in Krupskyi’s accounts as checked against their Soviet incarnations; protests at the running-down of Kharkiv’s factories; and arguments among the city’s youth about the “Odessa fire” in 2014 when fighting between proUkrainian and pro-Russian forces ended with the latter being chased into a building and burnt alive. The anarchists who repeat the old revolutionary slogan—“Peace to the Huts, War to the Palaces ”—are running a social center that is helping internally displaced people from Donbass. Owen Hatherley gives a very good account of Ridnyi’s documentary films are frequently based in and around Kharkiv, which was the first capital of Soviet Ukraine, between 1919 and 1934. Ridnyi argues that there is little memory of this moment in the Ukrainian public sphere; it is a subject that is “interesting only for some artists, researchers and leftist activists.”19 The position of the “official governmental institutions like the Institute of Historical Memory, is that Kharkiv was a puppet capital of Russian Bolsheviks to control the rest of Ukraine.”20 In Kharkiv however, a city which was nearly seized by Russian nationalists in 2014, its status as the former capital is often connected with a patriotic “nostalgia for a ‘Great Soviet past’” that has little to do with the period of anti-imperialist and modernist construction that immediately followed the civil war. Bringing together these young people and the story of Krupskyi is an attempt to redress the fact that, in Ukrainian history, the “leftist phenomena”—including an account of the socialist poet Lesya Ukrainka, the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army and the Ukrainian Communists—are suppressed by both sides in the war over national memory. Biographies like Krupskyi’s are either “completely unknown or represented in a damaged form.” Standing against both what Ridnyi calls Russia’s “‘privatization’ of the Soviet avant-garde heritage, including the Ukrainian part of it” and against the nationalist myths that simply mirror the same move, the work of Kadan, Nakonechna and Ridnyi shows that the century-old revolt has left both unhealed scars and unfulfilled possibilities. The failure of

19 Hatherley, Owen, ‘Postponed Futures,’ Frieze magazine, 23 June 2017. 20 Hatherley, Owen, ibid.

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the avant-garde lies not in its formal absorption or crass commercialization, but in its inability to realize its dream of international Communism, reflected in the very words we use to describe it.

Part Four Between 26 April and 24 June 2017 in London “Postponed Futures” ran at GRAD, London. It was the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, an exhibition juxtaposing contemporary Ukrainian art with that of the country’s avant-garde of the 1920s. Much of the work produced included in the exhibition was by 4 artists: Ridnyi, Kadan (who curated the exhibition), Nakonechna, and Oleksiy Radynski. Owen Hatherley gives an extensive analysis of the exhibition, noting how the exhibition seek to assess the works of the period via the war with Russia, the seemingly abortive anti-oligarchic uprising in the Winter of 2013–2014, and the attempt to legislate the country’s history through sweeping “decommunization” laws. In Ukrainian discourse, the 1920s generation is often called the “murdered renaissance,” or “remembered as ‘heroesvictims’ of the Soviet regime,” as Kadan puts it. “But the Communist ideas of these artists are totally neglected.” Together, their work try to redress this neglect.21 Kadan juxtaposes a worn archival photo of Ivan Kavaleridze’s 1924 avant-garde monumental statue of the mythic Ukrainian Bolshevik Artem, which faced destruction under the decommunization laws enacted in 2015, and a reconstruction of Ermilov’s Monument to Three Revolutions from the same year. The latter is a stark, suprematist work—immortalizing revolts in 1825, 1905, and 1917 without a figurative or obviously symbolic referent.22 Half of the space was filled with works made in the “heroic period” of the revolution and the first decade after it from two private collections. Ukraine was one of the most complex theatres in the war and cultural ferment that followed the 1917 revolutions—fought over by shifting alliances of right- and left-nationalists, foreign interventionist troops, Communists and anarchists. After the Bolshevik victory in 1921, Ukrainian culture was encouraged via a state-sponsored process of

21 Hatherley, Owen, ‘Postponed Futures,’ Frieze, 23 June 2017. 22 Hatherley, ibid.

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“Ukrainization”, which was violently ended in 1933, as famine raged in the countryside and writers and artists faced show trials. Hatherley cites Kadan, who characterizes the historical work chosen as representing “different sides of avant-garde practices: political engagement and the autonomy of formal experiment; archaist and progressivist; national and universalist.”23 The exhibition included work by Oleksandr Bohomazov and Maria Synaokova, Vasyl Ermilov among others, noting: The curatorial statements, and Radynski’s text, attacked equally the idea of the ‘Russian avant-garde’ as an illegitimate nationalization of an international movement, and the notion that a distinctively ‘national avant-garde’ in Ukraine could be set against it.24

Nakonechna participated in “Postponed Future,” with a series of photo collages, Merge Visible (2017). She also included an installation of 2 drawings in graphite on paper: Perspective reduction 10 from a painting Road to a collective farm (1937). The series Merge Visible resembled smoother, digitized versions of the designs of Lissitzky or Malevich or, of interior axonometrics from constructivist buildings. But this similarity is deceptive for they are actually taken from photographs of the war zone in Donbass. She had altered them, using the “merge visible” function on a graphics editor, removing debris and damage to leave only these minimal, unidentifiable geometric planes and volumes. She wrote that the work was not parodic, as she had no intention to ridicule, but rather that she uses these forms to gesture to the time in the past when artists could feel confident about the possibility of positive and progressive change, and the role of artists within it. In June/July 2018, Nakonechna held a residency at Reading International in SE. England, responding to one of the city’s most renowned historical sites, the Abbey Ruins, one of Europe’s largest royal monasteries. As “global” centers in their time, the medieval abbeys acted like contemporary international corporations and were closely connected through a European network. The Abbey was first destroyed after the monastery was purged following Henry VIII’s dissolution and the buildings of the Abbey were extensively robbed and most parts removed were sold or used elsewhere. In the seventeenth-century civil war raged in 23 Ibid. 24 ibid.

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Reading, during which the Abbey was destroyed. The remaining ruins could be seen as monuments to both internationalism and secularization. During the exhibition, Nakonechna produced a new online publication as a communal activity and fragile instrument for social change which will include contributions from the public and other artists, thereby connecting historical and contemporary reference points as well as new symbolic possibilities for the way we interpret cultural monuments. Nakonechna focused on the contradictory yet inherently connected notions of creativity and violence. Whether vestiges of events, fragments of reality, cultural values and contexts, or deserted places—ruins hide stories about past accomplishments and catastrophes; they can become historiography’s indicators— and are both evidence of a disregard for historical accuracy, and subjects for historical imagination. Bleached and occupied by nature, ruins seem distant from the present day. Their distance brings a freedom of interpretation and requires an imaginary reconstruction. This implies that the actions toward the silent remnants of the past could become violent. How can we hold our position? How can we be engaged in the moment of the event, and at the same time extend our gaze into the distance? These could be questions for artists who dive into history and spaces of memory, and for whom the archive serves as a critical tool. At the same time, the questions could reveal how we become engaged with the material, and how we might interpret the past as the present. Everyday relations, war, and mass manipulation had become inseparable from each other and the rhetoric of capitalism had fused with that of national heritage. The project was presented during an event at the Abbey Gateway between the 5th–7th of July. During this time the artist led two workshops where participants were invited to contribute to the development of the work through a series of drawing exercises, on the Abbey site, and to take part in a series of conversations and discussions around what it means to “create ruin.” An online publication by the Method Fund was developed in collaboration with the designer and researcher Lozana Rossenova to create a communal approach to building digital archives. Rossenova also led a workshop, during which participants were introduced to the online tool, a web-recorder, in order to learn to create personal online archives and to contribute to the publication. Over the next months an online program of video work were screened, which demonstrated

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different states of “ruin,” showing fragments of lives in contemporary Ukraine.25 Meanwhile, Ridnyi became one of Prostory’s editors and he turned to the moving image as the current focus of his practice. In 2019 he curated Armed and Dangerous, a multimedia platform that brought together video artists and experimental film directors in Ukraine. In more recent films he experiments with nonlinear montage, collage of documentary and fiction. His way of reflection social and political reality draws on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories. The 12th Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania, 2019, commissioned Ridnyi to create this new project, a site-specific installation called Lost Baggage (5 fiberglass pots with ceramic oxide, prints). The project is inspired by the figure of Esther Lurie, a Jewish artist from Kaunas who made a series of drawings that show the characters, life conditions and streets of the ghetto.26 According to evidence, she hid her drawings in ceramic pots and buried them in the ground to conceal them from the Nazis. Nevertheless, they were never found, and this story evolved into a legend. In his installation, Ridnyi hid Lurie’s images in five human-size ceramic pots, and they only became visible through a peephole. The images embodied the dark side of Kaunas history and the Jewish minority, while the location of the work—the Kaunas Train Station—emphasizes the dramatic idea of the baggage which the traveler is not allowed to take on their journey. By 2019 Nakonechna was producing such work as Marking 2 (2019), in which three bands of color filter over a thicket that betrays a slither of inorganic construction at the bottom edge. This could be associated with various factions at war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine and while clearly a subject that informs the artist’s work, she did not make direct illustrations of the conflict. Rather, she offers viewers just enough proximity, hoping that they will consider the “borders” or barriers that exist between spectators and depictions of conflict. The contours and perspective of undulating lands are implied with simple graphite lines on paper in four works, each titled Work on the ground 1, 2, 3, and 4 (2019). (transfer print, graphite on paper, 71 × 1235 cm.) Anchored in the center 25 The program included videos by Yaroslav Futymskyi, Zhanna Khadyrova, Yuri Leiderman, Ivan Melnichuk (Gruppa Predmetov), Lada Nakonechna, R.E.P. group, Andrii Rachinskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi, Mykola Ridnyi, Stas Voliazlovskyi and Max Afansyev. 26 Kaunus is a southern city of Lithuania and was occupied by the Nazis.

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of each work and conforming to the perspective is a transfer print of a seemingly banal black-and-white photograph of a rural landscape, as taken from the center of a road, which is actually a fragment of landscape from Donbass. It appears as though flattened or pasted onto the land with the lines running visibly through it, suggesting creases in a folded document or map. Nakonechna clearly wishes to obfuscate distinctions between the picture plane of the printed photograph, the minimally suggested “landscape,” and the work’s overall surface and function as an object. List of domains (2019, photography, cut-out, graphite 100 × 70 cm), for example, comprises four cropped photographs that appear to show several people handling a map, but the map in each image has been erased. The blank shapes that have been left behind correlate with the shape of each photographic image in the “Work on the ground” series. It is now understood that the shapes from the “domains” determined the perspective of the landscapes, rather than the other way around. The erased “maps,” now only marked with a number from one to four, respectively, have been scratched out by hand, the paper’s surface perilously thin in places. Lines, just like borders, are often flimsy, or perilously delicate. In two works titled Uniform image 1 and 2 (2019), the single image of a soldier, again sourced from the internet, is cropped from the waist up and transfer-printed onto white paper with the alienating effect of becoming a motif. By “occupying” these images with green crayon, Nakonechna heightens this effect while rendering them as landscapes, thus returning them to nature. Yet, since soldiers’ uniforms are intended to camouflage, this saturation could also be understood to re-boost their uniformity as a collective force—“invaders” or “defenders” depending on the perspective. Such tension between occupation and erasure, and who determines the “law of the land,” appears to be at the heart of this elusive exhibition. Between January 9 and February 20, 2020, Galerie EIGEN + ART held a solo exhibition of Nakonechna’s work Images from abroad. The exhibition ostensibly took place on an end wall of the gallery. The wall bears markings hand-drawn in graphite that evoke shadows once cast by pictures, since removed, their fixtures also left in situ. Serving as a framework of variable coordinates, these traces also suggest the transference of something temporal onto something permanent. The wall, in this case, could be thought of as a permanent “land,” while the 17 framed works stacked to the side for visitors to handle and hang in different configurations, could be considered as borders, ever shifting.

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Nakonechna’s work explores the social and historical space of postSoviet countries as a mirror of European processes, dealing with questions of personal responsibility and civic patriotism, examining the interaction of the individual and the common, and exploring the role of the artist and art institution in response to the situation in contemporary Ukraine, which is involved in a state of war since the 2014 uprising. Adjusting and interpreting those remnants of the past that previously were fundamental structures—these are gestures and practices that speak of how we tend to relate to those vestiges, rather than of the historical objects themselves. The gaze that we direct onto the ruined past can describe our current position in the world, while the different artists’ practices can serve as instruments to clarify this position.

Part Five Zhanna Kadyrova (Brovary, Kyiv region, Ukraine, 1981) where she currently lives and works. She graduated from Taras Shevchenko State Art School. Her works have been extensively exhibited worldwide, including the 5th Moscow Biennale, the 55th Venice Biennale, “Nouvelles Vagues,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris (all in 2013). In 2014 she participated in a residential program, supported by Baró Galeria, Sao Paolo, Brazil, at the end of which she finished with a solo exhibition: “Street Collection.” In 2014, Kadyrova was invited to participate in the exhibition Fear and Hope at the Pinchuk Art Center along with Kadan and Volokytin. She presented a combination of three works, exploring the theme of conflict. Athletes (2003), a photo series Kadyrova made during a stay in Crimea, playfully refer to violence, bodily harm and protests. Untitled (2014) was a new work of a Ukrainian map cut out of an excavated burned wall found in a former Soviet factory in the town of Shargorod, SW of Kiev, Shargorod had bee occupied by the German fascist army and by the Romanian fascist army during World War II in 1941–1945. The Ukrainian map has on the front side burned bricks and is covered on the backside with old Soviet wallpaper. Kadyrova’s wallpaper represents political conflict inside a real life and Ukraine as a broken country as much as the breakup of the Soviet Union; its industrial collapse and the independence of Ukraine. The third work, Crowd (2013) is a compilation of 40 glass panels with each panel containing a collage of one daily international newspaper from 2012. Kadyrova cuts out all portraits of people in the newspapers, recomposes them, juxtaposing persons of different social status, political

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position or religion side by side within the original frame of the newspaper page. Losing all reference to the text and the language, apart from the title of the paper that “frames” the crowds in a geographical culture context, each collage becomes a representation of a mass of people as the installation entirety represents a portrait of a crowd.27 Since 2014, Kadyrova has been exploring the relationship between architecture and mosaic in a project entitled Second-hand. Responding to the architectural and social memory of particular communities, she used ceramic tiles from a hotel in Venice to construct items of clothing and bedding. Some of these hung from clotheslines suspended outside the back of the central pavilion and visible through the windows. Kadyrova began this project shortly before Ukraine introduced decommunization, a process intended to erase all trace of the country’s Soviet past. The Ukraine has a long history of ceramic tile production, and in previous iterations she has used tiles from defunct Soviet-era industrial buildings, memorializing these structures in sculptures reminiscent of 1960s and 1970s-style Soviet fashion. Due to their material—smalt, mosaic panels or ceramic tiles feature a strong physical resistance to the effects of time, being more durable than the architecture they are set upon. Elena Sorokina, curator of an exhibition of her work in Zahorian & van Espen Gallery in Prague commented: Monumental mosaic panels once often decorated the concrete “grey cubes” of the socialist housing projects, institutions, and factories that were built between the 1960s and 1980s. Today, this architecture is in decay or transition. Buildings are often abandoned or caught between life and death. They are undergoing all kinds of transformations, restructuring strategies, and the pressures of so-called “urban rationalisation.”28

Sorokina continues: Smalt was famously used for mosaics in the Byzantine basilicas and later in orthodox churches as the chief medium for divine spaces and Christian saints. Like glass, smalt has an ambiguous status between materiality

27 This description of Kadyrova’s work in the exhibition is drawn from Pinchuk Art Center website. 28 Elena Sorokina, ‘Zhanna Kadyrova: Resistance of Matter’, Galleria Continua Les Moulins, 2019.

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and immateriality. Paradoxically enough, in the late 1950s, smalt started to spread all over the Soviet territories. Sometimes combined with ceramic tiles, this privileged material of sacred spaces was destined to cover grey facades with images of workers, athletes, cosmonauts, marvels of industrialisation or wonders of atomic energy. Kadyrova’s project “Monumental Propaganda” explores this paradoxical encounter between concrete, the foundational stone of modernity – cheap, addictive and polluting – and its “Other”, smalt – exclusive, secret, expensive, and almost indestructible.29

The Second-hand project began in Sao Paulo in 2014 when Kadyrova found tiles in second-hand shops, produced approximately in the 1970s. There had been a Brazilian custom of decorating the walls of their houses, shops, cafes, and facades with colored ceramic tiles. Such a tradition was impossible in the Ukraine with its winter frosts. But in 2015 Kadyrova made it in Ukraine after finding old tiles in the lining of the Kiev-based Darnitski Silk factory premises or stored on its territory. The factory had been a major light industry factory in the Soviet-era built after the Second World War producing tens of millions of fabric with a staff of more than 6000 women and men over 3 factories. After its collapse, the buildings had been transformed into shopping areas, real estate, and warehouses. In addition to the production of various tissues the site was supported by a strong social infrastructure, offering many working women amateur clubs, sport clubs, recreation centers, and libraries. The Second-hand project then continued in Chernobyl in 2017, where Kadyrova made a dress for a mannequin from the ceramic tiles that had decorated a bus station in the township of Polesskoye. At the time of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the population of Polesskoye had been 11,300 people. By 1999, it was officially removed from the settlement register. Before Venice in 2017, the artist had been invited to participate in the festival Gogolfest. The building used by the artists was the Film Handling Shopfloor of the Kiev cinema copy factory that had operated for more than 50 years. Kadyrova found some original old tiles that had lined the factory which she then repurposed. In a couple of months after the festival, the building was wrecked, and a new residential, shopping and entertainment complex was planned.

29 Sorokina, ibid.

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The factory was the largest in the Soviet Union; it copied films for all Soviet republics excluding Russia, which had a similar factory on its territory. Nearby the factory “Svema,” had produced films for photos and movies, located in Kyiv and Shostka since 1931. The building had been built before World War Two, and there was a school for a while. In 1948, the building was repaired after military damages and since 1949 the first Kiev Film Copy Factory started its work there. There were 13 buildings in factory heyday. In the early 1990s, after a dissolution of the USSR, the animation studio Borisfen-Lutes was founded by French investors with about four hundred and fifty people working in the animation production. Some cartoons of that studio won international awards. But, by the early 2000s, Borisfen had gone defunct and in 2008, ten out of thirteen buildings together with the Film Handling Shopfloor were sold. In 2019, Kadyrova was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale. With the support of Galleria Continua, she made a new version of Second Hand, using ceramics collected from old Havana Streets, cement, wood, photography corresponding to each dress.

Part Six In 2016, Yevgenia Belorusets submitted her work “Let’s put Lenin’s head back together again!” for the Pinchuk Art Prize Nominees’ Exhibition in collaboration with curator Tatiana Kochubinskaya, also from Kyiv. With texts by both Elena Vogman and Yevgenia Belorusets and elements of recently demolished statues of Lenin found in Ukraine: they wrote: Lenin’s nose turned out to be the only intact piece of the giant monument. It completed the journey to Kyiv and now, following its exhibition at the Pinchuk Art Centre, it is available for hire.Trying to assemble not even an entire figure, but even just the head of a Lenin, is an undertaking doomed to fail.The pieces are scattering in all directions. The meaning of the present is slipping away. Imagination, action, politics, tears, hands extended in a dramatic gesture, - I have to cut short my reading of the events connected to the destruction of monuments to Lenin. We can freely arrange them into any narrative, but in this particular work, it seemed

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better to me to present fragments which resist attempts to build something from them.30

Then, in December 2016, Yevgenia Belorusets wrote that a new editorial board is beginning work on Prostory: The year is 2017. This project is coming into existence in a time of war, the most significant for us, because of its proximity, being the war in Eastern Ukraine. This war has been going on since 2014, and is developing like a chronic illness, through localised but constant painful signals, resonating with the wars in Syria, Iraq and Nagorno-Karabakh and Yemen. We’re creating a literary and art online journal at a time when news reports have become the most meaningful texts, when photographs from the scene of events are the most important images. Memory is selective, and while our attention is drawn to news bulletins, literary works are not at odds with this, but rather exist within the depths of this scorching stream, of reactions, summaries, compressed formulations and retellings of events. It seems to me that what lies ahead for the Prostory editorial board is an exploration of the interactions between various forms of expression, and a search for the line where news and event become image, exhibition, conversation, literature, literary translation or protest action.31

Part Seven Anna Zvyagintseva (Dnipropetrovsk, 1986) lives and works in Kyiv. She studied in the department of painting at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, Kyiv, graduating in 2010. In the same year as her graduation, she participated in an exhibition Court Experiment with The Cage (textile object, 2010). The work embodies the contradictions between freedom and imprisonment, rule of law and lawlessness, and strength and fragility. In our country and in other post-Soviet countries there is an iron cage in courtroom. If the person committed real crime, he or she will be in

30 Belorusets, Yevgenia, ‘We’re losing him! On monuments to Lenin and the cult of demolition in present-day Ukraine’ in Re-Centring the City: Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity, Edited Jonathan Bach and Michaeł Murawski, London: UCL Press, 2020. 31 Yevgenia Belorusets, Editorial Prostory, December 2016.

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the cage during court sessions. If this person is not considered dangerous, he or she can just seat in front of this cage with the lawyer and the cage stands behind them like a ghost. The process often goes slowly, system makes everything not to let you leave and return to activist practice, some very simple process can last for years. Friends of prosecuted activist visit the sessions week by week, month by month. I made a knitted cage as a metaphor for this passing time and for certain comfort which one feels in the hands of justice together with feeling of own incapability to change anything.32

Since 2010, she has been a member of the curatorial group Hudrada and in 2011 was cofounder of ISTM (Art Workers’ Self-Defense Initiative).33 While her art practice encompasses painting, sculpture, and photography, the most representative medium of her expression is drawing. Her drawings, however, are neither based on precise and authentic documenting of the visible world, nor are they based on elaborate mastery, aiming to convey a realistic manifestation of everyday objects, people, or events. Rather, they are a narrative that draws on various selected visual marks and constellations, which are often formless and abstract. Zvyagintseva creates images that capture the traces and marks of everyday life, ephemeral coincidences, and what are generally considered the banalities of life. In translating the simple gestures, body movements, and everyday traces left by nameless people into poetic stories, the artist lends

32 Kinga Lendeczki, ‘Interview with Anna Zvyagintseva, Nikita Kadan and Mykola Ridnyi,’ Venice Biennale Ukraine at the 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale. Art Guide East, 18.07.2015. 33 Zvyagintseva was a finalist in the 2010 MUHi Young Ukrainian Artists Prize, and in 2015 was awarded Special Prize as well as received Public Choice Prize. In 2015 she was selected to participate in the Pavilion of Ukraine “Hope!”, at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice. In 2017, she was awarded the main PinchukArtPrize and, in 2018 was shortlisted for the international FutureGenerationArtPrize and participated in the nominees’ exhibition in Kyiv in Venice. She has also taken part in the both the first and second Kyiv Biennials: The School of Kyiv (2015) and Kyiv International (2017). Her solo exhibitions and projects include Disputed Territory, Mykhailo Kroshytsky Sevastopol Art Museum, (Ukraine) in 2012, Ukrainan News, CSW Zamek Ujazdowsky, Warsaw; FILM PAPIER, Galerie La Box, Bourges (France), Court experiment, curated by Hudrada, SIZ Gallery, Rijeka, (Croatia) in 2013 and Trusting movement, Scherbenko Art Center (Kyiv); The radio behind the wall, Closer, Kyiv, 2015; Misplaced touches, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv in 2017 and The empty spaces of doors and windows allow the room to be inhabited, The Naked Room, Kyiv in 2019.

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a distinctive frame and meaning to the most mundane objects, places, and activities. In September 2012, Zvyagintseva then participated in a Hudrada collective organized exhibition “Disputed Territory” at the Art Museum named after M. P. Kroshitsky, Sevastopol, Crimea. The exhibition included works by nineteen artists from Ukraine and other countries, and was dedicated to the conquest and liberation of social and political territory.34 In an interview conducted later, Zvyagintseva noted: The exhibition “Disputed Territory” only partially raised the subject of territory in geographic sense. In this project we discussed various disputed territories: public and private space, human body and gender, migration and political conflicts. We were invited to do “something” particularly at the Sevastopol Art Museum. A problem of disputed territories emerged in the course of our work, as it basically lies there on the surface—both Crimea and Sevastopol are the battlefields of identities, and a museum is a “disputed territory” for contemporary art…Perhaps an artist has a keen desire to raise questions, to doubt things, to search for new ways to express own doubts. An artwork may be made in a form of a question. And the reality may give an answer to it after a while.35

Using the medium of drawing, as well as photography, Zvyagintseva’s work often transcends the two-dimensional frame and expands into spatial installations. In other words, the highlighted forms and movements—be it dents in the floor tracing the trajectory of an opening door, ring scratch marks on a door handle, stains on the wall left by someone moving their chair, or black wall “paintings” created by putting out cigarettes—reveal something of the individuals, people we will never meet or get to know. In this way, a person’s unconscious movements or the contours of objects used in daily routines become part of the artist’s individualized narrative. Increasingly, Zvyagintseva’s work has turned to capture a larger condition of everyday life in the Ukraine, its fragility. As if suddenly, drawing embodies a precariousness to life around her. The work she makes 34 Exhibition participants: Adrian Paci (Albania), Anna Zvyagintseva, Ivan Melnichuk, Yevgenia Belorusets, Nikita Kadan, Yuri Solomko, Esther Kempf (Switzerland), Aleksey Salmanov, Simona Rota (Spain), Lesya Khomenko, Lada Nakonechna, Aleksey Gnedenko, Alina Kleitman, Ulyana Bychenkova, Nikolay Ridniy, Tanz Laboratorium, FNO (Russia), R.E.P. 35 Evgenia Smirnova interview with Anna Zvyagintseva, Art in Ukraine, 2017.

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captures the impossibility of grasping the reality which is changing right before your eyes. This work makes us think about reevaluating our values, when routine, calm, and confidence in tomorrow become the most significant things in life. The landscape changes very quickly, falling apart right here and now. When she made “To draw your own window, to crumple the paper” (2015), it was as if her work was an echo, albeit distant, but resonant even from Kiev of a war in the East of the country. One could look from the window and see perceive the peaceful passing of everyday life but the work she was making reflected the larger reality that permeated the lives of everyone. She has spoken of having seen many photos from the East where people were standing in destroyed windows and feeling he echo of war coming to her house. Zvyagintseva’s thoughts about the military landscape emerge as remote reflections of a conscious citizen and artist. In this manner, Zvyagintseva captures the state of today’s political landscape, emphasizing its fragility. The landscape changes very quickly, falling apart right here and now. the impossibility of grasping the reality which is changing right before your eyes.36 In 2015, Zvyagintseva was awarded in the Kyiv Biennale: The School of Kyiv and received Special Prize as well as received Public Choice Prize and was selected to participate in a group exhibition Hope! for Ukraine at the 56th Venice Biennale. The Ukrainian participation in the Venice exhibition was an exhibition of a young generation of Ukrainian artists: Anna Zvyagintseva together with Yevgenia Belorusets, Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Mykola Ridnyi, together with the poet Serhiy Zhadan, Artem Volokitin, and Open Group. With this exhibition a generation of artists voice hopes for Ukraine’s future while confronting the current conflict and the country’s recent history. By 2017, the Pinchuk Art Centre had organized a solo exhibition of Zvyagintseva, curated by Tatiana Kochubinskaya. Entitled Misplaced Touches, it featured sculpture, graphic art, installations and metal, gypsum, paper, ink, google images, animation as well as found photographs of imperceptible touches in public and private life, from maternal to civic, discovered on social media. The installation used a found photograph as starting point and was based on the idea of a trail, of unconsciously

36 Kateryna Iakovenko, Tatiana Kochubinskaya, Euphoria and Fatigue: Ukrainian Art and Society after 2014. Warsaw: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, No. 14 2020.

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following somebody else’s path, and paths that emerge from our imperceptible touches. The artist seems to anonymize the bodies, discarding their volume. The installation’s line connects the two exhibition spaces, turning into a line of contact, a metaphor for one territory’s or one body’s infringement on the other. But the artist anonymizes these territories, stripping them of physical dimensions. The line remains a visible boundary for the act of infringement/touch, leaving the possibility of memory and memory traces of physical interactions. During this period, Evgenia Smirnova published an insightful interview with Zvyagintseva in Art in Ukraine.37 Evgenia Smirnova: Anna, let’s begin with your latest nomination for PinchukArtCentre Prize. Your work obviously stands out from majority that was carried away by reflection on recent social & political events in Ukraine and the world. So was this avoidance your conscious choice or the general state of mind?

Anna Zvyagintseva: These issues influenced my work as well. At first sight everything does seem pretty – fine pencil drawings, light room. But if you look closely, don’t you feel that there’s something wrong? Don’t you wonder why these fragments fell off? Why does this peaceful image fall apart? At first it looks like a couple of nice pictures, they are even hung or placed so that visitors can easily walk along the walls. But there’s an obstacle – you can’t come closer to the pictures on the walls, as you hit podiums with the fragments of them that had fallen off. I.e. it’s up to you whether you choose to ignore “the shadow of the disaster” and satisfy yourself with the seemingly calm sequence of images, or stop and try to apprehend the artwork as a whole. In the second case it will be difficult to separate it from “the events in the country.”

When Zvyagintseva was shortlisted for the Pinchuk Art Centre Prize in 2018, she chose one of the hundreds of drawings she had made of daily household labor such as washing dishes. She selected a fragment of that drawing and transformed it into the monumental sculpture of a drawing, using iron rods for the pencil lines. Through this transformation, the

37 Op.cit., Evgenia Smirnova interview with Anna Zvyagintseva, Art in Ukraine, 2017.

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banal act of washing dishes is abstracted, dealing with the idea of labor itself. For her Ljubljana show, Exercises in the Dust at The Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (June 5, 2018–July 13, 2018), Zvyagintseva combined drawings created by appropriating doodles—the kind one usually makes on a piece of paper when buying a pen—with tiny sculptures whose shapes are parts of various objects and spaces from the immediate surroundings of her residence in Ljubljana. Combining the found and seemingly out-of-use material discarded by strangers with parts of objects she encountered in her temporary living quarters, she manages to fuse two abstract forms into an autobiographical narrative full of coincidences and uncontrolled gestures as well as carefully selected and documented details of her daily life. In the following year Zvyagintseva submitted Declaration of Intent and Doubt (2019, mixed media) that was shortlisted for the Pinchuk Center’s Future Generation Art Prize. In the video that was part of her work, she continued with the essence of traces but in this new work the stage replaces a piece of paper. Proposing a film-based experience, the artist underlines spatial interactions and conflicts between the characters and stresses on how the roles can shift. The viewer sees the woman washing the floor. But only traces of water remain after her and flicker so fast, recalling fleeting results of any efforts. Throughout her work Zvyagintseva makes manifest the impalpable. Through various media, she reveals an elusive but sensuous experience of daily life in the midst of a larger world in flux and change. In this way, there is something so affirmative experienced through our encounter with her work, as within its very fragility lies its strength.

CHAPTER 8

Contemporary Georgia: Here and There

By the early 1990s a new generation of artists from Georgia began to emerge in the wake of independence from Russia. They started to travel, finding residencies and scholarships in order to live and work elsewhere, broadening the artistic influences discernible in their practice. As with many younger Georgians they were able to shrug off the weight of the Soviet domination or not be bound by national borders. Moving to Western Europe or to North America, they found a broader world of contemporary art and culture. Their practice could no longer be defined only within the term of a post-Soviet world. And yet, nevertheless this memory, this experience indelibly left its mark. With such terms, I broaden and extend Piotrowski’s the concept of horizontality. This chapter includes six artists: Maia Naveriani (Tbilisi, 1966), Thea Djordjadze, (Tbilisi, 1971), Nadia Tsulukidze (Tbilisi, 1976), Sophia Tabatadze (Tbilisi, 1977), Tamuna Chabashvili (Tbilisi, 1978), and Vajiko Chachkhiani (Tbilisi, 1985).

Part One: Maia Naveriani Maia Naveriani had studied under Gia Edzgeveradze before completing her formal training at the Academy of Fine Arts, Tbilisi between 1985 and 1989. On finishing she moved to London, where she settled for some years. In the beginning of 1990’s, very soon after the collapse of USSR, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_8

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Naveriani emigrated to London, UK, where she stayed for more than two decades. She has mainly worked with drawing, mostly using pencil on paper. In her early career, the work vividly speaks about isolation, alienation, state of uncertainty, emergency, state of exception, always through a humorous and ironic personal voice. By 1999 she was well established and had gained greater recognition, nominated by Annely Juda Fine Art for the Vordemberger Gildewart Foundation international prize which she won. Naveriani combined the popular signs and symbols with her immediate present, using imagery derived from pop-culture, Greek mythology, the Bible, William Shakespeare, as well as common knowledge of fairy tales. In 2015, Naveriani returned to Georgia, focusing on themes such as: emigration, conditions of workers, sex-work, and the role of a female body. In fact, her practice always addressed the subject of a female body in patriarchal society. When asked if she defined her work as feminist, she answered: Yes, I would define my text as feminist. It took me a while to acknowledge it and I realise that at the beginning it was an intuitive rather than conscious choice. Initially I subconsciously tried to sabotage everything that had an ideological, political or cultural claim and just followed my intuitive drift. Later, I articulated better that the symbolism and the text that I was working with was very much a feminist perspective. My own take on current female narrative is through investigating sexuality…I suspect that thorough “research” of sexuality of both sexes and the reshuffling of the current hierarchy can help dissolve the harsh borders of dichotomy and destabilise the didactic narrative of patriarchal order…To be a feminist today in my opinion is not only fighting for equality but contributing to a change of consciousness, departing from the stagnating and didactic discourse of a phallic system. Maybe the female gaze is a point from where a new, open space could be detected…1

The idea of “reshuffling” she refers to in her response to the Questionnaire as cited, is useful. She suggests that her collages are like a pack of cards she able to reshuffle to form a different set of meanings, putting into play new elements that disrupt expectations around gender.

1 See Questionnaire for Two-part exhibition “Twelve Women Gone Missing,” curated by Elene Abashidze. Silk Museum, & Writers’ House, 2018.

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At the art fair Pulse New York (March 5–8, 2015), she showed a series of large pencil drawings titled “Future Wolves and Chicks So Far” (2011, colored Pencils on Paper). The work explored the female subject through the artists’ own cultural memory fragments as well as the contemporary film stills, advertisements and images with documentary character using colored pencils to transform memories into visuals that resemble collages. “As a woman artist I have an unavoidable instinctive tendency to first of all address the queries about female identity and consciousness, and its relevance and impact in a contemporary context of dissolved values and ideologies to reflect on the endless attempts of many “Little Red Riding Hoods” to leave home, walk through the threatening forest, swallow a wolf (and a grandmother) and never look back…”2

Over the past few years she has devoted her time to making largesized colored pencil drawings. They are a form of nostalgic processing of life images, which the artist arranges in a different context and thereby creates a “post-real” open space. Quite often Naveriani’s playful, collagelike image arrangement is an important means to creating ever-changing interpretations, as every image is re-situated in a completely different context alongside other drawings and there creating a different associative meaning. This can be seen in At Home with Good Ideas (2012), House of Forward Thinking (2013–2014), After Honore Daumier (2017/2018), Nothing to Declare (2018) and All You Have to Do (2018), although in some series, earlier drawings also appear. Themes, such as parenthood, domestic labor, emotional labor, as well as heavily male dominated reality form the ever evolving leitmotif in her body of work. Naveriani metaphorically describes her artistic work as a sort of alchemy: as an entering into a mystic terrain, as never-ending trials and errors, as the aim to create pure perfection and instead experience beauty in failures. Colored pencils in particular are able to create transparency and vulnerability in the drawings, which reveal the one and disguise the other layer by layer.

2 See Naveriani Maia, Dusseldorf: Galerie Voss, 2012.

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Part Two: Thea Gvetadze Thea Gvetadze (1971) was born in Riga and then went to the Art Academy in Tbilisi between 1988–1993. Following her graduation, she attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam between 1993–1994 and the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf from 1994–2001. She decided to stay and work in Germany and more recently spend some time in Tbilisi. Her artistic development - and profound exploration of the traditions of Western European art - largely coincide with the traumatic socio-political developments that were taking place in Lithuania in the early 1990s. It wasn’t just the disappearance of socialism – a philosophy equally dogmatic as utopian – that was the source of turmoil, but also most assuredly the onerous transformation to a new political reality foisted upon them following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Gvetadze’s artistic development, therefore, takes place with one eye on a dark and defaced past, and the other on a liberating but uncertain future. The result is an oeuvre laden with tension, emotion, symbolism and enigmatic resolution.

From early on in her career, Gvetadze began experimenting with materials and techniques that were off the beaten track. She painted her images straight onto black velvet in garish colors, assembles ceramic tiles into wall-sized mosaics or, fashioned female figures from wood and ceramics. The result was a work that appeared dark and primitive in its look while, at the same time, it radiated pride and perseverance. They are meditative images that have survived the past and which, divested of any trace of gloom or pessimism, have found a new incarnation as objects or monuments. The reality that Gvetadze reveals is the one-off and, at the same time, irreversible confrontation of a human being with a motley assortment of things: other human beings, objects or a story that is told. The artist doesn’t tell this story, nor does she show the encounter. Rather, her compositions show only the image, like a film-still, of the person involved, who saw it happen or heard about it. Everything portrayed is situated between joy and sorrow, between here today and gone tomorrow. She depicts existence in disconsonant scraps and fragments: nostalgic, poetic and documentary. Everything is based on information, not as a transfer per se, but as lost cyber-data alluding to a previous life. Absent of social criticism or political analysis, Gvetadze recycles reminiscences from the past into contemporary, richly colored

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scenes. With a great sense of composition and a predilection for collage and contrast, she effortlessly blends aspects of Klimt, Ernst or Matisse with symbols and blanked-out painted faces from the Soviet era. In March 2012, Gvetadze held an exhibition at Galerie Rupert Pfab in Dusseldorf (23 March 2012–28 April 2012) entitled “Shavi Shotebi” (Black Bread with Grace).3 Shoti bread is the symbol of abundance and divine benevolence but also marks the lifestyle oriented toward epicurean complacency, feasting, prosperity and peace—the features which happen to be the embodiment of quotidian life. The loaves of bread in the painting are black as if they were transformed into the uneatable substance or objects, that no more have to do with the everyday demands. In most of Gvetadze’s paintings, it is not the background that becomes black as was the case with the Russian avant-garde, a cosmology turned into total background devouring the figurativeness of reality. For the Russian avant-garde, black—as in the black in the Suprematist paintings—had the same function as the golden in the Byzantine orthodox iconography and was considered to be the non-color standing for the eternal, the perpetual. Rather for Gvetadze, it is the objects or bodies that are blackened to acquire the purport of the eidetic objects. This stance is not just about dividing the world into the material and the metaphysical, the empirical and the sublime or the spiritual, but rather about taking the matter, the material substance, the thing, the real in all its associative poetic dimension. The notions or meanings are never detached in Gvetadze’s painting from matter, the touchable substance, the movement, the mood, or the way of doing. In the piece called “Mamas,” a short poem of the Georgian poet Anna Kalandadze—the letters and words are clad out of real flower petals and painted over, so that each word contains the blooming matter in the literal sense. But at the same time the blooming force of a flower and a plant becomes the allegory for the poetic force of language. This simple and naïve poem contains the dimension of the universal, the general which the painting transmits despite its unmediated modesty. The poem is a dialogue which translates as follows: Tell me ivy who went along the river Ksani. I don’t know, was thinking about clouds and haven’t heard of anything. Actually, I just asked by the way, not that I meant to talk at all. 3 Shotebi (in plural) in Georgian means black bread, a traditional bread.

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Poetic allegories permeate the paintings of Gvetadze. In the piece called “If it takes forever I will wait for you” the flowers held by an old lady despite their fading and inability to sustain stand for the faithfulness and devotion. This painting as a whole implies various facets of life—its sustenance and volition in the central figure, the consuming vitality of the backstage figure holding out the traditional Georgian dish khachapuri and the reverent resignation in the name of the eternal in the figure of the lady. In the work “When I was young ” the background is covered by an abstract imprint also clad out of flower petals reminiscent of some corporeal substance. Such work can be considered as the allegory for the feminine, or as the dynamic force of anything that is alive. As is well known, allegory was part and parcel of late medieval and early Renaissance painting and the allegorical object on it while appearing naïve, such allegorical objects were used to represent the impossibility of the divine, a form of hieroglyph of longing for the impossible, permeating the picture with grace. In each painting by Gvetadze one finds such an allegorical object, gesture, or movement from which grace, reverence, and gratitude emanate. This series of works have been painted directly onto a black velvet ground. The works were inspired by her annual visits to Georgia, while the artist was still living in Germany. Gvetadze took particular inspiration from her walks, seeing her encounters with different individuals—market traders, fishermen, gardeners, and other inhabitants—as part of the theater of the street. Experimenting with traditional techniques in clay and textile among other materials, Gvetadze’s practice speculates with highly idiosyncratic forms of image-making, representation, and storytelling. Enigmatic in tone and with a certain darkness, they reflect stories of private lives, gestures, and body language. In May 2016, the Tartu Art Museum in Estonia presented a group exhibition “Aesthetics of Repair in Contemporary Georgia,” which conjures the practices of refurbishing and fixing in its multiple dimensions: material, symbolic, personal and social. Repair refers, for instance, to notions of “remont” and “khaltura,” which express a state of permanent unfinishedness, unstable equilibriums and low-key engagements. The works exhibited grasp collective dynamics and personal notions of craftsmanship and care. It included Thea Gvetadze and Sophia Tabatadze, another contemporary Georgian artist then based in Berlin. She presented her project “Pirimze,” based on a research work about a building which

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functioned as the repairing center of all possible things between 1971 and 2007. In more recent years Gvetadze has brought a series of independent drawings into an assemblage of fragments of everyday life. Together, they are a kind of jig-saw puzzle. They are fragments, visual snatches from life. We might imagine the experience of things or objects and spaces around one’s Apartment or house: a toaster, a corner of a room, a couch sofa, a window frame, or on the street walking, seeing objects, shapes, spaces that she then captures using high-registered color and line. But the images are not tied to an object but, loosened of any specific reference or control. A most appropriate instance was observed by Ella Lewis-Williams. Writing in the magazine Elephant, she notes that in 2013, Gvetadze visited the seaside in Batumi, a place where she spent many childhood summers. She quotes the artist: It’s a common sight to see women selling bagels on the beach. It can be gruelling work, up and down all day, under the blazing sun. The bagels cost nothing and the women are selling them all day just to survive. It’s heart-breaking to see.4

But as Lewis-Willams notes, one woman caught the eye of Gvetadze. She was much older than the others, simply dressed but styled “like a star,” the woman sold her bagels with total exuberance and joy. They became firm friends. As quoted by Lewis-Williams, the artist continues: How she represented her tough life—she didn’t show it at all. When I first saw her, her back was to the sea. You couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the sea began—it was as if the horizon was vibrating. Her eyes were the same blue. She was this tiny thing covered in bagels in 45-degree heat. How she stood there. I saw in this moment how I want to learn and grow myself. I cannot ever forget this.5

Then as Lewis-Williams suggests, a particularly significant “khairos” moment happened later in the Georgian mountains. The artist had long had a nagging feeling that her given name didn’t match up with who she

4 Lewis-Williams, Ella. On Thea Gvetadze, Elephant, November 1, 2019. 5 Ibid.

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knew herself to be—or could be—but she couldn’t come up with an alternative. In the mountains of Svaneti, she finally found her moniker. A local boy mentioned that his mother was called Merlani, an unusual, rather exotic name in Georgia. It clicked. “I had the feeling I was fainting,” she tells me. “‘I guess I found my name,’ I told him. Of course, he had no idea what I was talking about! It’s not even about the name—it’s about reaching another level in life. I have the feeling I’ve freed myself from my past, my knowledge, from being anything.”6 From there Gvetadze made a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (M KHA), producing a work about this woman. It was a wall sculpture made up of 410 glimmering blue ceramic tiles, alongside a life-sized bust reminiscent of old religious polychrome sculptures of saints. She named it Becoming Thea Merlani, because she saw in the bagel seller’s grace and stoicism the type of woman she wanted to be herself, she tells me. As soon as it was made, Gvetadze returned to Batumi “to show her my tribute.” The artist waited at the beach for hours. She went back the next day but there was still no sign of her. She asked the other sellers where she might find her friend. They told her the news. The day before—the same day that Gvetadze arrived—the woman had been crossing the road on her way to the beach and had been hit by a car. The driver sped off. The woman died. “A year has gone by and I can still hardly talk about it… I have to digest it and make something out of it, so people know this tiny, beautiful lady. Her attitude and dignity, it’s why I make art.”7

Part Three: Nadia Tsulukidze Another contemporary artist to emerge in this period was Nadia Tsulukidze (1976). Tsulukidze was born in Georgia when still part of the Soviet Union, she studied in Georgia and the West. Having attended Music College in Tbilisi, she then lived and studied dance in Germany. She also took part in many international projects and exhibitions in Turkey, Armenia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, France, and Germany. Thus, enabled her to draw a geographically fragmented line when constructing a personal history by reflecting on her own historical context.

6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.

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Coming back to Georgia in 2004, as a freelance artist she collaborated with visual artists and co-founded the multimedia performance group Khikali Juice. With a background of classical music, contemporary dance and performance, Tsulukidze began to collaborate with Sophia Tabatadze (1977) forming the group “Khinkhali Juice” in 2005.8 Combining visual media, performance, music, and installations, their performances were site-specific, critically and ironically reflecting on newly generated traditions and urban developments, addressing social events or mirroring specific social situations. These include unequal gender relations, religious orthodoxy and upheaval, traditional Georgian toasting traditions or East-West relations.9 In 2010 Tsulukidze finished the Master of Theater studies at DasArts in Amsterdam with the documentary theater performance “Ready for Love or Seven Fragments of Identity.” and was nominated with this work for the Neu/Now Festival 2011 in Tallinn where, between 17 and 20 November, it was presented at the NEU/NOW Festival.10 Her work was an autobiographical piece, based on stories from Tsulukidze’s own life which have been linked with political events. For this performance Tsulukidze employed the strategies of documentary multimedia theater, using videos, photos, dance, and text to construct the fragmented narrative of her own identity. Being born in the Soviet Union and educated in 8 Much of what I relate about Tsulukidze’s work draws upon her portfolio, presented in 2019. 9 In 2007, their projects included: “Let’s drink to love!”, “Progressive Nostalgia,” Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci, Prato (IT.); “Maiden – Divorced – Spinster,” in collaboration with “Women’s Fund in Georgia,” National Library, Tbilisi; “Alterative travel Guide through Georgia,” Theatre festival “Babel,” Amsterdam (NL). In 2006, their projects included: “Alternative Guide to Georgia and Caucasus” Caucasus Biennale, Tbilisi, October; “Caucasus Game” Festival Est-Ouest, Die, France, September; “Caucasus Game” Festival Est-Ouest, Die, (France), September; “I was silent” ACCEA (Armenian Centre for Contemporary Experimental Art) Yerevan, August; “All about Lies” Apartment projects, Istanbul, August; “Roof performance,” Roof in Tbilisi urban neighborhood, Tbilisi, June; “What do Georgian women do in Istanbul,” Apartment projects, Istanbul, April 2; “Kilebi da Kalebi,” NAC (National Art Centre), Tbilisi, March. 10 The performance was presented at De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam (NL), the

Neu/Now Festival in Tallinn (EST), the liya University Theater in Tbilisi (GE), KSAK – Centre for Contemporary Art in Chisinau (MD) and the Chelsea Theatre in London05 (UK). The Talinn Festival provided an innovative platform for the most exciting and creative NEU artistic talent NOW emerging from higher arts education institutions and universities across Europe and beyond.

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the West allows Nadia Tsulukize to draw a geographically fragmented line. Living in diverse cultural surroundings, being shaped by different cultural values she sees herself as a cultural product “made in East/West.” Using videos, photos, dance, and text she constructs the fragmented narrative of her identity. Together, it interrogates the relations between those three roles in the process of creating an identity as a fluid and fragmented body. On stage, the piece is a collage of “Guruli Marseillaise,” soup bubbles, the 1980 Olympics, “Samaia,” Grandpa Brezjnev, love letters and politics. The same year she worked as an artistic assistant with Edit Kaldor (The Work) and Jochen Stechmann (The Critical Piece). Tsulukidze’s theatrical performances try to deconstruct the “general illusoriness” of the EastWest division of the world. For instance, in her multimedia-theatrical performance “Me and Stalin” (2013), the artist first interprets her family story under the period of repression under Stalin. Then, the backdrop of the Stalin period drama of her family conceptualizes over the actual politically neoliberal governance, along with marketing tools of Google. In the following year she joined Moving Theatre (lead partner, a UK production company) in collaboration with Radio Romania International (International broadcaster), Theatre Ephemeride (French theater), Radio and Association Green Wave (Georgian NGO and Radio organization) and the Tbilisi VasoAbashidze Music and Drama State Theatre (Georgian theater) to produce Carmen: The State of Exception. Created by Tsulukidze, State of Exception was a working process in an apartment during which discussions became a public performance with the interaction of the audience, making each participant to a performer. The audience could follow the performance live in Internet and influence the discussions through a forum published on the same website. By the end of two working days participants of the workshop presented their works for the live audience. As a performance—reality show—workshop, Carmen was a European intercultural dialogue; inspired by a Pushkin poem, the story of a Spanish gypsy, written as a novella in French. Many of the story’s key themes are central to the question of what it is to be European. Many countries believe that Carmen is in some special sense “theirs.” And so in retelling this story through a partnership, which represents “old” and “new” Europe, we can produce a new adaptation, which brings these trans-European themes alive. The project was a building on the exploration and the achievements of the work of each partner. In the same year of 2013, Tsulukidze presented a lecture performance, Stalin as an Artist at the BijlmAir residency in Amsterdam (NL), then

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at The Belluard Festival in Fribourg (CH) and The Street Academy in Tbilisi. The work was based on the research carried out for the Me & Stalin performance. As she notes, “It is an attempt to analyze Stalinism, as a complex social construction by showing dramaturgical narratives of manipulation. The audience could pick up one of the printed photos to propose a starting point for a non-linear narrative.”11 In the following year she presented a lecture performance On Crisis at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. As an interactive lecture performance, it was constructed with the printed images and participation of the audience. Based on a cicular, “female” narrative as a contrast to a linear, “male” one it allows seeing the crises as part of a continuous process, as it is not directed toward a “catharsis” like in a linear development. Crises seen within a circular narrative becomes a state of mind that is challenging our comfort and norms of behavior. By 2015 her work began to open up more broadly with a performance Happy 8th of March presented at The Atoneli Theatre in Tbilisi. With the support of the Women Fund in Georgia, the performance was a poetic narrative about the social construction of the Woman as the “other.” Inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s Book The Second Sex it addressed the absurdity of male domination, female sexuality, violence, and humor as a tool of resistance through the use of dance, images, video, and text. Based on personal anecdotes, Tsulukidze created a landscape of fragmented impressions, ranging from intimacy to ridiculous outrage. In the same year she presented I am Medea (2015), as co-author/performance with Jochen Stechmann and the support of The Goethe Institute, Tbilisi, at the Contemporary Art Space in Batumi. In their research Tsulukidze and Stechmann focus on the function of such states of crisis as tools for re-integration. Following their own interpretation of Medea, they investigate the self, as a product of pain and alienation and an experience of total otherness from family, from community, and, paradoxically, even from the self itself. As Tsulukidze relates, Peter Toohey, in his book “Melancholy, Love and Time,” describes Medea’s state of mind, as a manic-depressive one caused by lovesickness. She has lost the ability to experience herself as an entity separated from the world around, and her crisis is an attempt to restore the integrity of herself.

11 Nadia Tsulukidze, Artist’s portfolio, 2010–2019.

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In 2016, Tsulukidze presented Who is this I that can say I? at the Tbilisi State Silk Museum together with the students from the Contemporary Centre of Art. The project was realized in the frame of the State Silk Museum’s invitation to participate in their project “Art Intervention.”12 As Tsulukidze noted her work was a reformulation of “Knowing thyself”—an aphorism written at the Apollo temple in Delphi that expresses our ancient desire to explore ourselves. It is an infinite project the end product of which will always remain unknown, where the process itself becomes a subject of exploration. Within this frame students were asked to create a work based on reflection of their own working process and one element from the Silk Museum transforming it into a place of exploration, study, observation, critical thinking, contemplation, and dialogue. In this set up the Museum functions as “the other”—a mirror that reflects a process of identity construction. As a result we have a pixilated image of the Museum, constructed from different perspectives of time and space. In 2017, Tsulukidze made Excerpts From a Diary, a video and photo Installation (duration: Video I—07:27, Video II—02:40, Video III— 06:30). It was presented at The Feminist Festival in Kutaisi and the exhibition “Freedom not (yet) Again,” organized by Armenian Queer group in Yerevan. Tacit behind the work is the status of the diary as a literary genre. Is it mean for a public eye, if not, who does it address? Tsulukidze wrote: I see the diary as a form of letter- writing to oneself. The self is a narrator and the reader. The narrator writes about the self who describes the world to the self, who is the reader. It is a situation of the mirror where the self observes itself from different perspectives. Photo and video diary is an autobiographical way of inscribing yourself in the history. Referring to the current culture of selfies in the social media, it questions the boundaries

12 The project “Art Intervention” was realized within the frame of the “Regional Art and Culture Project in the South Caucasus,” which was managed by the Culture and Management Lab with the financial support of the Swiss Cooperation Office for the South Caucasus (SCO). The publication was developed and printed as part of the project “Informal educational Program in Arts for socially vulnerable and disabled young people” supported by the Institute for International Cooperation of the German Adult Education Association (DVV International) Georgia Office. Its conceptual frame was a ‘Choreography of thinking’ that initiated a dialogue between students of CCA, the Silk Museum and the audience.

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of private and public, performativity of the self and body, as a product of social construction.13

In 2018, Tsulukidze presented Big Bang Backwards, a lecture performance and video installation of 50 minutes at The Archive of the GDR Opposition/Robert-Havemann-Geselschaft e.V. It was a collaboration between the Archive and District Berlin. Tsulukidze started to work with the archival material of Freya Klier—an actress, theater director, author, and documentary filmmaker. This led her to create her own diary and develop a conversation with Klier in my mind, calling her an invented ghost who guided her narrative and lecture.14 She notes: My starting point for this work was creation of a fictional video diary based on documentary materials…I was interested to experiment with the format of the fictional diary that would allow me to place the main character as a subject of his own narrative. I believe that this perspective is challenging existing concept of writing the history as an objective truth and proposes subjective interpretations and view points. A diary, as a format if not meant for the public eye, whom does it address? I see the diary as a form of letterwriting to oneself. The self is a narrator and the reader. It is a situation of the mirror where the self performs and constructs itself in relation to the other, who is an integral part of the self.15

By 2019, Tsulukidze had produced a photo exhibition and artist’s book called I decided not to talk about Georgia anymore that was presented at Gallery Warehouse in Tbilisi. It was a continuation of her earlier “Excerpts from a Diary,” in which she explores a format of a diary, as a transition space between private and public. A diary, as a format if not meant for a public eye, whom does it address? I see the diary as a form of letter- writing to oneself. The self is a narrator and the reader. The narrator writes about the self who describes the world to the self, who is the reader. It is a situation of the mirror where the self observes itself from different perspectives. Photo diary is an autobiographical way of inscribing yourself in the history. Referring to the current culture of selfies in the social media, it questions the boundaries of private 13 Nadia Tsulukidze, Artist’s portfolio, 2010–2019. 14 Nadia Tsulukidze, Artist’s portfolio, 2010–2019. 15 Ibid.

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and public, performativity of the self and body, as a product of social construction.16

Part Four The work of Sophia Tabatadze, Tsulukidze’s early collaborator and friend, elucidates a distinct form of social engagement and response. She had studied and completed courses at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands between 1997 and 2002 to subsequently live and work in Berlin. Predominantly residing outside of Georgia, she has shown her work internationally, participated in various Museum shows in Europe and represented Georgia in the Venice Biennale and participated in the Istanbul Biennale in 2007. In Tabatadze’s early works, she referred to subjective models of change and adaptation. An early work Wallpaper (2002), her graduation piece from the Academy of Arts in Amsterdam, consisted of several dozen rolls of wallpaper which the artist had printed with a pattern of her own design. It showed two sinuous and stylised verticals running in alternation, one a series of hearts and aortas, connected by an undulating rivulet of blood, the other a complete urinary system, composed of kidneys, bladder, and their interconnecting tubes. The wallpaper was pasted on the exposed interior wall of a half-demolished house, and left slowly to decay beneath the action of the elements. The artist says that the origins of this work lay in the wallpapered houses she had visited as a child in her native Georgia, and the impression she had got in them of something being hidden behind the façade of domestic propriety they presented. She used her wallpaper to expose what she felt was concealed: the work was, in her words, a way of looking inside herself. For Tabatadze, introspection meant a literal examination of the physical interior of the body, the bloody mess of organs that we all carry around inside us and which is the guarantor of our mortality. Two themes emerge in this piece which will recur throughout her subsequent work. One is the equation of the domestic space with the space of the body, and the conception of the home itself as a kind of body; the other is the urge to expose what is hidden. For Tabatadze the two are closely interrelated. Her work looks for truths in the built spaces of her environment, and the truths it finds there are always visceral. That truth, 16 Nadia Tsulukidze, Artist’s portfolio, 2010–2019.

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for her, should always be somehow hidden within the material fabric of the lived space is perhaps not so surprising in former citizen of the Soviet republic of Georgia. The art of the late Soviet period is often permeated by a sense of concealed immanence, of something unimaginable about to break through the fabric of everyday reality. To characterize this “something” as specifically visceral, however, is perhaps an insight peculiar to Tabatadze’s generation, especially in a country like Georgia. The formative years of these artists witnessed the process of the rise to power of formerly “underground” movements of national independence. Georgians had learnt what this process meant: not the arrival of a utopian modernity but, the return of a familiar repressed—the outbreak of bloody ethnic conflicts, and the precipitous immisersation of the vast majority of the population. Yet there is another moment to the visceral besides the violent and unreasoned, and that is as a seat of identity and creativity, it is as such that it manifests itself in Tabatadze’s next piece De Doorzonwoning (2003). If to expose the hidden was a more or less straightforward business when dealing with her memories of Georgia, it was less so when confronting her immediate environment. In the Netherlands, where the liberal democratic ideal of “transparency” exercised a strong influence over the built environment, the society’s repressed was made that much more difficult to characterize. This became the subject of De Doorzonwoning, literally the “through-lit apartment,” made as the result of a nine-month residency in Vlaardingen. The artist was given an empty apartment to move into, and over the following months converted it, as she says, “to her liking.” Tabatadze noticed that the apartment both embodied not only the ideal of transparency, but also its attendant inconsistencies and hypocrisies as she found them in Dutch society. While its layout appeared to make everything open to view, in reality, she found, it subtly controlled and directed the viewer’s gaze. Nothing ultimately was allowed to appear as itself; everything inside it became in a sense an exhibit for the benefit of visitors. She responded by building an installation that would “expose” the apartment’s “mechanism.” This involved making architectural additions that overtly manipulated the viewer’s gaze. Using a system of reflecting mirrors, she constructed a periscope running from one end of the living space to the other: it ensured that one could literally look through the apartment without seeing anything of its interior. Elsewhere she constructed out of wood and fabric a room within a room, a confined,

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cosy space which she decided to make her bedroom. She thereby revived, within the archetypal “machine for living in,” the Soviet tradition of ad hoc and idiosyncratic home improvement. These additions also recalled the organs of the body. The room within a room was evidently a kind of womb; while the periscope served as a kind of giant artificial gut which swallowed the viewer’s gaze at one end and effectively excreted it through a window at the other. Both insisted upon the truth of the home as an organic space, a truth suppressed by its reconfiguration as a machine. When Tabatadze visited Georgia after six years living abroad and found herself confronted by a country that had changed almost beyond recognition. House on Wheels (2003) was her reaction to this, recreating an imaginary home—a chair on wheels containing only the basic objects necessary for living. This sense of general illusoriness grew stronger as I noticed how fast things were changing in this country and how there was absolutely no feeling of continuity to anything happening here. Everything was on wheels, everything could be folded down and packed away.17

While in Holland a sense of social alienation had produced the need to adapt her material environment to her requirements, here she felt the opposite: the need to adapt herself to the society in which she found herself. The house on wheels was conceived as a structure that could function both as a dwelling and a market stall. Inhabiting it meant making oneself vulnerable and exposed. This was Tabatadze’s way of trying to identify with her native country, where life was precarious and people lived from day to day. At the end of the project she abandoned her work in the market place, where it was slowly dismantled by traders using the parts to construct stalls of their own. Tabatadze’s next work, What We Thought Was a Wall Turned Out to be a Curtain (2004), followed a visit to Eastern Europe with a group of Dutch architects. Shocked by the prejudices that she encountered among her companions, she set out to make a piece dealing with perceived differences between east and west. Her aim was to represent the political and ideological divisions that had, at least partly, disappeared in fact but continued to exist in people’s minds. It is this, perhaps, that lies behind the peculiarity of the title, which makes one want to object that the “wall” 17 Sophia Tabatadze, website.

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in question only became a “curtain” later, and was real enough while it existed. Tabatadze is concerned here not with its historical existence but its persistence within the subconscious—a region that, notoriously, lies outside time. The starting point was the Soviet institutional space. The artist painted her installation with the two-color scheme characteristic of such buildings. The public institution is, of course, a familiar subject in post-Soviet art; one need only to think of installations made between the 1970s and 1990s by Nakhova or Kabakov (discussed in an earlier chapter). But instead of expressing, as they do, a sort of bathetic nostalgia for a failed utopia, Tabatadze’s space—constructed out of curtained-off areas and hidden “rooms”—radiated an aura of ghostly irreality, in which one’s perception of solidity and insubstantiality, depth and depthlessness were consistently confused. The piece seemed to aim at asking of how we can grasp the disappearance of the divisions of the Cold War with minds that have themselves been formed by those divisions, and as such was drawn inevitably toward paradox—toward investigating of how the nonexistent can become tangible, and how objects, and even space itself, can both exist and not exist at the same time. The stark binary of the color scheme served to underline this: the white and green walls extended into white and green curtains, then half-curtains, then a blank space in which only the dividing line between the two colors, represented by a rope cordon, lived on in a kind of spectral redundancy. The wall having disappeared, its absence survived, radiating a peculiar mystery and impenetrability. She wrote of her work: What we thought was a wall turned out to be a curtain. And the converse was also true: the wall disappeared but a stronger wall remained, the one that exists in our minds – a transparent veil you can’t see through, the wall that turns into a curtain, the curtain that is sewn shut on both sides. Among the questions I asked myself in this piece were, how much can one really see of the other side, and how much of this is what one wants to see? Can I face my image of the other side being destroyed, or do I think I can build my new home anywhere I start working and create things around me…This work deals with the human body placed in new surroundings, and the relation of human beings to their lived space…18

18 Sophia Tabatadze website.

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Tabatadze works often respond to a condition of collective amnesia and a generational leap caused in Georgia by rapid changes in the country’s political situation and its social and urban development. She has described Georgia as a country “going through its teenage period, where the objects of its love and passion change drastically each year.” In her work Much More, a newspaper made in 2006, she recorded what were for her the most recent visible changes. “A large number of shops and new businesses open each year, only to give way to other business the year after. For example, 2003 was the year of casinos, 2004 of fashionable supermarkets, and 2005 of perfume shops. There have also been years of pharmacy stores, exchange points, beauty salons, petrol stations, restaurants and so on.” Tabatadze’s installation Humancon Undercon (2007) (decoded title: human condition under construction), concluded a series of works by the artist dealing with the relationship between the body, the home, and personal identity. Subsequently Tabatadze represented Georgia at the Venice biennale in the same year of 2007 with the work. Comprised of a series of black and white photographs of architectural facades printed on fabric, the texture and aesthetic has been enriched and made more personal and individual with hand stitched embroidery and miniature sculpted landscapes that show fragments of architecture and human traces in an urban environment that has, in fact, become thoroughly inhuman due to large and rough manmade landscapes of half destroyed or not yet fully completed buildings.19 The work shows the influence of her engagement with performance, in that it introduces, for the first time, an element of fictional narrative. The artist imagines the construction of an apartment block in her native Tbilisi, whose story embodies the corrupt and chaotic nature of Georgia’s slow economic recovery: its steel skeleton, divided into units and corruptly sold off while still under construction, is built up piecemeal by its new owners. This metaphor for the privatization of the country’s centralized economy is personalized by the introduction of 19 In 2007 Tabatadze presented Georgia in the 52nd Venice Biennale and in the same year she participated in the 10th International Istanbul Biennal, Turkey. She has had solo exhibitions at Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam; Lambert Tegenbosch Gallery, Heusden; Josine Bokhoven Gallery, Amsterdam and in Old Gallery, Tbilisi. Her participation in group exhibitions includes those at Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art, Prato, Italy; Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam and National Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia. In 2008 Tabatadze was an artist in residence at the International Studio Program at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien.

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fictional characters. Tabatadze has imagined how the new inhabitants will procure their own building materials and arrange their own apartments. One such inhabitant has even, in an act of absurd foresight, installed his own coffin. The gesture suggests a link between death and the acquisition of the trappings of social respectability. But it also acknowledges that to prepare to die in particular place is also to prepare to live there, to make it one’s home. In so far as Tabatadze’s imagined characters often turn out to be parodic selfportraits, we may take this to suggest a degree of reconciliation with her native country and a determination to make her life there. It is for this reason, perhaps, that she sees this work as concluding a cycle that began with Wallpaper. For while her first work was concerned with bringing the inside out, with exposing the hidden, Humancon Undercon deals with bringing the outside in, with coming to terms what she finds around her—as well as recognizing that it had always been part of her. Tabatadze has described her method of working as drawing on her environment and processing it through her body—a method of digestion and assimilation. By the same token, the ideal fate she envisages for her work is that it be assimilated back into the environment that gave rise to it, in satisfyingly circular processes of decay and dissolution. Such processes ground their maker’s place within that environment, by making her a component of its cycles of creation and destruction. In this latest work, the artist recognizes that she herself is subject to these processes. In so doing, it proposes for her both an identity and a home.20

20 Tabatadze’s practice also involves the organization of collaborative group projects between Georgian and international artists. In an interview with Yuriy Kruchak, the Georgian curator Nini Palavandishvili noted that the idea of GeoAir came from Sophia Tabatadze. It is an independent art initiative that has operated since 2003 on, and officially registered as a non-governmental organization in 2007. It became one of the very few art residences in Georgia. Palavandishvili notes further: “I came back to Georgia from Germany in 2004. I was a curating a project by Goethe-Institute, where Sophia Tabatadze was also participating. Gradually we started to work in collaboration, some other people joined who shared our ideas and views. This is a time when Archidrome, Contemporary Art Archive was born. Archidrome includes an archive, library discussion platform, which contains diverse material (publications, periodicals, digital media) about contemporary art and culture in Georgia, the Caucasus region, as well as international theories and tendencies. See Yuriy Kruchak interview with Data Chigholashvili and Nini Palavandishvili, Bialystok, Poland. August 30, 2014 and ‘Art as Anthropology: Cooking Together’ in Partisan, Magazine of Contemporary Belarusian Culture, 20 July 2015.

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In 2015, Tabatadze made a film Pirimze (38.40 min.), as director with GEOAir with a premiere screening in April 2015 at the festival “Visions du Reel” in Nyon, Switzerland. The story of Pirimze is told by the building itself. It touches upon the 1970s, when the luxuriously designed edifice of Pirimze served as an exemplary building; how it made an incredible amount of money in the 1980s and then in the 1990s when it decayed and operated in an improvised and shady way. For decades, the central Pirimze building served anyone with anything broken: shoes, clothes, watches, jewellery, electronic devices, etc. After the independence of Georgia, just as the Soviet Union collapsed and broke up into different countries, Pirimze “exploded” and smaller workshops with identical name sprung up in the surrounding neighborhood, where the “debris fell.” Tabatadze and her team visited these workshops and observed the fascinating skills performed by craftsmen who used to work in there. They also visited the newly renovated business center “Pirimze Plaza,” which replaced Pirimze and question the need and motives of this transformation. As with the project Humancon Undercon (2007) that investigated ties between collective amnesia and layered cityscapes in post-socialist Georgia, Pirimze functions as an altar to Eastern European DIY culture or “macgyversim,” after the protagonist of a popular American TV series, MacGyver, who solves complex problems by inventing things out of everyday objects. However, as Svetlana Boym suggests in her book The Future of Nostalgia, these kinds of replicas of demolished places of the Soviet era are not only about longing or nostalgia, but also about an investigation into the “sideshows of modernity,” into different paths that history could have taken.21 Eastern Europe experienced its own collapse capitalism, involving businesses that quickly emerged in the newly opened markets after the fall of the Iron Curtain and were willing to sell anything that promised the desired Western lifestyle. In the following year of 2016, it became the central piece of the exhibition Aesthetics of Repair in Contemporary Georgia, curated by Marika Agu and Francisco Martínez for the Tartu Kunstimuuseum, Estonia. Tabatadze presented her documentary film along with a book and an installation—a replica of the handworker’s booth in Pirimze with the original tools and accessories.

21 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2001, pp. XVI– XVII.

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Part 5 Tamuna Chabashvili (1978) is a visual artist whose practice often consists of both individual and collaborative projects. After graduating from the Jacob Nikoladze Art School in Tbilisi, she studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. She then obtained her BA in Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. In 2003, Chabashvili co-founded, together with Adi Hollander (Belgium 1976) an artists’ initiative “Public Space with a Roof” (PSWAR). Functioning as an artist’s run project space until 2007, it continued as an artist initiative. Research-based PSWAR addressed questions central to current art production, blurring the borders between various roles artists are assumed to take today: artist-as-activist, artistas-producer, or artist-as-curator. Developing new exhibition formats and using artworks of others as ready-mades, the essential part of each project was installation. This functioned as a framework for each project, as well as serve as an open laboratory and public space. As such, PSWAR demonstrated the possibility for collaboration and collective action. This enabled the creation of platforms for intimate and individual experience of artworks, such as the possibility for sensory activation of the spectators through changing the parameters of the space. Soon after its founding, they conceived PSWAR as a platform and agency for bringing different voices together, formulating collective questions and sharing our working process with the public. In this way, PSWAR could become a specific extension of their own artistic practice, our open studio.22 During the months May/June/July 2005 PSWAR dedicated its program to issues of identity and migration. Two exhibition projects and a series of screenings and lectures approached this theme from different angles They also made available some texts, including The Freedom of the Migrant ’ by Vilem Flusser; “Regarding the Pain of Others ” by Susan Sontag on and Judith Butler’s “Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative.” In 2007 Chabashvili and Adi Hollander together with the theoretician Vesna Madzoski, chose to close their project space, and allow themselves to work in other places, investigate other stories outside of Amsterdam and the Netherlands. They wrote at the time: Pixels of Reality: What do you Know, What do You See? in Amsterdam (2006) 22 Correspondence with Tamuna Chabashvili, 25. July 2020.

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In the last few decades, the digitalized image has become our main tool to perceive reality. When zoomed in on this image, it reveals its deceptive and fragmented nature – tiny squares in different colors – pixels of our reality. Hence, our perception of the surrounding world and current processes is based on the false uniformity and unity of a highly fragmented and complex entity. The aim of our project was to zoom into this image and reveal its structure, so as to show the diversity and artificiality of such a mediated perception of the world. Pixels of Reality was the starting phase of a project with which we wanted to open-up the discussion about the position of artists’ interventions in stimulating future social and political change. By inviting various artists to contribute their works for our cubic structure, we re-examined the concepts ‘politics’ and ‘art’ in the overly used term ‘political art’, as well as the role of media in turning the aesthetics of our senses into anaesthetics.23

PSWAR’s final project was Beauty Unrealized: spider webs of personal universes seeking a form which was presented in Amsterdam between 2006 and 2007.24 The project consisted of 6 parts presented between January and April 2007. Each artist could present their works and performances as a reaction to the question they posed with the installation they had created. Hence six months of collaborative effort and storytelling emerged within one elaborate artwork. All the artists who participated in the history of PSWAR were invited to be a part of its closure. Their definition of beauty was the idea of sharing knowledge. The wooden bookshelves of the library were packed with personal memorabilia—books, articles, music CDs, and more—that had inspired several contributors. It hosted a series of lectures and public debates on the sidelines and visitors were free to browse and research. The library only remained open for six months, as it was in fact, an art installation at a studio in Amsterdam. As a framework for the whole project, we created a special library in which visitors can enter and get lost in the world of thoughts, ideas, questions, possibilities, and puzzles. For this library, we invited numerous individuals (artists, filmmakers, writers, theoreticians, etc.) to submit items that have

23 See website: pswar.org/projects/pixelofreality-what-do-you-know-what-do-you-see. 24 In 2007, PSWAR won a honour prize by the city of Amsterdam and AFK foundation,

and was nominated for the AICA prize. In 2013 PSWAR was nominated for the Prix de Rome.

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significantly influenced them and their work. Inspired by Aby Warburg, this library is “a collection of questions” rather than “a repository of books…involving not objects but the tension, analogies, contrasts, or contradictions among them.” “Its inside will be used to host six separate exhibitions where the invited artists will present their past works, works in progress, or works produced especially for this project.25

When it was time to dismantle the library, the trio gave up their own art space for travel and work experience in galleries around the world. It was research that brought Chabashvili and Hollander to Calcutta, having gone to the same art school in Amsterdam and been a team since 2003. Sharing these personal creative journeys and plans in books, publications, and handouts, the process of creating art was for each of them as important as the final production. Asked about Calcutta, Chabashvili said the city would inspire a less elaborate project. “Calcutta has so many layers and colours that we would go minimalist, if we were ever to showcase here.” “We always research for the story, cultural flavor and background of a space before presenting our work. The installations should blend with the place,” added Hollander. It is the history of the textile industry, mud architecture and terracotta art that have inspired them in Bengal. “There is so much to learn from,” they chorused.26

Their project for Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland, Passage Through (The Unfinished Monument) was cancelled a few weeks before the launch in 2007, leaving them frustrated and demoralized. The news came as a surprise, nullifying months of work and raising questions regarding the disempowered position of artists today. As a way of confronting this trauma, the idea of creating a book was conceived and, they published their journey in a book that was launched at the Salon für Kunstbuch, Vienna, Austria.27 For the book, they created a model of the essential part of the original project conceived as an installation of three 25 See webpage: pswar.org.projects/beauty-unrealized-spider-webs-of-personal-universesseeking-a-form. 26 Ibid. 27 The book was made possible by individual donations and support of the Mondrian Foundation; Materiaalfonds; AAP Lab, Amsterdam; Model & Objekt, Rotterdam. It was designed and published by Roma Publications Netherlands.

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intersecting Möbius strips “circling” around the gallery and functioning as a platform for the works of other artists. They then photographed it with a pinhole camera, resulting in a series of photographs giving the structure a form and “life” they had not anticipated. The book includes 17 series of photographs, each of them offering a different imaginary walk through the structure, accompanied by texts by various thinkers who inspired them while working on the project. After they have closed their own project space, they started research into questions of architecture and the narrative of exhibition making, as well as definitions of authorship. The project Endless Installation: A Ghost Story for Adults in 2009 presented a spatial confrontation between the works of three figures who have become particularly inspirational for this research: Frederick Kiesler, Aby Warburg, and Meir Agassi. Endless Installation created a non-linear dialogue with exhibition visitors unfolding around the work of these remarkable individuals, becoming a fictional meeting point for their individual universes. This fictional montage allowed for the juncture of their ideas together as well as offering new readings on their individual practices. They understood well that one of the principal guiding ideas when building installations is the specificity of the institutional and architectural context of the space in which their projects took place. For Endless Installation, they created different installations in the four main exhibition spaces at SMART project space in Amsterdam. The Inverted City was a commissioned work for the exhibition “ERRE: Variations Labyrinthiques” at the Centre Pompidou, Metz France in 2011/2012. Via the model of a labyrinth, this group show tackled the notions of straying, loss, and wandering as well as their representations in contemporary art. The work reflected the following three main aspects of the exhibition: the concept of labyrinth, the architecture of exhibition, and the artists presented. They defined labyrinth as a metaphor for both life and death, feelings of getting lost and finding one’s way, play and horror. This duality complicated their ability to formulate one single definition, choosing instead to recreate the labyrinth as a physical experience. Inspired by Italo Calvino, we created a structure functioning as a distorted mirror image. Their position became one in a shadow universe that exists only as a reflection of the exhibition structure. Our main questions became: What are the ways in which we can detect the cracks in this labyrinth, and what do we see once we look through them?

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As an individual artist, Chabashvili’s practice revolves around the topic of the archive and traces. Mapping private stories, memories, and questions into visual and tactile narratives, it is inspired by traditional artifacts and working methods based on utility objects that are deeply rooted in the local cultural contexts (from arts and crafts). She modifies them to offer new narratives that can challenge adopted positions on collective and personal level. In 2014, Chabashvili developed a research project and art installation Supra of Her Own. Based on the anthropological research made by Agnieszka Dudrak, she played with the idea and practice of “Supra” (a ceremonial feast), in order to represent gender-based violence in Georgia. In collaboration with Dudrak, it was produced together with the Georgian NGO Anti-Violence Network of Georgia, and the Independent Group of Domestic Violence Survivors (Do You Hear the Woman’s Voice?!). They conducted a research project concerning the violence against women in Georgia and the invisibility of women’s painful experiences and novel ways of making these public. Every day, I met with women who were beaten, raped, married by force, homeless, whose children could not be healed, and who worked endless days. I talked with them and recorded interviews in order to collect data for my PhD in anthropology. But one day something changed in me. “What am I doing? What is it all for?” I started asking myself. I felt that I could no longer collect these stories as one gathers mushrooms after the autumn rain. Suddenly I understood that I wanted everybody around me, here and now, to listen to these voices and feel as disturbed as I was. I wanted all of them—and especially people with perfect make-up sitting in restaurants, and slowly drinking their Martinis in the rhythm of their bright futures—to listen to these stories…28

The exhibition did not aim to create an exhaustive list of the different types of gender-based violence against heterosexual women, but encouraged women to speak about and interpret these experiences. The exhibition was hosted by Nectar Gallery in Tbilisi (June–July 2014), Contemporary Art Space in Batumi (18–30 October 2014), and “NEW-ნადიმი 2014” in Telavi (3–4 November 2014). The selection from this work was subsequently shown at the Kiev Biennale, The School of Kiev, and

28 Agnieszka Dudrak, Supra of Her Own website: Supraofherown.wordpress.com.

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in the parallel program of the 14th Istanbul Biennale, Manifest Thought Form—A Route of Evanescence at Kuad Gallery in Istanbul in 2015. In 2015, Chabashvili made A Bundle within the framework of the exhibition project Tbilisi InSights. The publication “city (un) achieved” was produced by Onomatopee in Eindhoven (Netherlands). Chabashvili’s work consisted of a map embroidered on textile (100 × 100 cm.) and series of 32 drawings, (each 21 × 29 cm.) The square piece of map is thought as a bundle, a piece of cloth used to wrap one’s belongings in the course of a journey. The numbers and the words embroidered on it correspond to the street numbers on the map. Each drawing locates a story by linking numbers to each other. Chabashvili wrote: A Bundle is a journey, the meditation of its kind, to the city of my childhood tracing the everyday memories of the neighborhood where I grew up. With me I am loosing all the physical evidences connected to my childhood experiences in that neighborhood – people, with whom I shared the experience of certain places, have disappeared; the changes in the city are unbelievably fast, new buildings are replacing the old ones; The city that shaped me and marked me as a young girl has its traces in me. I embody the city. It exists within me. My body is an archive, a carrier of my lived experiences accumulated in time. Through the depiction of my body-mindscape I reconstruct my emotions, memories and questions, thus I reconstruct the city. Talking about the city with out them would have been impossible.’29

Chabashvili was also developing during this period “Blue Tablecloth” with a focus on the existing gap between “tradition” and “everyday life.” The artist had learnt that the patterns on the Blue Tablecloth tell old stories, attributes to the rituals active in the past. At present the patterns carry a decorative function while also, endlessly retelling old narratives. The work focuses on the lives of women with all their daily duties and uses collection of photographs of women conducting daily activities and rituals as its source. She had read Elizabeth W.Barber who wrote: Cloth, like clothing, provided a fine place for social messages. Patterned cloth in particular is infinitely variable and, like language, can encode arbitrarily any message whatever. What did ancient people try to accomplish when they deliberately made cloth bear meaning?…It can be used to mark 29 Website: the school of kyiv.org.participants/281/tamar-chabashvili.

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or announce information,…to record events and other data,…to invoke “magic.”30

The artist collected such images from Internet, tracing the silhouettes of the women’s bodies and abstracting them from their original context. Turning them into signs (patterns) engraved individually on the woodblock. The woodblock stamps as abstracted forms outline the layer that I want to communicate. It speaks about social daily problems of those women, which remains mostly underrepresented or unnoticed.

For me they represent conventional socio-cultural patterns that tend to influence and often violate our lives. In order to question this role of the patterns, I deconstruct the traditional form of the Blue Tablecloth to its components (fabric, patterns, colors). By doing so, my attempt is to reintegrate the function and the technique charged with new content into our present social context. 31

If in traditional Blue Tablecloth the attention goes to the larger narrative, in my work I focus on individual patterns and create enough space for each of them to tell their own story. By means of woodblock printing technique I construct a nonlinear narrative in the form of a book to bring all those stories together.32

Chabashvili’s exhibition in 2016, The Book of Patterns, at the State Silk Museum in Tbilisi focused on the representation of “everyday life” of women, who remain mostly unnoticed. The Book of Patterns is a hand printed textile sample book taking its reference from the traditional Georgian Blue Tablecloth. By tracing the daily activities of the women mostly laboring on the street, the work focuses on the existing gap between the “everyday life” and “tradition,” and draws the parallel between the traditional tablecloth decoration and the social-cultural patterns that tend to influence and often violate women’s lives in Georgia. 30 Elizabeth W. Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years—Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1994. 31 Website: supraofherown.wordpress.com/whats-new/. 32 Ibid.

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Attributed to the old rituals the set of organically inscribed patterns on the Blue Tablecloth endlessly retell abstract stories distant from our present living conditions. Suggesting new patterns that are based on the daily lives of the women who mostly remain underrepresented or unnoticed, the work reintegrates the traditional techniques of pattern production and its functions into our present social context. The outlines were based on the existing photographs that have been circulating in local social media and are engraved one by one on the woodblocks as silhouettes. The woodblock printing was the original technique used for producing the Blue Tablecloth for different celebrations. If in traditional Blue Tablecloth the attention goes to the larger narrative, in my work I focus on individual patterns and create enough space for each of them to tell their own story. By means of woodblock printing technique I construct a nonlinear narrative in the form of a book to bring all those stories together.33 In 2017, Chabashvili held a solo exhibition: The Fabric of the Everyday Life at Moving Gallery by Project ArtBeat in Tskaltubo (West Central Georgia) developed for the Tskaltubo Art Festival held in Tskaltubo. Putting emphasis on the process of making the hidden content public, the elements in this exhibition: a tablecloth, a bundle, and a pattern book unfold the women’s painful experiences that mostly remain hidden or unnoticed in everyday life. The works were displayed on the wooden tables from the local families, specially collected for this occasion. All those works are based on textile and take their reference from the utility objects from local crafts. By looking at the complexities of everyday life as patterns, my attempt is to speak about the violence of the daily routine dictated by the social or cultural norms. Each and every work is an attempt to offer the space for the unheard voice. Traditionally the tablecloth is decorated by women and kept within families for decades despite stains and mends they accumulate. These family treasures, like diaries, hold personal memories the traces of which remain invisible. Associated with collective space, the tablecloth can make public the issues that are kept silent. A bundle, a rectangular piece of cloth, is connected to mobility and has been an essential item to carry and store personal belongings, during

33 Op., cit. website: supraofherown.

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one’s journey or relocation. As a devoted companion to the holder it represents an archive of one’s lived experiences.34 In 2018 Chabashvili made A Memory Foam for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennale for which her starting point was an image of the building in front of her house in Tbilisi. She had discovered this building in 2005, when her family settled in a studio-apartment that was illegally constructed on the rooftop of a 16-story apartment building. The facade of this partially inhabited and unfinished building was intruding into my daily reality but at the same time it mirrored my personal state at that time. Each inhabitant shaped the facade of the building according to their individual needs by completely ignoring construction, urban, and public law. The endless transformation process (of extending, reconstructing, and adding) that kept the plurality of approaches together offered a particular aesthetic. In order to retrace that overwhelming experience of temporality that clearly influenced my own perception of home as an endless process, I decided to print the image of that building on a mattress, the most intimate companion of our body, which often holds our imprints as stains and as time passes it slowly adapts to the shape of our body.35 From 2018 on, Chabashvili begun two projects The Mantle and another related project The Corridors of Conflict. Abkhazia 1989–1995. For The Mantle, the starting point was an image, a still from the newsreel documenting the Georgian poet Zura Rtveliashvili reading poetry in a grocery shop in Tbilisi in the 1990s. The image… ponders over the interior background, focusing on a woman in front of the counter inside an empty shop. Despite the poor quality of the image, the emptiness of the grocery shop is still vivid. …Taken out of its original context, this blurred image simply shows an empty shop. For me, it stands for the post-Soviet emptiness, the time standing still, the space between two systems—the one that collapsed and the one to follow. The time-frame when the Soviet products had disappeared and the global goods had not reached the store yet. The time period followed by permanent instability, disillusionment, and depression, changes the lives of many. It did not last long, but it is an everlasting

34 Website: projectartbet.com/en/MovingGallery/49/The-Fabric-of-the-Everyday-LifeTamuna-Chabashvili. 35 Website: biennale.ge/archive-2018/tamuna-chabashvili.

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imprint on all the generations that have witnessed the process. It has also become a part of my life. During the period of my residency in Berlin in winter 2018, this image became a prism with which I traced the imprints that this brief period in history left on me and helped me understand the impact it had on my artistic process.36

As a nomadic form the mantle is a universal piece of clothing. Transformed and accustomed to the demands of different communities in space and time, its function of denoting a status and providing protection remained. As Chabashvili understood, “the Mantle embodied a process of patterning my own mantle as a possible wrap, a straightjacket, a portable home, a tent, a diary.”37 In 2019 she began The Corridors of Conflict. Abkhazia 1989–1995 that became an archive exhibition, telling the story of a critical period of recent Georgian history: the Georgian–Abkhaz conflict. The exhibition, held at the Literature Museum in Tbilisi, carefully selected documents from a more extensive “collective memory archive,” known as the Memory Project. The two installations cover the war itself (1992–1993) and the immediate postwar years (1993–1995). The exhibition began with personal stories that shine a light on the consequences of war, rather than taking the visitor through the experience of armed conflict, and finally explores the events that led to violence. On display were materials previously unknown or forgotten by the general public—documents, newspapers, and photographs, private letters and rare recordings of stories from people directly involved in events. This led to Chabashvili’s most current project that focuses on the topic of Missing Persons due to different conflicts in Georgia from 90 s onwards. The purpose of the project is to raise awareness in the general public to the issue of missing persons in Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the plight of their families. She hopes that the exhibition and art installation will shed light on the efforts deployed by families and family representatives over the past years and decades to commemorate and remember persons who went missing during the 1990s and 2008 conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. A digital exhibition will be 36 Website: airberlinalexanderlatz.de/salons-tamuna-chabashvili/. 37 Ibid.

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launched at the end of August 2020 and will be accessible at any time from that moment on. It is conceived as a permanent display of materials accumulated and collected until today, an online site serving as a missing memorial in an abstract and conceptual manner. The physical installation will follow, created as an artwork in relation to the digital exhibition. The installation will address the issues of physical absence/mental presence of the missing, the topic of the memorial, border, of territory and embodied memory. As so often with the missing, the work is testament to living with loss, and the act of both remembering and forgetting, of missing and yet waiting.

Part 6: Vajiko Chachkhiani In recent years one of the most engaging young Georgian artists to appear has been Vajiko Chachkhiani. Born in 1985, he initially studied mathematics and informatics at the Technical University in Tbilisi. He turned to fine arts soon after and like other artists discussed, left Tbilisi to study at the Universitat der Kunste un Berlin and, in 2008, entered the AudioVisual department at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and then in 2009 moved to the Universität der Künste (UdK), Berlin, studying under Prof. Gregor Schneider. In 2015 Chahkhriani was recipient of the 7th Rubens Promotional Award of the Contemporary Art Museum Siegen in Germany. At the opening of the exhibition, visitors witness the performance “Father,” which lasted several hours. A middle-aged man—a father, as the title reveals—sits for hours on a chair at this location with his feet held tight by a block of hardening cement. He freezes like a living sculpture, forced to remain immobile. The father figure, now impotent and paralysed, loses every sense of authority. All he can do is sit tight and wait. Following the opening, relics remain and bear witness to the performance: an empty chair, a block of cement with two holes where the father’s feet had been held tight. The absence of the father figure materializes ex negative. The idea outlives the actual appearance, the work ultimately becomes a sculpture, the broken concrete remains as a relic in the exhibition. It was later presented at the opening of an exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In 2017, he was awarded the Rubens Promotional Award and shortlisted for the fourth edition of the Future Generation Art Prize, awarded by Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev and, in the same year his work “Living

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Dog Among Dead Lions ” was shown in the Georgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Curated by Julian Heynen, the artistic director for special projects at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the installation consisted of a small abandoned wooden hut which was found in the Georgian countryside. Reassembled in Venice specifically for the Biennale, the small abode held all that would typically be found inside of a home: furniture, pictures, and other everyday items, with an irrigation system fixed to the roof, creating the effect of a steady downpour within the structure. During the 6 months in which it was set up, the natural process of rotting of the materials exposed to moisture and water stagnation generated a sort of spontaneous dramaturgy that led to meditate (or rather to perceive) the existential implications of resistance and change. The work was a tribute to the spirit of adaptation that the Georgian people has shown over the centuries, facing the Muslim invasions, the tsarist one, the Soviet dictatorship (which also made victims among artists and poets) and the difficult transition to democracy. The “living dog among the dead lions” mentioned in the title therefore alludes to the common man, who from the majestic Caucasian nature has drawn the strength to react to the survival tests to which the story periodically submits him. A metaphor for the ongoing impacts of traumatic histories, the rain gradually flooded the house, but also gave life to moss. A faint yellow light illuminated the unadorned rooms, visible only through the windows partially shielded by curtains that invited the spectator to approach with caution, as if she were witness to a sorcery that at any moment could have involved him. Perwana Nazif described the work in the following way: In an aim to address the process of decay, Chachkhiani will install an irrigation system inside that mimics permanent rain—thus playing on the concept of the indoor versus outdoor. Audience members will be able to witness the hut’s interior slowly growing ever-more derelict, with yellow sodium lighting serving to underscore the moss that will inevitably envelop the entirety of the interior over the duration of the exhibition.38

In the same year Chachkhiani also made a film Winter Which Was Not There (2017) that depicts a crane fishing a statue from the sea. Gradually, it becomes clear that the statue is of 38 Perwana Nazif, Art Net Online, 23 February, 2017.

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a man who is standing on the beach. He then ties the statue to his pickup truck and drives off dragging it through the Georgian landscape. The concrete disintegrates until all that remains is the chain that once fastened it to his vehicle. The film is a striking allusion to the figure of the dictator, namely Joseph Stalin, who was born in Georgia and whose statues and spirit linger throughout the country. Recently Chachkhiani wrote: My work operates somewhere between the outside world and the human psyche, bringing the shadowy aspects of our Conditio humana to awareness through a subtle and intriguing visual poetry. Frequently based on performances or transformative actions, many of my sculptures have an affinity to minimalism. At the same time, they are charged with narrative meaning. Through my sculptures and installations, I seek to address psychological conditions such as loneliness, violence and angst, weaving them with topics from religion, politics, literature, and poetry. Reoccurring themes in my work are conflict, culture/nature and the oscillation between the outer reality and the inner life of the individual being.39

In mid 2018 (29 June–14 October) he presented Heavy Metal Honey at the Bundes kunsthalle in Bonn -und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. At the center of the installation is a kiosk, reminiscent of those that appeared throughout Georgia as the private sector developed in the 1990s. While they resemble ramshackle huts—built from boards, sheet metal, found doors, and glass panes—these structures were the veins through which the Georgian capitalist economy owed. Today, they have disappeared from the streets but, as harbingers of capitalism, they too have taken on a mythic status. Noemi Smolik, a critic based in Bonn and Prague, wrote of the work: Heavy Metal Honey (2018) is a shocking piece of cinema. It depicts a large Georgian family sitting around a dining table, conversing animatedly. Suddenly, rain begins to fall on the interior scene, saturating everything and everyone, but the family continues its discussion as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Only the mother acknowledges the downpour. She leaves the room and, after some time, returns with a pistol. One by one, she shoots everyone except her son, who she does not have enough bullets

39 Vajiko Chachkhiani, Artist’s Statement, Yarat Contemporary Art Space, 2018.

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to kill. The film cuts to the mother, lying in bed with an intravenous drip, either dying or, unlike her family, being kept with the living.40

In the same year Chachkhiani received a Villa Aurora Fellowship in Los Angeles and a Residency Grant Tokas in Tokyo and nominated for the Kunstpreis Böttcherstraße, which is affiliated to an exhibition in the Kunsthalle Bremen. In January of 2019 (19 January–23 March) Chachkhiani presented Glass Ghosts at the Galleria de Foscherari in Bologna. Compared to the house of Living Dog Among Dead Lions, the perspective had been reversed because the viewer, having crossed the threshold of the gallery, found herself inside the house. On the ground was a strange population of toothed and ungulate pumpkins that grow unevenly scattered all over the surface of the floor, on which one must walk carefully so as not to risk treading one. These clusters of fetishes, which show off the aggressive attributes of wild beasts now definitively tamed by death, testify to the birth of a new breed of obstinate creatures, hybrid ghosts resulting from the assembly of fruits and animals without pulp, meat, and entrails. Still and suspicious, they arouse attraction and fear at the same time, concretizing the radical alterity of the animal and anticipating the tragic consequences of breaking the delicate balance on which the coexistence of the different living species that populate our planet is based. The installation was inspired by a natural disaster in Tbilisi, a flood of the river Were that killed nineteen people and hundreds of animals in the local zoo. On that occasion, many of the surviving animals that the fury of the waters had freed from the cages began to roam the city, making the landscape of the flooded streets even more surreal and constituting a real danger for the inhabitants, one of whom was mortally assaulted by a tiger. The strange individuality of the zoomorphic pumpkins that we see in the gallery (some of which were created with claws and teeth taken from the corpses of those animals) materializes an existential condition of incommunicability and diffidence that investigates the loneliness and fragility of being detached from one’s own habitat and perpetually forced to watch around to defend against unknown dangers.

40 Noemi Smolik, Once Upon Time: The Storyteller Vajiko Chachkiani, Freize, 24 September 2018.

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Digging into the metaphorical and formal implications of absence, the artist identifies correspondences and similarities between apparently unrelated elements, such as pumpkins and the latent images on the walls: both are empty, surround an unbridgeable lack and are devoid of home and identity. The ability of Chachkhiani to arouse intense emotional involvement stems from the sensitivity with which he succeeds in probing the collective imagination starting from simple materials and objects, which in his hands become amulets of a secular rituality that operates in the intersection between life and death to raise universal questions. His installations have the same mythopoetic vocation as ancient fables and they are the result of a similar process of fragmentation, displacement, and reuse of semantic units that each time re-aggregate in a different way to form new stories. And precisely this aspect, perhaps, demonstrates more than any other its close relationship with his country of origin, Georgia, a land permeated with stories, from Prometheus chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains and the golden fleece stolen from there by Jason with the help of Medea. The title suggests how fragility and absence are essential components in the artist’s research, which draws on traditional Georgian culture as an inexhaustible reservoir of metaphors of the precariousness of the human being in the face of destiny. Here too we find a faint trace of a house, evoked by a yellowed wallpaper that covers the walls of the gallery, on which are identified the shapes left white by mysterious removed paintings, as if they had been transported elsewhere to save them from a sudden calamity. The mute eloquence of these ghost images depicts the turmoil that is felt “in the presence of absence,” when we are faced with the sibylline remains of something that has been but which is now no longer, when we look at the lapidary incompleteness of fragmentary signals that do not lead anywhere and magnify the lack of what has vanished.41 Continuing his endeavors to uncover how the past is replicated in the present, in “Flies Bite, It’s Going to Rain,” his solo exhibition at Yarat Contemporary Art Centre in Baku, in early 2019. Chachkhiani mined Caucasian myths and historical narratives, and their impacts on the region’s contemporary consciousness. The central installation in the exhibition comprises a dense forest of dead trees. Perched on wooden

41 Smolik, ibid.

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pedestals, the worn and cracked sculptures are either effaced, incomplete, or studded with wedges which either hold them together or threaten to tear them apart—a sculpture of a headless horse, effaced classical statues, and decorative reliefs overgrown and embedded within the soil. They refer to the fragmented nature of storytelling, which in Georgia is entrenched between ancient mythology and its more recent, often traumatic past. It is an eerie, viscerally affective piece that questions the place of mythological figures and classical knowledge within our memories and lives today. While the work suggests the fragmentation of historical narratives and a sense of loss, it also evokes a burial for the notions that no longer serve to guide our futures. Elsewhere in the gallery were three traditional Georgian structures, including two glass-and-wood porches and a barn made of rough-hewn logs. Presenting these architectural elements as sculptural objects, the artist highlights the elegance of the designs, and the fact that such features are fast disappearing from the Georgian landscape. At the same time, the porches—commonly representing a space for family and community interaction—are markedly void of people. One of the smaller barns shows a commissioned video, Glass Bones. A dark and daring contemporary interpretation of a popular Georgian fairy-tale, in which a son sacrifices his mother’s heart for an impossible love. Entering the space through a small opening and traversing up a short flight of stairs, viewers were invited to sit on benches to view the contemporary retelling of a well-known Georgian fairytale, set in presentday Tbilisi. In the story, a young man lusts after a beautiful but indifferent woman, who taunts him to make the ultimate sacrifice to prove his love to her. Back at his home, his devoted mother cleans his room before retiring for the evening. What follows next is gruesome—desperate to prove his devotion to the girl, the young man suffocates and then violently stabs his mother, carving out her heart to present it to the young woman. The shocking act serves to represent the pain that is inflicted by the selfish desires of one generation, and the sacrifices of another generation to make these wishes possible. There is no happy ending here, only hurt, regret, and the weight of generational trauma. As Lesley Ann Gray suggests in her review of the exhibition, Chachkhiani leaves us to consider how we contribute to the perpetuation or destruction of historical memory, cultural expectations, and their

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contemporary manifestations.42 Chachkhiani asks viewers to consider what is lost when we allow cultural memories to vanish. Nostalgic places of leisure and time spent with family, the constructions also point toward an underlying problematic relationship with memories, heritage, and internal emptiness. Invited to participate at the Biennale of Sydney in 2020, Chachkhiani presented Army consists of an enormous tree stump, embedded within a pile of excavated earth including rocks, soil and branches, around which are situated numerous tombstones baring portraits of the unknown deceased. Chachkhiani’s work asks us to consider the larger historic and social forces at play at the core of our identities and sense of selves. ‘We are dwarfed by this unknown or lost landscape as if it has been removed or stolen from a faraway place and dumped for our contemplation and confusion…I operate somewhere between the outside world and the human psyche, bringing the shadowy aspects of our Conditio humana to awareness through a subtle and intriguing visual poetry. Frequently based on performances or transformative actions, many of my sculptures have an affinity to minimalism. At the same time, they are charged with narrative meaning. Through my sculptures and installations, I seek to address psychological conditions such as loneliness, violence and angst, weaving them with topics from religion, politics, literature, and poetry. Reoccurring themes in my work are conflict, culture/nature and the oscillation between the outer reality and the inner life of the individual being…The world I’m reconstructing in my practice exists in the conflict between one’s inner and outer world, in the conflict between past and present.’43

42 Lesley Ann Gray, ArtAsia Pacific, web 2020. 43 Vajiko Chackhiani, Artist’s Statement, Biennale of Sydney, 2020.

CHAPTER 9

Lost to the Future: Central Asia

With a focus on three countries in Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, this chapter explores how some artists have explored the complex cultural history of the country, contesting the dominant representations of the country or representing those who live at the margins of history in their country. As explored, what becomes evident is the legacy of Soviet rule of these countries, such as the repressive state control in Uzbekistan, the legacy of Soviet rule in Kyrgyzstan, and the devastation brought to people in parts of Kazakhstan. This chapter focuses on artists of different generations across three countries of Central Asia: Rustam Khalfin (Tashkent, 1949–2008) and Yuliya Tikhonova (Almaty, 1978), Shailo Djekshenbaev (Sailyk, Kyrgyzstan, 1947), Gulnara Kasmalieva (Bishkek, 1960) and Muratbek Djumaliev (Bishkek, 1965), Evgeny Boikov (Azerbaijan, 1960), Said Atabekov (Bes Terek, Uzbekistan, 1965), Vyachaslev Akhunov (Osh, Kyrgyzstan, 1948) and Saodat Ismailova (Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1981), Almagul Menlibaeva (Almaty, 1969), Erbossyn Meldibekov (Shymkent, Kaz, 1964). Artists also briefly discussed include Alexander Ugay (Kyzylorda, Kaz. 1978), Georgy Tryakin-Bukharov (Nizhneudinsk, Irkutsk region, Kaz. 1943). In 2012, I presented the exhibition “Lost to the Future: Contemporary Art from Central Asia” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore that drew upon contemporary art in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_9

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Uzbekistan.1 These three countries form a part of Central Asia and are in different states of re-formation following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. The exhibition was shaped in response to the organizing concept of the fourth Singapore Biennale: “If The World Changed.” In a certain sense, “Lost to the Future” anticipates a changed world but the result of which was an uncertain proposition. This anticipation is based on a recognition of the need, if not imperative, for change but, with the knowledge of an uncertain outcome. Some thirty years has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This passing has resulted in some attempts to disentangle of the past from today and explore the possibility of new beginnings. Video became the leading medium for Central Asian artists in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and allowed for the continuation of a visual tradition in which figurative imagery complements the existing oral tradition. In 2007 the Philadelphia Museum of Art presented a survey of video and filmwork by contemporary artists from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, the first exhibition of its kind in the United States. The fourth installment of Live Cinema/Return of the Image: Video from Central Asia from November 16, 2007–February 17, 2008 looked at recent developments in the artistic production of the region. Presented in three parts: In the Search of Place, The Dervish Way and Eccentricity and Melancholia, the program investigated the unique history of this politically and culturally turbulent region and its effect upon artistic production. Viktor Misiano, the guest curator of this exhibition and both founder and editor-in-chief of Moscow Art Magazine, credits Central Asian artists with retaining a sense of trust in what he describes as “the figuratively authentic and immediately suggestive ‘image.’”

Part One Gone are the days and visions of the early Soviet era, symbolized by the Kazakh artist Alexander Ugay and his video work ‘Bastion’ (2007). The short video re-presents Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist tower “Monument to the Third International ” of 1920. As one of the pioneering artists of the early Soviet Era, Tatlin designed the tower to rise about 400 meters high, housing a conference and administrative hub, a broadcast center and 1 Lost to the Future: Contemporary Art from Central Asia, Singapore: Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, 2012.

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workers’ library. Its structures were designed to rotate according to year, month and day, and would be built using industrial materials such as iron, glass, and steel. The tower was never realized as, within a few years from the time of its design, all had changed as the Soviet Union fell under the repressive and destructive dictatorship of Stalin. Ugay’s rendering of this image in “Bastion” is a reminder of what never was. It appears dreamlike, as if floating on the water, passing across the view of a group of spectators. The concept of the exhibition “Lost to the Future” was conceived to suggest how different legacies have grown in this past quarter century, a legacy still informing if not shaping the present and immediate future. The artists represent a post-Soviet generation for whom national identity is of ongoing and troubling concern. But what is distinctive or different about their identity? Was the Soviet Union still shadowing its definition or could it be now defined by the individual, or had national government interests taken over Soviet ideology shaping if not controlling their identity rather than letting people determine their own destiny. In Uzbekistan, the issue of identity has remained for many years determined by a government whose dictatorial rule can be symbolized by still-standing monuments of the heroes and “fathers” of communism. This contrasts to many countries today, where such monuments have been dismantled (See chapter on Monuments ). In Kazakhstan, many artists address the haunting vestiges of the Soviet era alongside the increasing disparity between the steppes and traditional life and the rapid growth of city centers, especially in Almaty and Astana. Artists in Kyrgyzstan have referred back to the revolutions that have taken place in 2005 and again in 2010. The two revolutions brought a hope that the county would find its own path, its own development and not be a state serving the Soviet Union or an even worse a surrogate.

Part Two While younger than many of his contemporaries, I begin this chapter by looking at Said Atabekov who was born in 1965 in the village of Bes Terek in Uzbekistan, less than 100 k. from Tashkent and close to Kazakhstan. Atabekov began his artistic activity in 1993, graduating from Shymkent Art College, Shymkent (Kazakhstan), a village where he continues to

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work and live in.2 He was a founding member of Kyzyl Traktor (Red Tractor), the first avant-garde artistic group founded in southern Kazakhstan after Perestroika. It took advantage of Perestroika to experiment with international modernism. Red Traktor Group was the first avant-garde art collective founded in southern Kazakhstan after the Perestroika. Founded in the early 1990s by Vitaliy Simakov, a college professor and member of the spatial-structural composition school, Kyzyl (Red) Traktor’s name and members have fluctuated throughout the collective’s existence. The first known title of the collective was Shymkent Trans Avant-Garde (followed shortly by SAA,) a verbal expression short for salem, meaning “hello” or “peace be with you.” This ironic deconstructive stance is rooted in the performances Atabekov created with the Kyzyl Traktor collective with Said Atabekov, Smail Bayaliev, Moldakul Narymbetov, Arystanbek Shalbayev, and Vitaliy Simakov, all having been core members. Moldakul Narymbetov (1948– 2012) was a painter, shaman, poet, philosopher, and former lead member of Kyzyl Traktor from the 1980s until his death in 2014.3 The collective incorporated traditional Kazakh folklore and indigenous materials into their artistic practice. At the same time, their work observed and re-examines nomadic culture in the context of capitalism and industrialization. Working in the sphere of contemporary art, they preserve and interpret the spirit of age-old tradition, using the typical materials available to the nomad—leather, wood, and felt. The main concept of this art group lies in the juxtaposition of the archaic pre-Islamic past

2 Atabekov has participated in several international exhibitions and Biennales, including: Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan at the Yarat in Baku (2017), The Other & Me at the Sharjah Art Museum (2014), 5th Moscow Biennale (2013), Migrasophia, Maraya Art Center, Sharjah, UAE (2012), 4th Fotofestival Mannheim, Ludwigshafen Heidelberg, Germany (2011); Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011, 2007, 2005), Ostalgia at the New Museum in New York (2011), Photoquai Biennale, Paris, France (2009); Time of the Storytellers at the KIASMA in Helsinki (2007), Media Art Biennale, Free Waves, Los Angeles, California (2006); La Biennale de Montreal, Canada (2007); 9th Istanbul Biennale (2005); Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2005); Prague Quadriennale, Czech Republic (2003). 3 Narymbetov was a Member of the Arts Academy of the Republic of Kazakhstan,

member of the Artists’ Union of Kazakhstan, and winner of the Zhiger reward. He has represented the Republic of Kazakhstan in many events across the world in countries such as Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Czech Republic, USA, Italy, Russia. He opened the School of Modern Art in Almaty and has participated in the festivals of contemporary art such as ARTBAT FEST in both 2010 and 2011.

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against Soviet practices of artistic professionalism. For instance, a tractor “logo”—seen stamped on goods such as bottles, plates, and textiles— serves as a recurring symbol about national identity borrowed from Soviet rule. Like many of today’s artists, Atabekov’s work spans a variety of media, from video and photography to sculptures and installations. His use of ethnographic signs is heavily influenced by recollections of the Russian avant-garde and post-Soviet realities, along with an analysis of his condition as a contemporary artist. As a witness to successive waves of social and political change in an area which saw a transition from nomadic culture and pantheism, and presence of Islam through to Communism and then Capitalism in less than a hundred years, Atabekov explores the intersections and local impact of often conflicting cultures, skilfully identifying and animating elements that reveal their deeper paradoxes. In an almost ethnographic attempt to rediscover their roots, Atabekov and the Kyzyl Traktor group instead seems to poke fun at the orientalist stereotypes through which westerners often view Central Asia. They reorient nomadic, Sufi, and Shamanistic philosophies, presenting them as “new artistic languages.” Constant nomadic movement, a common narrative of the 1990s, is present in most of their projects and performances, demonstrated by the use of “traditional materials” such as wood, wool, and felt and instruments like the Shan-Kobyz, dombra, and drums, all found in the steppes of Kazakhstan. Atabekov’s first solo exhibition in 1993, entitled I is not We, was a clear affirmation of a new individual voice in contrast to the traditional Soviet aesthetic of “collectivism.” His exhibition proposed an important alternative to a post-Soviet environment. From this point on, he has continued to focus his attention on Central Asia: its customs, daily life, legends, and the history of the area. His linguistic mix of ethnographic signs is heavily influenced by recollections of the Russian avant-garde and post-Soviet global interventions, along with an intimate and often touching analysis of his condition as a contemporary artist. As such his practice, though deeply rooted in a particular culture and geography, is yet very much part of the global art community at large. While acutely aware of the attractiveness of the exoticism associated with the iconographical stereotypes of Central Asian art, he often refers to them ironically, mixing them with allusions to the shamanic and nomadic. Atabekov challenges the issue of the old dichotomies of borders as a transitional space. Following the work of these two artists over the

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past thirty years provides us with a map that charts the path of minority cultures who have sought both their own autonomy and dialogue with others. Their work signifies a double encounter with both the inside and outside: a third space that asserts their own local cultures and an opening to exchange with the world beyond, us who see them from outside. Twenty-five years ago, the subject of borders was understood in terms of issues from that of a person’s identity and the increasing phenomenon of migration and as result, cultural pluralism, hybridity, and the emergent figure of the subaltern. This raised issues of the possibility of cultural exchange and horizon of a person or people’s aspirations. In other words, it became a space of negotiation between the national/international or local/global dichotomies, of journeys of migration and the diasporic. It opened up to issues of nomadism as distinct from that of the migrant, of exile, and of home. Within this framework, the plight of the migrant, as the subject of political or racist persecution, was better understood and begun to be addressed. Since that time however, nationalism and call for greater national sovereignty has grown as a response to the opening of borders. Migration became a national problem and was transformed into the issue of asylum. National and ethnic assimilation was called for, challenging the right to difference. The work of Atabekov reminds us of the promise of borders as an emergent space of cultural difference. His work contests the concept of both the national/international or local/global as insufficient in accounting for what was, in fact, an emergent interstitial space. This interstitial or third space marked the minoritization of national cultures. That is, cultures that had been viewed as a minority were beginning to assert their own identity, independence and in some cases, autonomy. This was based on a communal identity, not a national identity, that was transformed into an agency able to dictate their own sense and images of themselves. It was no longer a question of plurality or universalism but, rather that of community. In these terms, the “I” embodied a history of cultural difference, in which its production represented the political and social definition of the historical present, of the now that embodied specific histories, of living with difference. We are reminded of Atabekov’s first solo exhibition of 1993 was called “I is not We” declaring the individual voice in contrast to the Soviet political aesthetic of collectivization. Between 1995 and 2016, Atabekov made three ongoing series by Atabekov: “Journey to the East,” “Way to Rome,” and “Dream of Genghis

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Khan,” that each, in different ways, focus on the issue of borders. “Way to Rome” represents the encounter of East and West, echoing Marco Polo’s journey to the East. It includes the photo work “Son of the East ” (1995) that, as Madina Tlostanova notes in her book Post colonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art, captures “frozen ethnic-national symbols.”4 In his performances—whether alone or with other members of the group Kyzyl Traktor (Red Tractor), the artist takes on the appearance of a shaman by dressing in a quasi-shamanic costume. For Atabekov the encounter with the myth of the shaman takes on the features of personal experience with alienating consequences. By flaunting this image of shaman-impostors, Atabekov and his companions take their distance from new age fads and the post-soviet commercialization of the shamanic heritage (very often exploited by healers who are equally false). This can be seen in their photos as makeshift shamans with Journey to the East (2002). They wore colored tunics and pointy hats, crossing a red bridge or approaching a monument with an uncanny musical instrument on their shoulders, or going down a hatch while performing odd rituals. Atabekov’s reenacted shaman is first and foremost a cˇ udak, an “eccentric” uprooted from his village community context, where he performs bizarre rites that have been inevitably contaminated by the penetrating force of Western culture. In his study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade (Bucarest, 1907–1986) dwells on a condition he calls “nostalgia for paradise,” defining it as the desire “to find oneself always and without effort at the centre of the world, at the heart of reality” transcending the limitations of human nature; being born again at a new level of awareness.5 That “nostalgia for paradise” is also a powerful metaphor for artists from Central Asia, who have recreated or mimicked shamanic rituals in the post-Soviet era, reinterpreting them under a broad range of conceptual solutions. Following the historical fracture generated by decades under the USSR, it is almost inevitable that the image of the shaman has tended to be both fluid and unstable. The shaman is now no longer the exclusive 4 Tlostanova, Maria, Post colonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 5 Mircea Eliade, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Princeton University Press, 2004 (first published 1951).

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medium between man and the spirits but rather, an incarnation of that tribal substrate with which Russian culture, throughout its history, has always had to converse. A rereading of shamanism implies confrontation with the avant-garde legacy, in other words its conceptualization of the primitive cannot be ignored nor can its utopian perspective of man in the natural state. On the other hand, the contemporary artist, living within the dynamics of the art world, can no longer partake innocently of this idealized momentum. The “shaman reenacted” after the fall of the USSR becomes, therefore, the object of a tension that is destined to disappoint, the symbol of a primitive spirituality that may charm or arouse feelings of regret—yet it remains unattainable. After 2000, Atabekov began to participate in international events, expanding his repertoire to use also video, photography, performance, and installations. In 2001 Atabekov made a video/performance from 2001, titled Farewell Song, was inspired by an age-old custom in Kyrgyzstan, where “women are supposed to let their hair grow until it is plaited into very thin braids for their wedding,” the gallery assistant tells me. “And so the scissors are symbolically severing all ties with a past that is felt to be stifling, in order to bid it farewell.” Atabekov works with the techniques of video and photography, creating installations and performances. Contemplating the status of the artist in contemporary society, he draws on traditional aesthetics, the practices of Soviet collectivism, and the post-Soviet reality. Through the prism of author’s irony, he focuses his attention on the iconographic stereotypes of Central Asia, its mores, daily life, legends, traditions, and history. In his video performance Walkman (2005), Atabekov, wanders the Steppe with a double-bass hoisted on his shoulders to the sound of Albinoni’s Adagio. Here Atabekov uses shamanism to capture the concept of otherness: alongside the ghost-like figure of the shaman the theme of the city also emerges, the urban dimension (as opposed to the village) where the contemporary artist usually interacts and creates. Hence, the issue of appropriating a shamanic otherness—which coincides with an ancestral identity for artists from Central Asia—remains open. Or, we see Atabekov meditating on his knees before the sliding doors of a department store as with Neon Paradise (2003). The artist is seen from behind, kneeling in front of the sliding doors of a Department store, interacting no longer with the spirits but rather with a humble photocell. In some

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performances, he wears a patchwork of local embroideries, or Soviet and American military cloth, printed with slogans and oriental fabrics. Another project was the “Steppen Wolves ” project, a photographic series which captured scenes of the popular traditional game of “Kokpar,” in which local horsemen engage in fierce competition to seize the carcass of a goat. The photographs capture scenes from the popular traditional game of “kokpar,” in which horsemen engage in fierce competition to seize the carcass of a goat. On the one hand, this is a brutal contest in which the primordial element of strength reigns supreme, an approximation of cosmogonic battles between titanic forces. On the other, it is a metaphor for the crude, dangerous, and not seldom treacherous competition which the author sees in contemporary “market” activity, accompanied by its cult of success. The world is thus akin to a cruel struggle in which the prize for which all compete so fiercely is, in essence, unimportant—the “goat’s carcass” takes second place to the status of the victor and the attributes associated with this role. The installation “Customs Point” is fashioned from traditional tools of labor. The central object is formed from a mound of farmers’ hoes, which make reference both to an apocalyptic image of those fallen on the battlefield and to the arduous toil of the migrant worker, forced to earn his bread the hard way, in competitive struggle, whether it be home in Central Asia or further afield. Some of Atabekov’s work that show groups of people holding a korpeshe, a traditional form of Central Asian textile that serves as both a mattress and blanket in the nomad’s yurt. On these surfaces, he depicted symbols of different ideologies and religions that have divided the world. Atabekov’s series around the figure of Genghis Khan take up Khan’s dream to create a state without borders. Atabekov’s photos Genghis Khan’s Clothing (2013) re-enact Khans epic battles. He often makes photographs of single figures or groups holding a rug or textile, that distinguishes and defines them. Standing before the camera, they assert their own cultures, bold declarations of their being here and now. We have often thought that interactive media was a sign of contemporaneity. But it may be that, equally, in a global age, the use of cloth signifies a broader and more fundamentally, a shared resource. The residual value of cloth globally, as that which we wear, can serve as a marker of cultural difference and distinction but equally, a shared human custom. This work challenges the issue of the old dichotomies of borders as a transitional space.

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Following his work and his contemporaries in Central Asia provides us with a map that charts the path of minority cultures who have sought both their own autonomy and dialogue with others. Their work signifies a double encounter with both the inside and outside: a third space that asserts their own local cultures and an opening to exchange with the world beyond, us who see them from outside. The project Farewell of Slavianka (2010) is a slide show presenting an unusual ritual. According to Atabekov, the captured action was carried out by his Kazakh relatives, trying to find traces of Aldashev Amir (born in 1908), the artist’s great-uncle, who went missing in 1943 during the Great Patriotic War. The younger brother of his grandfather, was drafted into the Red Army on August 28, 1942 and last seen in March 1943, severely wounded in the infirmary in the Voronezh region. In one of the photos his aunt holds a letter from the Archives of military medical records from February 25, 1970. This is not the first, nor the last letter. At first the villagers made a special object—a “carpet” with the same halfsacred, half-suprematic images of a crescent, square and circle, which are parts of the project Red Cross, followed by a ritual procession of the object.

Part Three: Kyrgyzstan Shailo Djekshenbaev was born in 1947 in Kyrgyzstan. He resides and works in Kyrgyzstan. Having graduated with diploma in architecture from the Frunze Polytechnic Institute, Bishkek in 1971, worked with the architects V. Nazarov and D. Yryskulov from 1972 to 1974. Together, they realized the construction of the Museum of Arts in Bishkek. In 1974, he gained a Diploma of Film Director at the Photo studio, Bishkek. From 1975 to 1979, he was an Instructor at the Faculty for Architecture at the Polytechnical Institute Frunse. By 1979 his passion for cinematography led him to the Cinema Academy of Goskino USSR in Moscow, where he studied animation film direction. Shortly after, in 1980, he made a photo series that captures what will become a hallmark of his photographic practice. “Bride on the Bridge” (1980) powerfully conveys the tragedy of individual lives, of lives gone wrong or the fates of those forgotten. Through the idea of a series, he creates a virtual document that tells the story of particular lives. In 1981 Djekshenbaev was awarded a certificate as a Professional Photographer from the Cinema Academy. Then, until collapse of the

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Soviet Union in 1991 Djekshenbaev worked with animation films in the Kyrgyzfilm studio. In 1992 he became a freelance photographer and co-founded the film studio Kumai in Bishkek. As art director and cameraman, together with Marat Saraluu, they realized several films including the short subject The fly up (2002) and the feature film My brother silkroad (2001). These films won international prizes in New York, Nantes, and elsewhere. His biographical background greatly influences his photographic gaze, the structure (the architecture), and the statement (the dramatics) of his pictures. As Djekshenbaev reports, the decay of the old structures was a kind of liberation for him. While the country has liberated itself from Soviet domination, it has not come to rest since then. Two authoritarian governing presidents and the civil war between the Kyrgyz and the Uzbek minority repeatedly made negative headlines. Quietly and at a remove from things, Djekshenbaev is interested in the situation in his country. He avoids the sensational places, the street fighting and plundering during the last two revolutions; there is no picture of bleeding victims. Rather they are pictures of transition or decline with subjects that are barren, deserted regions, paths, fields of stone, asphalt, and architecture, telling a story that seems to trace little more than the atmosphere of what once was, unfulfilled or yet to be. He looks at the changes his homeland has gone through in the last two decades, showing the discrepancy between holding on to the familiar and the hope for change, the longing for freedom. An exhibition Transition in the photo gallery Anika Handelt in Vienna (June–August, 2010) captures this, reflecting on the changes his homeland has gone through in the last two decades. The exhibition title Transition refers to the photo work Ötmök (in Kirgyz: pass, bottleneck, crossing): a bus crosses a ridge with effort and detours across the steppe, because stones cover the road and block further travel. As Lizzy Mayrl commented in her curatorial text, Djekshenbaev “reflects on the changes his homeland has gone through in the last two decades…Upheaval, decline, transition – these words can only begin to describe the great revolutionary changes. The photographs go beyond that, telling a story. When Djekshenbaev casts his glance at the nearby road or the distant horizon, what is grotesque becomes clear. Something lies between the “here and now” and the future. One senses the impulse to set off, hopelessness and hope, destruction and moving forward in one

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breath…he seems to trace the atmosphere…When people appear, they are part of what happens and of the whole space of a well-considered composition…These are people fully integrated in – in part the captives of – the societal structure. They want to get ahead even when the situation seems forlorn.6

The series was shot during the filming of Lizzy Mayrl’s video Heavy Water. The video was part of the exhibition (which exhibition?) and was shot in the building of a former Soviet laboratory for uranium extraction on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. Djekshenbaev’s subjects are often barren, deserted regions, paths, fields of stone, asphalt, and architecture. Two essential factors shape Djekshenbaev’s photographic work: first, time, i.e., experience and long-term observation; and secondly, places important to him, like Asphalt (2004) photographed at Ala Too Square, the Old Airport in the city of Bishkek (formerly Frunse) or the abandoned Soviet settlement Kyzyl Ompol, and the new residential areas on the outskirts of Bishkek, called Nova Stroika. Between 2001 and 2010 he made several photo series that capture this such as Subway (2001), a triptych of an underpass in the center of Bishkek or Perestroika (2004), a four-part photo series that show a destroyed asphalt surface, broken up to enable the renewal of the street on the occasion of the celebration of the Day of the Republic. People walk over the fragments and seem to be wandering on ice floes or uncertain ground, but nonetheless let nothing turn them from their path. For Djekshenbaev, this is a typical paradox, a metaphor for the globally shaken world.” With The Presence (2005) A triptych from the series The Revolution Square, youths are seen on Ala Too Square in Bishkek on the eve of the “Tulip Revolution.” In the background is the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty; in the foreground are Balbal figures, the stone statues of ancestors from the tenth century. Nova Stroika (2006) show settlements on the outskirts of Bishkek that have grown since 1991 and after the second great flight from the land in 2005. Despite a lack of infrastructure, deep poverty, and social conflicts, the settlements are given names like Nesting Place or Wooden Cradle. Kyzyl Ompol (2008) are a series showing one of the projects planned in the Soviet period: a small city in an arid region, designed on the drawing board. After the decay of the Soviet Union, it became a city 6 Mayrl, Lizzy, Übergang (Transitition) Photographs by Shailo Djekshenbaev, Vienna: Galerie anika handelt, 29 June–21 August 2010.

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of ruins because the supply of water and energy was interrupted. Flight — Demolition (2008), show the ruins of a wall from a demolished school building in Talas, in northwestern Kyrgyzstan, Ötmök (2009), meaning bottleneck, crossing show a bus detouring across the steppe because the road is covered with stones. Djekshenbaev captures the world around him. The photographs are more abstract, and less clear or “unremarkable” in their subject. This sense of “lack” or ambiguity suggests an environment of change, a change of which outcome is unsettling, situated within an obscure, indeterminate space. For Djekshenbaev, this is a typical paradox, a metaphor for the globally shaken world. Djekshenbaev documents unspectacular but isolated and remote lives as with his photo series Mental Health (2007).

Part Four: Kazakhstan In 2005 the artist Rustam Khalfin (Uzbekistan, 1949) and filmmaker Yuliya Tikhonova (Kazakh 1978) collaborated to make a video entitled “Northern Barbarians, Part II: Love Races ” (13 minutes). The short film captures a young couple making love, nude on horseback, while riding across some desolate woods. “This video records a languid flail of arms, slow-jostling thighs, and jerking, heaving, torsos. Through the mass of stirring skin - the sheen of fur. The strange rhythm of this moving flesh - lilting, rocking - is accompanied by breathy sighs. She reclines, head resting on mane, He is seated, as their mount carries them through the forest.” The couple had been hired to re-enact an old ritual: Before the creation of the Soviet Union, and subsequent repression of indigenous Central Asian cultures, Kazakhstan was a land of Nomads whose daily lives were intimately bound-up with their horses. Inspired by two series of watercolors from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, found in the book of “Chinese Eros,” the love scenes are re-interpreted. While the act harks back to an obscure Folk custom from the pre-Soviet era, the title “Northern Barbarians” appropriates an ancient Chinese term referring to the nomadic peoples of Kazakhstan. We might view the piece as exploring the notion of a Kazakh identity set apart from the long-standing cultural and political influence of their powerful neighbors—Russia and China. These reference points are also relevant to the work of Almagul Menlibaeva, whose work draws also upon strands of sufism and

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shamanism as practiced across Central Asia. She couples a powerful portrait of the fate of women in and after the Soviet era together with the resurgence of a residual shamanism among women as a force of resistance. Menlibayeva comes from the nomadic culture of Kazakhstan, and in her practice she overcomes geographic borders with ease, as well as the boundaries of self-censorship in art. In the beginning of her career she worked in traditional media such as painting and graphics, and she experimented with combining the representational space of figurative painting with the decorative flatness of Kazakh felt rugs. As her practice developed, she gradually left the two-dimensionality of painting behind, moving toward a time-based practice that seeks a recognition of the values of authentic nomadic culture. She has turned from a performer into an artist-director who devises, organizes, and shoots her moving-image works. At the same time, she aims to create her own nomadic mythology, updating archaic myths and poeticising the dramatic reality of post-Soviet Kazakhstan. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a group of young artists, students and graduates of the Zhurgenev State Institute of Theatre and Art emerged in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan. The group called itself Green Triangle and Menlibayeva was a member, taking part in its first underground exhibitions. This was when they got to know each other, at the “Crossroads” exhibition in the Central Exhibition Hall in 1989, which now has cult status in Kazakhstan. “Crossroads” gathered all non-conformist groups existing at that time, among whom Green Triangle stood out for its exceptional freedom of expression. However, later Menlibaeva will bring into the heart of this cultural heritage the image of devastation symbolized by the ruins of Soviet occupation and the presence of the nomadic Kazhak woman. The allusion to shamanism in her work is to be found in the utter concentration of her characters—that often include the artist—in actions that defy any obvious sense or logic. It is as if their actions are informed by a communicative force outside of the real. This power is transformative and transmits to the viewer as an audience who, in willing to participate, suspends disbelief. A space is created in which the audience enter, become one with what they see, with the characters and its unfolding narrative. Menlibayeva’s educational background is in the Soviet Russian, avantgarde school of Futurism, which she combines with the “nomadic aesthetic” of post-Soviet, contemporary Kazakhstan. This “nomadic aesthetic” is expressed in recent video works such as An early video work

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by her Dzhikhad (Jihad, 2004) by Menlibayeva is a case in point. A young woman plays with her headscarf, while in the background the second Mecca of the Middle East: the holy grave of the thirteenth century Sufi Ahmed Yassavi. His inner quest was “Jihad.” She then made “Butterflies of Aisha Bibi” (2010) and “Transoxiana Dreams ” (2011). In these two works, Menlibayeva recounts an ancient love story of the Sufi poet’s daughter Aisha Bibi and Karakhan, visually transforming it into a modernday drama of unfulfilled longing and unconditional love, with reference to both her own nomadic heritage and the Shamanistic traditions of the cultures of Central Asia. Menlibayeva writes: I explore the nature of a …shared cultural psychic experience, which manifests itself as a specific form of thought among the people(s) of the ancient, arid and dusty Steppes between the Caspian Sea, Baikonur and Altai in today’s Kazakhstan…We are not just speaking about an idea or archaic element in the collective subconscious of a people, but about the embodiment of our archaic atavism, which becomes an active entity, just like a creature itself. Our archaic atavism is not just internalised, but also externalised. It is as if It, like a being, has been awakened by the postSoviet experience of the indigenous Kazakh people, who are becoming their own after 80 years of Soviet domination and cultural genocide. Suddenly, it (Archaic Atavism) became interested in enculturation and in modern behaviours. It also began to have entertaining dialogues with the transnational circulation of ideas in contemporary art…My work raises metaphysical questions such as Who am I? and Where shall I go? This (psychic) experience and perspective marks my artistic language.7

In “Transoxiana Dreams ” (2011) tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter who observes the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population. A former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan who moved the banks of the Oxus River, the Aral region remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries spreading across southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. In the Nineteen Sixties, the Soviets had begun to drain the sea for irrigation and commercial and cultural interests were abandoned. Today, Transoxiana lies bare and stripped with discarded fishing fleets. In the 7 Cultural nomad—An Interview with Almagul Menlibayeva. Alimala and Monica Salazar, BERLINARTLINK, online magazine for contemporary art, 2020.

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film, which is part documentary and part fictional, the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds, while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures, feared for their savage and magical powers. These figures allude to images of the Greek mythological figure of the Centaur, and a time when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian steppes. In 2012 Menlibayeva released “Kurchatov,” is a powerful portrait of Kazakhstan’s political present, of a country that is only beginning to come to terms with its socialist past and at the same time is searching for the roots of its social identity. A multi-channel work, it addresses how the country is still living with the devastating legacy of sixty years of Soviet occupation.8 The title refers to the eponymous town built on the banks of the Irtysh River in NE Kazakhstan, named after the nuclear scientist, Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (1902–1960), and situated in the north-east of Kazakhstan. In the days of the “Iron Curtain,” the town was the nerve center for the nearby nuclear test site of Semipalatinsk. Almagul Menlibayeva visited the current inhabitants and spoke to them about their experiences and, above all, about the physical after-effects of the tests. As one of the three “Closed Cities” of Kazakhstan, Kurchatov was under strict surveillance and known in the Soviet heartland, among insiders, as Kurchatov 22. The number refers to the fact that, due to reasons of secrecy, the inhabitants had no individual mailing addresses, so that all items of mail had to be sent to P.O. boxes. From 1948 to 1993, under direct orders from Josef Stalin and the head of the secret service, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (1899–1953), at least 456 nuclear tests (around ten per year) were carried out, above and below ground, on the test site extending across 18,400 square kilometers, without forewarning or protecting the population in the vicinity. In 1949 the Semiplatatinsk Test Site in Kurchatov was once the Soviet Union’s primary test area for nuclear weapons. Over a span of 40 years, 456 nuclear devices were exploded on the territory that stretches across some 18,500 square meters. Its roads, subways, bridges, and concrete roads built for delivery of heavy equipment and material related to its nuclear experiments fell into disrepair and are now overgrown with dry grass. The lasting health impacts from radiation on children and

8 She also made a five-part video installation “Kurchatov 22.”

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infants born during the time or of the high rate of suicides amidst its remaining population remain unexplained. Nargiz Shekinskaya, a UN. Reporter and Multimedia producer, interviewed Tolkyn Bulegenov, VicePresident of the Serney Medical University who spoke of an increase in contemporary oncology indices.9 In the zones adjacent to the test site, one can encounter malignant growths of the thyroid and blood malignancies – hermatological blastoma, leukosis, lymphoma and chronic leukemia – 10 to 15 per cent more often than in other regions of Kazakhstan”, the medic told UN News. According to Mr. Bulegenov, it is precisely these diseases that are connected to the prolonged exposure to radiation, and all the cases nowadays are meticulously tracked. However, the information about the health of the people who were exposed to direct radiation during the operation of the Semipalatinsk Test Site, is under lock and key. Bulegenov says that in the 1960s, a survey was conducted but “the results of the study remain classified up until today.” The official estimate is that, over 40 years, there were approximately one million people in the zone of radiation impact.10

In 2020 Menlibayeva collaborated with Inna Artemova and German Popov to create an “Intrinsic Futuristic Machine” for the second edition of the Lahore Biennale. Held in Lahore’s P.I.A. Planetarium, a night sky was projected, which held interspersed screens displaying documentary footage, technical drawings, Farsi manuscripts, and an assortment of other astronomical material. The domed structure was the setting for Menlibayeva’s 10-channel video installation at the Lahore Biennale 2020, titled Between the Sun and the Moon and, curated by Sheikha Hoor AlQasimi. The program had a focus on the shared heritage of the region, including that of collective trauma from events such as the partition. It simultaneously maintains focus, albeit divergently, on the Lahore’s history as a center for trade, commerce, and culture. For Menlibayeva’s work, Sagheer Muhammad, a musician from GilgitBaltistan, sat with his rubab (a regional lute), to play music from his homeland of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, alongside other local musicians, including the sitarist Rakae Jamil, had been invited to collaborate by the sound-artist “Our Man from Odessa,” a.k.a. German Popov, who,

9 See Nargiz Shekinskaya, UN News, August 29, 2019. 10 Ibid.

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along with painter Inna Artemova, had journeyed with Menlibayeva from Tashkent to Samarkand, to explore the legacy of the astronomer-king Ulugh Beg Mirza and his astronomical and mathematical discoveries.11 The presence of Muhammad and Jamil, both versatile musicians in classical traditions, within the context of Popov’s avant-garde microtonal experiment Heliocentric Tetrachord, which had been previously performed alongside some of Menlibayeva’s other recent work, presents another lingering subtext, that of the trans-historicity of the contemporary experience, in which perceived futures and pasts can coexist with the present. The installation also comprised of the Uzbek art-historian Nigora Artemova’s 360 degree suprematist visualization of a futuristic model of outer space centered around a stylised globe. Data and resources for the project was collected through a range of interactions facilitated by Akhmedova between the installation’s team and various stakeholders of Ulugh Beg’s cultural legacy including scientists, historians, musicians, and other artists, and site-visits to places of historic relevance such as the Ulugh Beg Observatory in Samarkand. The second collaboration was between Menlibayeva and Popov. Titled The Cabinet of Morphological Metamorphoses, it was another tribute to Ulugh Beg in which the shadows of musical instrument parts are reimagined as futuristic space crafts. A shared history between Menlibayeva’s native land and the exhibition’s host city informed the artist’s choice to work with Ulugh Beg’s story as it presents a narrative of transnational heritage. This paradigm of thinking can be seen in Menlibayeva’s earlier work as well, which the artist describes as “punk romantic shamanism,” where images from historical memory are invoked to vitalise the sober present. Though approached from a different direction at Lahore, it is a similar didactic that emerges when the artist attempts to navigate the contemporary relevance of the astronomer while meditating on the inherent futurism of his personality by keeping his contemporaneity intact.

11 Ulugh Beg Mirza, the Timurid sultan, who ruled the Timurid Empire from 1411 to 1449. The empire stretched from Kazakhstan to Pakistan or in modern times across Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia.

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Part Five: Erbossyn Meldibekov Black humor pervades art of Central Asia and the work of Meldibekov (1964) of Kazakhstan, engaged with the enduring presence of the steppes and legacy of the Soviet era. Born in Shymkent, Meldibekov’s work deconstructs Kazakh identity. Erbossyn Meldibekov graduated from the Almaty Theatre and Art Institute, where he currently lives and works.12 In an interview Irina Makarova asks him about his early work that references Malevich: IM:

EM:

‘Black Square’ (2005), is a parody of Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich’s famous ‘Black Square’ (1915)—yours is a square of live worms. What led you to appropriate this artist’s work? I had a passionate period of applying my revisions to other artists’ work. I wanted to take the static Malevich and connect it to the earth, like the nomads, who are in constant motion.13

Two years later he began what became a photographic series “Family Album” (2007–2009) He collated photographs of his family against public monuments in the region taken before and after the collapse of the USSR. During this time, statues had disappeared or been torn down and replaced by other monuments. As such, Meldibekov’s series documents the eradication of Lenin and Stalin’s image from the public space, and their replacement with national heroes such as Tamerlane or Genghis Khan, as a means of controlling the masses away from Soviet dogmas toward patriotic nostalgic pilgrimage. The photographs constitute an ironic reflection of Soviet or communist power, alongside portraits of people who have lived, died or survived and outlived this era. In an interview Meldibekov captured the strange history of monuments in the region: 12 Meldibekov has exhibited internationally, including notable exhibitions including Punk Orientalism, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Saskatchewan, Canada (2019); Eurasian Utopia: Post Scriptum, Suwon I’Park Museum of Art, Suwon, Korea (2018); Eternal Return, Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan, YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku (2017); Eternal Return, A. Kasteev Museum of Arts, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2015); the 6th Moscow Biennale (2015); the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012) and the Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011 and 2015). 13 Erbossyn Meldibekov, interview with Irina Makarova. Hong Kong, ArtAsia Pacific, May/June 2010.

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Your “Family Photo Album” series (2007–09), which you made with your brother, shows family members posing in places they visited decades ago. Here, your medium appears to be time itself.

Meldibekov responds, I contrast family photographs from twenty years ago with modern ones, and it turns out that nothing much has changed – just the clothing and the heroes on the monuments framing the family being photographed.14

It is within the architecture of the changing landscape and the relationship between man and monument that Meldibekov was able to depict the static and disinterest of the individual against the backdrop of mutating power. This collaborative project, between him and his brother, Nurbossyn Oris, was prompted by parallel events—first the discovery that within the span of 120 years in the park center of Tashkent there had been six memorial monuments of national identity all successively proclaiming conflicting ideologies, and second was the unearthing of family archives that captured these markers of rapidly changing times. The first monument was to Konstantin von Kaufmann, a Russian military leader who played a key role in the conquest of Central Asia. It was erected under the Russian Empire. After the Revolution it was replaced by a Red Flag monument, followed by Hammer and Sickle, The Beacon of Revolution, statues of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, a stele with the Program of the Communist Party, and finally, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a statue of Amir Timur. Many of my new pieces consist of forgotten utopian stories, incidents and even gossip. For instance, there’s a monument in Uzbekistan that was changed 11 times in 90 years. At first, in 1912, it was governor-general Kaufman, but in 1917, the Bolsheviks replaced him with a red flag, calling it “Monument to Revolution.” Then it was Stalin, Karl Marx, and Amir Temur. It’s absurd to change a monument every ten years. Another time, we found a picture of our sister standing in front of a monument of Lenin in Kazakhstan, and decided to photograph her there, in the same pose. The strange thing was that the background stood out more than her. Lenin’s figure was replaced by an equestrian statue of the Kazakh 14 Erbossyn Meldibekov, interview with Irina Makarova. Hong Kong, ArtAsia Pacific May/June 2010.

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hero Baidiber-Batir, but in the end it looks like the Soviet military leader Kotovsky or the Red Army commander Chapaev.15 In 2020, the work was installed at the Garage in Moscow. Entitled Transformer, it was a 4.5-meter wooden construction set with interchangeable pieces based on the garden’s former monuments. An ironic comment on the crisis of Central Asian identities, the work offers a critique of ideological manipulations of the national idea by governments. By turning grand monuments to conquerors and state symbols into a children’s toy, the artist reminds us that entire nations can sometimes be a plaything in someone’s hands. With Mutations (2008–2011), the mass-produced monumental bust is given a new interpretation. It is a series of four bronze figures of Lenin are contorted to replicate Giacometti, Patrice Lumumba and a great local hero with mongoloid features exemplifying a return to roots. In Meldibekov’s opinion: “in the conditions of post-Soviet nationalism, all our numerous new heroes are very monotonous: they are heroes of the past, invoked to confirm the historical credibility of our new governmental forms. But since nobody knows what these heroes looked like, there is a mushrooming of ethnic characteristics.” Gattamelata (1999–2007), previously Monument to an Uknown Hero, reflects on the acceptance of the Western monument standardization. Unlike the mushrooming of local heroes that Meldibekov mentioned above, here there is no face that can readily be identified. The natural materials used: horse, pelt and bone, are references to a nomadic era in the history of the Kazakh peoples but also to the equestrian sculptures of Europe’s monumental myth-making. Meldibekov takes European standards and applies barbaric tactics, the use of a real animal and its subsequent decapitation combined with an elegant positioning of the hooves. The absence of a rider is more telling of the current struggle for representation than any figure could be; asking the question—who can truly serve as a representative of such a complicated and diverse past? Meldibekov’s installation “Communist Peak” (2009) mocks the ideology and utopian visions of communist rule. The work was inspired by the renaming of the central peak in the Pamir mountains over six times, including being renamed “Peak of Communism” after Stalin’s death. The

15 Ibid.

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beautiful mountain ranges that lie across the whole region are represented by overturned aluminum tubs and basins that have been molded, damaged and crushed. Multiple references to the instability in the region find their expression within the incongruity of the bronze sculpture Grandfather and Child (2011). The piece features the busts of the forefather of the communist movement Vladimir Lenin next to the late Taliban terrorist Tahir Yuldashev, a former staunch communist. Through the use of irony and dark humor Meldibekov explores the scared and the profane and the relationship between the two nemesis: communism and Islam to tease out cultural and social discrepancies and the inherent contradictions that exist between the two. “Game” (2017) is inspired by the popular Rubik’s cube puzzle and is composed of three colours—red, green and white, referencing the colors of the Afghan flag. Providing a revisionist interpretation of the legacy of The Great Game (the original nineteenth-century standoff between Russian and British empires over Afghanistan). “Game” explores Afghanistan’s current position as a centerpiece of the long-standing War on Terror, masking both the US and British interests.

Part Six The twenty-five years since the fall of the Soviet regime have been filled with chaotic yet vital change. This change is reflected in a historical moment when the idea of change was an open question, when all seemed possible. In this openness, the old and the new were thrown together like a collage, an assemblage of materials, different sense of times, customs, beliefs, and ways of life. Georgy Tryakin-Bukharov (1943) is a recognized master of trash sculpture, he is one of the pioneers of contemporary art in Kazakhstan. He was born in Nizhneudinsk, Irkutsk region and lives and works in Almaty. His favorite materials are all those items that have outlived their respectable age—wheel tires, fashionable furniture, plumbing, etc.—but the artist shows a creative ingenuity to piece things together, to make something new out of the old, into darkly retentive sculptures fashioned from scraps of wood and tools, such as in “Sleeping Knight ” (2000), “Walk” (2001), “Balance” (2013), “Requiem” (1987), or the monumental “Mustang ” (2003) whose every part convey its existence before and after the formation of the art object. As collages of disconnected and out-of-use tools

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and materials, they embody simultaneously a sense of aesthetic life and death or the passing of function. All these things found themselves on a flea market or in a garbage dump. The artist gives these subjects a second life, in a sense more spiritual, by making an upsycling and turning this stuff into real works of art. For Tryakin-Bukharov, the present becomes a kind of living junkyard, constituted by virtue of treating all things equal, playfully teasing and mocking the aspirations of the present.

Part Seven The work of Yelena Vorobyeva (born in Balkanabat, Turkmenistan, 1959) and Viktor Vorobyev (Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, 1959) reflect this spirit in radically different way. Bazaar (c.1990–2006), by the Vorobyevas was a series of snapshots of improvised secondhand market stalls in the streets of the Kazakh capital, Almaty, provides a cracked, sooty window onto the shift from socialist to capitalist economy, capturing citizens’ vain efforts to survive by selling off their meagre possessions—everything from prosthetic teeth to Soviet memorabilia. These photographs simultaneously capture the dawning of a new era, an ambivalent nostalgia and a sense of uncertainty facing the future. The Vorobyevs have been working together in Almaty since the 1990s, using different genres and techniques results to capture the post-Soviet realities of constant change, disorientation and their effects on everyday life. They have been compiling a precise record of the ephemeral and quotidian details of daily life, local particulars, subjects that have been often overlooked and are not exactly photogenic. Household objects become animated, migrating not only from one composition to another, but also from one technique to another, the same kettles, irons and light bulbs fill the installations, video and photo projects They work in series, sorting images according to their typology. While seemingly insignificant, these details (of objects, colors, and customs) are integral to the creation of the new symbols of power, and serve as poignant social metaphors. The pair engages deeply with the environment they live in, examining its socio-cultural underlining, using a light and humorous approach. In addition to their interest in daily life, the Vorobyevs frequently reference the history of art. Provincial Hole (Suprematism Lives!) (2001) finds

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the stringent geometries of the Russian avant-garde in the humble architecture of outhouses in rural Kazakhstan. For Classics Bidding Farewell to the People (1997/1999), a performance originally staged on the streets of Almaty and later reenacted as part of the 6th Istanbul Biennial in 1999, the artists made paraffin casts of the plaster models of classical sculptures common to Soviet art academies. The artists set the casts on fire and allowed them to disintegrate amid the hustle and bustle of their urban environment—the melting figures, serving as a metaphor for the weakening hold of the academy on contemporary art production in the post-Soviet realm, as well as a reminder of the continually fraught relationship between the Western canon and its “Eastern” challengers and followers. Viewed collectively, the Vorobyevs work is a chronicle of a dynamic quarter century of both continuity and change. In it, we catch glimpses of everyday life refracted through the prismatic processes by which the symbols of the past are adapted or discarded as so much ideological detritus. They became famous for their Blue Period (2002–2005) body of work, a photographic chronicle of the country’s chromatic shift, told through the painted facades of buildings, from communist red to independent Kazakh blue. The hammer and sickle, the CCCP acronym) and their transformation, as metal objects, into fences demarcating private property, often painted green as a token of the return of religion, in this case specifically Islam, to contemporary Central Asia. All of their work is of the color selected for its spiritual connotation (in reference to the heavenly gods Tengrism initially dominant religion then blue vaults of the mosques, where Islam sets), but also because it symbolizes the country’s independence: When the Soviet Republic falls, the red flag gives way to Kazakh blue. ‘Necessary Additions: Home Archive’ 2010 series, shown in the Asia Pacific Triennale 8, 2015, is a series of intimate digital prints on paper with amendments in whitewash and pencil. While Kazakhstan was under Soviet rule, the Vorobyevs were obliged to use these photographs on official documents, a reminder of the impersonality of bureaucracy and its reduction of individuals to a quantifiable unit. Using these portraits, the artists insert small, subtle and humorous subversions on the official photographs—hinting at growth beyond carefully designated identities and borders. Transforming these objects of authority through humor and whimsical disruption, the Vorobyevs reassert the presence of the individual within an oppressive history and society.

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The uncertainty of change and the future underscores the work of Askhat Akhmediyarov (Uralsk, Kazakhstan, 1965). His photographs and performative-based practice capture the fantasy of change, caught between the disappearing life of the steppes and dreams of the city. This has led to the migration of people, especially youths, who seek a way of life that appears to be offered by the city. This condition of being “in-between” is shown in “Nomad” (2012) and ‘In love with the Track’ (2013). In these works, Akhmediyarov ironically imagines the world of those who dream or aspire to live in the city centers, imagining a better life there—one that is less traditional and more modern. The installation “Turn Turk” (2008) by Katya Nikonorova (Almaty, 1981) presents traditional carpets that are bundled up together in a manner that recalls the architectural structure of a traditional dwelling in the region. Installed in the middle of a space, their isolation makes them appear bereft of use or cultural context, as if outside their place of origin, nothing more than a decorative sign.

Part Eight: Kyrgyzstan During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the two artists Muratbek Djumaliev/Gulnara Kasmalieva from Kyrgyzstan, decided to curate an exhibition: In the Shadow of “Heroes” that was opened at the “2nd Bishkek International Exhibition of Contemporary Art,” in Bishkek.16 Held between 7 and 17 October 2005, the Biennale included 29 artists were mostly from Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan (11), Kazakhstan (7), Uzbekistan (3), Russia (2), Georgia (1), Afghanistan (2), and from Armenia (1) and China (1). The concept of the exhibition was conceived in the following terms: The official post-Soviet images of the heroic are already very well represented on Central Asian territory. The present-day creation of heroic myths has resulted in the cloning of numerous portrait statues on horseback all the way from the Caspian Sea to Mongolia. The search for cultural identity 16 The artists established a cultural center ArtEast in Bishkek which schooled young

Bishkek artists and serves as a forum for contemporary art. The curriculum was sponsored by Arts Collaboratory and Open Society Foundation. The Center closed in 2014 due to economic hardship. See interview Beth Hinderliter, The ArtEast School for Contemporary Art: Interview with Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, Journal of Inquiry & Action in Education, 6(1), 2014.

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is in crisis. Somewhere within us, we experience an unwavering sense that what is most important has been left behind, beyond the limits of public attention, in the shadow of “heroes.”17 One of the eternal problems for creative people is the understanding the “heroes” of their time…How can we define the “hero” of our time? What is he like? In what contexts is he represented? Is there an inherent conflict in asking what makes for a “hero” in today’s world, when “anything goes” in the arts? Can we speak with certainty of the loss of “the enemy” in artistic representations? How should artists relate to mass media treatments of “heroes”?18

Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev then returned to their own work They employ media including photography, film, and performance to capture and convey the politically and economically harsh realities of life in this Central Asian nation, where traditional nomadic lifestyles underwent drastic change, first transformed under former Soviet Communist rule and today tossed by the winds of global capitalism. In 2007 they made “A New Silk Road” (2007) and “Brooklyn Bridge” (2010), capturing two aspects of a country in the moment of change. They, like many other citizens of Kyrgyzstan, had witnessed the transformation of their country from the rise of the export trade using ancient transportation routes and the migration of people beyond their country to live elsewhere. Together, these works represent two points of departure toward new beginnings. First, the advent of a burgeoning economy that is based on the modernization of the Silk Road as the new hub of transnational exchange between China, Russia and the West; and secondly, the movement of people Westwards beyond their country, in the hope of a better life elsewhere. A New Silk Road (2007) featured photography and a stunning fivechannel video, commissioned in 2007 by the Art Institute of Chicago. (Also shown Winkleman Gallery, November 13, 2008–January 10, 2009). Shot along the highways and small villages connecting China through the Central Asian country Kyrgyzstan to the Western markets—one of the actual routes that still form the renowned “Silk Road”—Kasmalieva and

17 Ibid. 18 Muratbek Djumaliev/Gulnara Kasmalieva, In the Shadow of ‘Heroes,’ 2nd Bishkek International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Bishkek, Press Release, 2005.

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Djumaliev’s images and video capture the determination and resourcefulness that define this mountainous, poverty-stricken region. A New Silk Road tracks the passage of a caravan of dilapidated trucks carrying scrap metal to China in exchange for cheap products such as clothing, reflecting on the relationship between overlapping histories, and globalization and local identity. Subtitled “Algorithm of Survival and Hope,” the five-channel video presents a nearly hypnotic panorama of exquisitely edited scenes juxtaposing the dilapidated Soviet trucks (that continuously break down as they haul carriages of scrap metal from Central Asia into China) against the caravan of shiny, behemoth Chinese 18-wheelers barreling through the narrow passes filled with cheaply manufactured good destined for European markets. Along the way, the residents of the Kyrgyz farms and tiny towns exhibit stunning entrepreneurial ingenuity in finding ways to bond with and benefit from the drivers of both sets of trucks. The work depict the agonies of collective paranoia, doubt, and disappointment that this environment causes with minimal yet poetic narrative structures and music effectively deployed. In an interview the artists state: Art in the Soviet system was a part of the ideological superstructure and was therefore quite generously supported by the government, which created dependency and conformism among “official” artists. And significantly, with the collapse of social support alongside the growth of certain freedoms, we did not overcome conformism in life or art. Rather, we witnessed its magnificent blossoming. Now “creative forces” do not serve ideological requirements but instead market demands. In these circumstances, contemporary art in Kyrgyzstan since the late 1990s has probably been the only alternative to the faceless and boring so-called “professional” arts. The main intention of contemporary art has become an a priori otherness, originality, and nonconformism and an atmosphere of creativity and unity. The transitional period, despite of all its difficulties, has become an ideal environment for the development of contemporary art.19

The road is a symbol of the complicated process of ‘migration, survival and transformation’ that has taken place in the Kyrgyz Republic over the last 100 years. Kyrgyz people were originally nomads, but in the last two decades with their independence from the Soviet Union and transition 19 Ibid., Muratbek Djumaliev/Gulnara Kasmalieva, In the Shadow of ‘Heroes,’ 2nd Bishkek International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Bishkek, Press Release, 2005.

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to a free-market economy, their lives have been transformed. The Silk Road itself reflects this history—statues of former communist leaders Mao and Stalin still remain by the side of the road, and a runway for military airplanes now exists as a parking lot for trucks, with formerly nomadic shepherds providing food and shelter. As Lisa Dorin, Assistant Curator of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Contemporary Art, noted Devoid of nostalgia for the ancient Silk Road, with all of its romantic connotations, the project foregrounds instead the contradictory currents in the existence faced by the living, breathing populations along these well-worn trade routes…The five-channel video installation…provides an abstract set of instruction for resilience in the face of hardship.20

Indeed, the central messages of “The New Silk Road” take on a wider poignancy as the entire world begins to reel from an economic crisis that seems to know no boundaries. Brooklyn Bridge, by Kasmalieva and Djumaliev continued to focus on the immigrant experience, extending a theme they have been exploring for some time. The work was based on their experience of living in Soviet society and through the subsequent dissolution of the U.S.S.R., the artists explore how daily life, local economies and livelihoods are impacted by economic and political transformation.21 For Brooklyn Bridge, Kasmalieva and Djumaliev used their characteristic video technique to document experiences of Russian-speaking immigrants from one-time Soviet-controlled areas of Central Asia residing illegally in Brooklyn, New York. The experimental video, projected in slow motion at one-twentieth of its actual speed, is a shot of the Brooklyn Bridge taken while crossing New York’s East River on an adjacent subway line. Before traveling to New York in May 2009, the artists had asked their friends in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek to introduce them to people who had immigrated from Kyrgyzstan to the U.S., in order to interview them about their experiences. In New York, nearly all of the families the artists visited had met other immigrants with similar experiences, due to the rise in illegal immigration from Kyrgyzstan to western countries. The 20 Lisa Dorin, cited in Winkleman Gallery (New York) Exhibition page: Kasmalieva and Djumaliev, 2008. 21 The exhibition of video art and photography created in 2012 was shown at TheCube Project Space.

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interviews present the stories of two men and two women who immigrated from republics in Central Asia and either later returned home or still live in New York City. Having grown up in Soviet-dominated cultures, the four interviewees tell their life stories in Russian (both English and Chinese subtitles are provided), which include experiences typical of illegal immigrants from many parts of the world. After arriving in the U.S., they worked in the construction or service industries, unable to use the training or skills they had gained back home, even though they may have been educated as doctors, musicians or teachers. Furthermore, they were unable to return home to visit relatives while waiting to obtain legal status in the U.S., which took anywhere from seven to twelve years. The photographs in the exhibition were taken in Brighton Beach, a section of New York City where many Russian-speaking immigrants reside, and present the artists’ observations of an immigrant population that has yet to fully integrate into American society. Although they have dreamt of America since a very early age, some ultimately decide to return after their dreams are destroyed.

Part Nine Evgeny Boikov (1960) lives and works in Bishkek. He graduated from the Azerbaijan Institute of culture in 1980 and studio of painting and drawing in 1985. Born in Bishkek, Boikov moved with his parents a year later to Baku, Azerbaijan where he spent the next 20 years of his life. His father served in the army, where Evgeny also did his required service after deciding to major in sport, completing his studies at the Azerbaijani State Institute of Sport Science. Returning to the Kyrygz Republic in 1982, he started his career in painting, which was to consume him for the next 30 years. Boikov’s early work was fairly conventional painting, such as Dreams of an Ugly Girl (1995), silkscreen and oil on canvas (108.5 by 190 cm.), a work exhibited in Manifesto, Exhibition-Action, Bishkek, 1995. Boikov noted: The painting depicts a real situation and the characters are not fictitious. I am against make-believe. For me the reality of an image is not in its naturalistic representation, but rather in a complicated weaving of associations,

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thoughts and feelings. Semantics of the form lie beyond the image, on the level of line, texture and colour.22

By 2012 Boikov had advanced dramatically with “Warriors of Manas ” (2012) and “Kinematics of Protest ” (2012). The first work addressed the presence of the US military base in Kyrgyzstan, whose existence was justified by the former Soviet presence in the region. The name “Manas” refers to a heroic epic of the Kyrgyz people and Boikov’s series reflects a contemporary reading of the epic. While virtually obsolete, the US base nevertheless remains a sign of its former self but, nonetheless, a lasting shadow. On the other hand, the series of 12 works in “Kinematics of Protest ” (2012) captured and transformed the moment of “The Tulip Revolution” of 2005 and the uprising of 2010. The idea of a people, of the humanity of ordinary people regardless of their class or status, profoundly affected the culture of Kyrgyzstan after their revolution of 2005. But Boikov’s artwork does not focus on the ethical issues surrounding these uprisings; rather he examines the dynamics of people in these intense situations. The notion of a potentiality of such a change animated people again. This led the group of artists within the Workshop of Critical Animation of STAB (School of Theory and Activism—Bishkek) to create projects, such as “Which side are you on” (2013), seeking to engage with a broader local Kyrgyzstani audience. The inky, abstracted figurative prints of “Kinematics of Protest ” (2012) read like a series of artistic Rorschach blot test cards. The figures are dynamic, filling the entire canvas with the movement of their bodies. The men are wearing suits and ties while participating in what seems to be a brawl blurred only by the watercolor treatment. The hazy, out-offocus quality given the subject smooths out the chaotic violence implicit in the subject matter and make the prints more dreamy. The print method Boikov uses to create his work is unconventional. He uses an industrial large-format printer, normally used for outdoor advertising, to print on to regular-sized canvases. Kinematics of Protest I and IV ’ (2012) is reminiscent of the Italian Futurists in the early twentieth century, when the country was going through a period of upheaval and change. In utilizing industrial techniques in printing, Boikov tacitly acknowledges the surpassing of the 22 Boikov, Evgeny, Manifesto, Exhibition-Action, Bishkek, 1995.

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individual or artisanal approach to celebrate the age of mass culture. Boikov’s project investigates the aesthetics of revolt and violence, how the dynamics of people’s gestures and poses when caught up in extreme situations, are not only revealing but are also replicated in other revolts and uprisings throughout the world. By contrast, Boikov’s colleague and sometime collaborator, Furgat Tursunov (…), spent his childhood in the Kyrgyzstan, before proceeding to win a place to study cinematography at Moscow’s prestigious VGIK (All-Russian State University of Cinematography named after S.A. Gerasimov) and, after working in Mosfilm Studio, created his own production company Ordo in Bishkek. As the Soviet Union collapsed around him, he was imparted upon him a particular understanding of art. Working together, Boikov & Tursunov produced a series of photos: Identification. The work identifies the ongoing state’s role in the ethnicization and exclusion of minorities, which goes back to the Soviet era. In allusion to the identification photos from the Gulags, the artists present themselves as being registered in police or secret service files and labeled “different” and members of a minority by means of the Uzbek cap.

Part Ten: Uzbekistan The independence of Uzbekistan from the Soviet Union did not bring radical change as was inaugurated in other neighboring countries, however fragile that independence may have been. Rather, in the years that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan witnessed the emergence of another repressive state-controlled country. Artistic practice was corralled into the service of a centralized nation-state and the possibility of a freedom of expression for artists remained unrealized. In short, not all change brought with it an opening up for the betterment of peoples. The work of Uzbeki artist Vyacheslav Akhunov reflects on the present in Uzbekistan as one that is still guided by the dead weight of its communist leaders.23

23 Notable recent exhibitions include 2nd Yinchuan Biennale (2018), Quand Fondra la Neige où Ira le Blanc at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice (2016), BALAGAN!!! in Berlin (2015), 5th Moscow Biennale (2013), Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2013, 2007, 2005), 1st Kyiv Biennale (2012), Documenta 13, Kassel (2011), Ostalgia at the New Museum in New York (2011), Time of the Storytellers at KIASMA in Helsinki (2007), La Biennale de Montréal (2007), and 1st Singapore Biennale (2006).

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The Uzbeki artist Vyacheslav Akhunov, who lives and works in Tashkent, reflects on the present in Uzbekistan as one that is still guided by the dead weight of its communist leaders. Born into a Russian-Uzbek family, these multi-cultural circumstances determine his artistic production, in which he pursues a quest for the encounter of Asian mentality and European stylistics. Akhunov’s aesthetics are sometimes described as surrealistic, but on the other hand, he is considered the first conceptual artist in Uzbekistan’s underground movement between the 1970s and 1990s. His body of work comprises abstract paintings, installation, performance and video art, as well as numerous essays and novels. From the peripheral position of an artist who lives in Tashkent, his artistic production is connected to the experience of 1970s Moscow Conceptualism. He uses the typical iconography of the Socialist propaganda of the Soviet period, subverting the then dominant ideology through the manipulation of propagandistic images. His work tackles the ironies of perceived cultural marginality as well as the power of difference. The projects by Akhunov are part of the same pursuit: the style of constructivist photomontage, supremacist abstraction, influxes of Islamic calligraphy, the modes of socialist realism, oriental mantras and miniatures from the Muslim east differentiate Akhunov’s work from the Russian conceptualists. In these extraordinary works, everything seems to be fused together (as in a sort of kaleidoscopic collage) to deconstruct rhetorical formulas, the propaganda images of the Soviet regime. However, these works seem to be “archives” in which you keep one story and a plurality of stories at the same time. Akhunov is a typical representative of a generation of artists from Central Asia who have experienced the stormy times of stagnation and disintegration in the Soviet Union, Perestroika, and the independence of post-Soviet republics. He was born in a so-called “mixed” family, his mother being Russian, his father Usbek. These circumstances determine all his artistic production, in which he is on the search for the threshold where Asian mentality and European stylistics meet. In a marvelous interview Akhunov remembers I was born in 1948 in Osh, at the maternity hospital on Stalin street. I went to kindergarten and school in Osh. When asked for a portfolio, I usually call myself a Kyrgyz-Uzbek artist because I lived in Kyrgyzstan for almost 30 years, and I was shaped as an artist there. While Moscow was the place where I was shaped as a contemporary artist, it was Kyrgyzstan where I had been shaped as an artist in general.

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When I was born, my father served as an artist in the army, at a border unit in Osh. He was given a small room in an old madrasah that functioned as a museum. We lived there for 3 years. It was a typical regional historical museum. I remember myself as a three-year-old kid running around among the exhibits: ancient jars, skeletons and weapons. Later we were given a room in an eighteenth-century mud house. There were no windows, and the door led straight to the street bustling with waggons, people, and donkeys at the foot of Suleiman mountain.24

Akhunov carried out “true to life” experiments working as a stable boy and a laborer in a geological research expedition; he served in the army, where he observed that artists were distinctive people, who do not attend political education classes and indulge in an attitude contrary to the regulations. That was the impulse for him to get involved in art. In his own words, he “poisoned” himself with art—entering Art school in Bishkek (former Frunse), then changed to the Art Academy in Moscow. He finally returned to Fergana and participated in various art exhibitions. In one of these exhibitions, he was discovered by Scharaf Raschidow, former general secretary of the communist party in Uzbekistan, who in a gesture of generosity presented the young artist with living quarters in Tashkent. This enabled him to work in peace, but hindered him from treading the path of pure nonconformism. Some describe Akhunov’s aesthetic principles as late Surrealism; others are of the opinion that they rank with the Neo-underground movement. Akhunov’s work is so diverse in form that a strict classification is impossible. He works in various media, painting, installation, performance, actions, and lately video art. In his artistic credo there is no contempt of classical or traditional art and nothing said against officially involved art. Oriental in attitude, flexible and without any specific intention, he faces every style or society. He says: I have always fled collectivism, that means a place where a collective is working on something. A creative person is always alone, just for himself. In my life, there have always been lots of alliances, right up until when I finally understood that all this was madness, all these artistic associations…25

24 Published in ADAMCAR/CA Central Asia and the Caucasus, Almaty. 25 Ibid.

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A further typical work of his is a media piece in the artistic tradition of the Russian nineteenth century battlefield painter Vasili Vereshchagin, who had made a number of works on the theme of the war in Turkestan. With the virtuosity of an academic art school graduate, Akhunov depicts elegantly and convincingly a modern Usbek army guard standing at the Tamerlan Gates facing a Vereshchagin warrior of the guard of honor from times long past. The piece shrewdly ascertains that the apotheosis of authoritarian Asian power may easily be obliterated by a retouche with attributes such as the standardized modern uniform of an army guard. Then again, this apparel still stands for the same glorification today. The technical quality of a highly defined print assures that the work is timeless. Akhunov writes extensive texts, novels, essays, and poetry compendia, in which the protagonists cannot understand if the world they are living in is real or imagined. As a consequence, they continuously fall into unreal situations. Some colleagues say this is “pure Existentialism” and an Uzbek writer asked him jokingly: “what are you planning to do, do you want to even overtake the Existentialists?” Between 1974 and 1987 Akhunov worked on a series of collages and drawings in which he was using fragments of “Leniniana,” one of the official ideological types of Soviet realism art, created to perpetuate the memory of Lenin. In his collages Leniniana (1977–1982) (Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp), Akhunov uses reproductions from magazines, newspapers, albums and posters to create an imaginary political propaganda, in which he expresses his interest for the Soviet phenomenon of mass idolization with a mixture of irony and fascination. Akhunov was trying to save the tradition of art by a countermovement, a reconstructive movement, countering what became propaganda taking it back to space of constructivist reflection. His Mantras of the USSR, made between 1977 and 1983, is typical of this. A series of 10 collages on paper, Akhunov assembles the shattered remnants of the former Soviet Union, re-appropriating collected snippets of Soviet print culture from magazines and posters that he has amassed during his artistic career, merging iconic statues of the revolutionary founder of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) with Greco-Roman statuary. Written across the background are repetitious slogans like “the highest goal of the Soviet State is the building of a classless society” that were invoked during the Soviet era. The incessant repetition of state propaganda that was a constant feature of public rallies, television and radio broadcasts of the Soviet period, imbued the reverberation of propaganda with a religious quality like the

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eponymous mantras evoked in the title of the series. The resulting images chart the collision of the cult of Lenin, the impact of Soviet modernist photomontage, and the legacy of Alexander the Great, who conquered Maracanda (present-day Samarkand in Uzbekistan) in 329 BCE that when combined with the methodic duplication of Soviet propagandist slogans evoke a temporal slippage. Rather than evoking remnants of a past, Mantras of the USSR are a mock parade as a way of negotiating the complex recent geo-political history of Central Asia and speculative documents of an archaeology of the future. In the year 2000, he made “Cage for leaders” —an installation presenting a cage stuffed full of 250 polystyrene busts of Lenin, but it was removed from presentation in one of Tashkent’s international exhibitions. Since then, Akhunov has been investigating the possibilities of the new media, especially video art, often working with Sergey Tychina. Tychina takes on the role of the performer and Akhunov cameraman. They work together on the fundamental message of a particular piece and complement each other organically on various other tasks. During the Soviet regime, the artist, author, and philosopher Vyacheslav Akhunov hid his notebooks in stables and barns, in murals and matchboxes. For the artist, the notebook is an autonomous artistic medium. Between 1973 and 2000, he had archived more than three thousand of his ironic, visionary drawings and collages on paper for two hundred projects.26 The early work of Akhunov reinterprets the motif of ecstasy, drawing on Sufism in the two videos Ascent and Corner (both 2004, video performances in collaboration with Sergey Tychina). Ascent leads us up the spiral staircase of a medieval tower, while in Corner the artist imprisons our gaze in corners of brick and stone.27 Ascent is the direct transfer of the idea of a multi-layered evolution; the video performance focusing the spiritual path of man enables us to participate in Sergey Tychina’s ascent of a medieval tower. Together with the artist, the viewer looks up but cannot see far, the visibility being blocked by the spiral construction of the 26 See Leeza Ahmady’s introduction to Akhunov’s drawings and collages, which the artist refers to as “art-facts,” interprets and reveals these as sensitive forebodings of the fall of the socialist era and as a contemporary document conceived to outlast the present. Vyacheslav Akhunov. Text(s) by Vyacheslav Akhunov, introduction by Leeza Ahmady. Series. Documenta 13, German, English. 2012. 27 see Julia Sorokina, NAFAS, May 2006.

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stairs. We are right there with him when he goes up stair-by-stair, when his breath gets shorter, and when he rests, before relentlessly continuing the ascent. Whenever a narrow slot opens up in the brick wall, we get a short glance at the parched earth surrounding the tower, and then it goes on, further and further… Once on the platform at the top of the tower, we conclusively understand with the artist that even if we are right at the top, everything in this world is correlated in mutual support. The video demonstrates a mix of various cultural vectors—and existential motifs—from Akhunov’s artistic practice: Sufi meditation and medieval Eastern poetics. During the whole climb, we perceive not only the physical effort of Tychina, but also Akhunov’s heavy breathing, as he goes up the stairs together with his colleague, with the camera in hand. Once at the top of the tower, the ascent is shown again virtually on a laptop screen and one is reminded anew of the exertion and willpower. Then the image zooms back into the screen and the ascent in the “real” scenery begins once again from the start, just like in real life, where we are forced to go through difficulties over and over again. The work “Corner” is somewhat the inverse of this idea. Here, the ethic evaluation of the individual position, with the full specter of personal values and thoughts, dominates. The protagonist—Sergey Tychina, now wearing Muslim headdress, recites a namas (prayer) in various places. For this, he does not turn toward Mekka as required by the rules of Islam, but goes close up into various corners, thereby completely focusing on himself. The corner becomes an iconographical motif of a sacred place, where spiritual quest and reality cross. Should it be a mosque, a museum, or an office, the type of building or space makes no difference. Both pieces include exotic elements from Central Asia: Muslim attributes, a Medresa (legal and theological place of education), a cupola, buildings made of clay bricks, an Usbek shirt, and the protagonist’s headdress are merely attributes identifiying the authors. However local the color, the addressed themes and problems withhold their universal significance. In 2007 Akhunov showed his installation, 1 × 1 m2 (matchboxes), now in the Collection M HKA, Antwerp. Five hundred matchboxes are filled with small-scale reproductions, drawings and plans taken from his journals and albums from 1976 to 1991. The artist uses the idea of the hippies travelling in Central Asia, who used matchboxes to hide pieces of hashish, and uses it for his travelling pocket-sized exhibition of the “banned USSR avant-garde artists.” At the same time, the work is related

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to Western conceptual art of the 1960s, particularly by Marcel Duchamp and his consecrated everyday objects. With USSR—Our Motherland’ (2013) and “Monument to the Match” (2011), Akhunov constructs a monumental installation composed of the letters USSR. The viewer may walk through a small door, reminiscent of a yurt, to see “Lenin’s plans for monumental propaganda.” In the center, there is a high-rise monument made of matchboxes. It stands as a mock celebration of the grandiose vision of communism, with photographs of its leaders and a myriad of commemorative images. It is a matchbox monument that offers little solace except a momentary fire that burns out, leaving nothing but the ashes of dead wood. In January 2014, Akhunov participated in the exhibition The Empty pedestal Ghosts from Eastern Europe, curated by Marco Scotini, at the Bologna Archaeological Museum. Scotini interviewed Akhunov at the time, asked about his project. Vyacheslav Akhunov responded: (N)ear the end of the ‘50s, the statue of Stalin – which we had all got quite used to – suddenly disappeared. As I was on my way to school the next morning, I found an empty pedestal. Stalin had vanished. On the lawn in front of the building where the local chapter of the Communist Party had its headquarters there was another municipal monument. This one was made of cement. Lenin and Stalin were sitting on a bench engaged in conversation. Now Stalin’s bust had disappeared and Lenin was sitting there all alone. The adults made jokes: Stalin had gone to the store to buy some vodka. And there had also been a figure of Stalin with two pioneers, a girl and a boy who were offering him a bouquet of flowers, at the rest home for the city’s workers: that too was gone. As were the many busts of Stalin that were near the school named Stalin in the city park of culture and leisure, which was also named Stalin.28

Part Eleven Saodat Ismailova (1981) was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and graduated from Tashkent State Art Institute, Cinema Department. After finishing her studies in the Uzbek capital in 2002, Ismailova carried out a year’s creative development in the video department of Fabrica, the 28 Interview by Marco Scotini, on occasion of the exhibition: The Empty Pedestal, curated by Marco Scotini, Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna, Italy. 24 January–16 March 2014. Courtesy Laura Bulian gallery.

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Benetton Group’s communication research center in Treviso. The philosophy of Fabrica is to allow students to develop and work on their projects independently under realistic working conditions and under the guidance of experts in the fields of advertising and design. Both Saodat Ismailova and Almagul Menlibayeva show us different sides of the urban dream. “Steppes” not only refers to a region but, tacitly, to a way of life, a people and culture who were born into traditional nomadic life or small towns that are part of the hinterland of Kazakhstan. It is a world still invested in customs and beliefs, a world where mythology comes out of the strange admixture of ethnicities and a legacy of histories and beliefs of its people. Ismailova’s first film “Believe or Not Believe” (2002) was awarded the Grand Prize at the Tashkent Student Video Film Festival, Tasvir, in 1999. Her next film “The Last Guest ” (2002) received the award for Best Camera at the International Film Festival of Almaty in Kazakhstan. In 2008 she put together a production company MAP that is dedicated to development of young Central Asian Cinema. Saodat Ismailova resides in Tashkent and Paris, and is affiliated with Le Fresnoy, France’s National Studio of Contemporary Arts. Saodat represents one of a new generation of artists from Central Asia who came of age in the post-Soviet era and have established artistic lives in Europe while remaining deeply engaged with their native region and its past as a source of creative inspiration. As Ismailova told Eurasianet in an interview in Tashkent, on August 28, 2019 she sees the generation before her as a wellspring of inspiration. Her father was a cinematographer. Her grandmother was a storyteller. “My grandma was always telling stories,” she said. “She was the key person in my development.” Her early short films include Believe or not Believe (2002), The Last Guest (2002), and Zulfiya (2003) the latter which was soon after shown at the Arcipelago Film Festival in Rome. “Zulfiya” is the fictitious journey of a mother to the banks of the dryingup Aral Sea. It is the story of a Karakalpak woman hoping to quench her child’s thirst by searching for water. Her son’s future, however, seems to be already determined. The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest body of fresh water, covering an area the size of Ireland. But then the nations around it became part of the Soviet Union. With their passion for planned economics and giant, nature-reversing projects, the communists diverted the rivers that fed the inland sea and used them to irrigate vast cotton

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fields. The result: The Aral shrank by 90% to a string of isolated stretches of water. And even now, more than two decades after the Soviet Union broke up, the damage is far from reversed. Satellite images taken earlier this year show that one section of the sea has shrunk by 80% in the last three years alone. Uzbekistan, which controls three-quarters of the Aral Sea, has given up trying. The rescue has happened on Kazakhstan’s portion, and it is striking. A dam built by the World Bank and Kazakh government is slowly resurrecting a small part of the sea, reviving the fishing industry and bringing hope to an area that some expected would simply dry up and blow away in the fierce, salty winds. In some areas, the water is already lapping at the derelict hulls of ships that were stranded deep inland, heightening the ghostly and surreal aura of the landscape. In Uzbek, Zukhra is the planet Venus, the morning star that appears in the twilight. In the film Zukhra, we follow a young woman sleeping, while hearing the sound of her heart beating, her dreams, even her memories. We can come to know her by the sounds of her past.29 Through such films, she explores the role of women in contemporary Central Asia where tradition still plays a major role in defining one’s position in society. Ismailova’s work engages with a poetic discourse that has its origins in a personal memory of her grandmother. Ismailova writes: As a child, I was awakened by my grandmother every dawn in winter to see the last star in the sky: Zukhra – Venus. According to the legend there was a young girl that mysteriously disappeared and reappeared in the sky as a star. There is a belief that one can ask for a wish when seeing this star; this will be granted by Zukhra.30

In this manner, Ismailova draws upon a mythical heritage that persists throughout contemporary Central Asia. Through the installation, the viewer is encouraged to actively immerse herself in an experience—that of a woman in an idle state remembering her life, passively existing in a moment of suspension. In 2005 she was invited as an artist in residence by DAAD program, Berlin.

29 Later in 2013 she presented a video installation of Zukhra in the Central Asian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. 30 Artist’s website.

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She then made her documentary film Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea (2004). It won Best Documentary at the 2004 Turin Film Festival that was shown at the documentary film festival in Nyon in 2005. Ismailova once again chose a location beside the great sea, half of which lies on the Kazakh side, half on the Uzbek side, painting a picture of three generations of fishermen. Their struggle for survival is mirrored in the drying-out sea and it’s once plentiful waters. Ismailova’s feature film Barzagh in 2010, is a story about human relation to its roots and nature. Its synopsis is that three women, two alive—Tursun and Nigora, and one dead—Lutfia, are driven by Ravshan, lost for three days and three nights along roads, cities, wastelands, steppes, and mountains. The three are in a hope to deliver Lutfia’s body to her burial ground—a remote village where her husband awaits. The trip unfolds as a discovery of the last wish of Lutfia, while her sister, Tursun, gradually realizes that she is going against the ultimate will of the deceased. At the same time Tursun witnesses a strange bound that happens on the road between Nigora and Ravshan, which becomes another test for Tursun. Barzagh is “a cold sleep” between death and resurrection, where the dead awakes and the living dies. The journey becomes a trial not only for Lutfia, but rather for the three living souls that are imprisoned in a car that takes them further and further to a destination that slowly disappears. As she has written: In 1999, my aunt Lutfia came from the southern village and died in my hands. It was my first experience of death so close. Barzagh is an intimate story of my family that can be applied to wider thoughts about one’s homeland, identity or final destination on this earth. The journey across more than one thousand kilometers through all Central Asian landscapes will give me a chance to explore and document traces of my own past, while trying to comprehend the borderlines of its unknown future…The subject of death has always been one of the most intriguing subjects for me. Responsibility for one’s personal deeds, communal tasks and the idea of self-annihilation based on Islamic understanding of afterlife is a driving force of the project, which creates a rich environment to bring my characters to life.”31

31 Saodat Ismailova, Torino Film Lab., Newsletter, 2011.

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Following this, Ismailova made a film Gulchehra in 2013. It is a melancholic reflection depicting a seventeen-year-old girl looking at herself in a mirror and dreaming of love and, on a accompanying screen, the futile search for her. Based on a true incident, Saodat notes, the film tells briefly the story of Gulchhra who disappeared in 1992 in the southern city of Termez in Uzbekistan. She never came back from a walk she took to collect “rivoj ”—a spring plant that grows for a very short period in the high mountains. It is believed that if you eat rivoj hand-picked by yourself you’ll be granted happiness with your beloved one. Ismailova wrote: I first encountered this modern myth of Gulchehra while doing my research on female archetypes in Central Asia, for my feature film “40 days of silence.” I was fascinated by the idea of a girl disappearing unto nature and becoming part of her surrounding and changing somehow the live of the local people, I was fascinated of this relation between nature and a female body, the way they influence each other. Before she disappeared, Gulchehra complained she was hearing some strange voices that were following her when she was alone. The family and local community spent several weeks searching for Gulchehra in the high mountains, forest, hills, caves, and waterfalls, of the region, but the search didn’t bring any results, only a lock of Gulchehra’s long hair was found in a cave called “Parite- shik” known as “The cave of female ghosts.”32

Ismailova’s feature film 40 Days of Silence (2014) is a poignant depiction of four generations of Tajik women living in the complete absence of men, was nominated for best debut film at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival. This feature film—which tells the story of a young woman who decides to take a vow of silence because she is followed by her past.33 Her Two years later in 2016, Ismailova made Stains of Oxus that evokes an oneiric journey through the greatest Central Asian river, Amu Dariya. Known in Greek times as Oxus, the film portrays the transformation of landscape and witnessing people who inhabit its riverbanks, beginning from the high plateau of Tajikistan to the lowland deserts in Uzbekistan where the river finds its end in the Aral Sea.

32 Ismailova, Saodat, Artist’s website. 33 The project received support from the Cannes Film Festival, the Sundance Institute

and France’s National Centre for Cinematography. The film was shown at 35 international film festivals, winning several awards.

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Ismailova gathered dreams and stories left by those who live along the river’s banks that, by local tradition, shared with flowing water. A girl recounts her dream of a white horse. A man tells a legend: “There was a girl named Soman. She didn’t want to get married to an old man. She escaped her undesired spouse on a horse. When she arrived here she transformed herself into this lake, Soman.” At the end of the film, we see an old man brushing the hair of a little girl reluctantly crouched between his knees. “Now I’ll put your hair into a ponytail,” he tells her. The girl slips away. “She escaped again.”34 In an interview with Anders Kreuger, Ismailova also speaks of the totem of the tiger, which she notes, is “deeply embedded in the psyche of the collective memory in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.” She reflects of it as: “a mix of complex emotions involving those of ancestral presence, spiritual longing and loosing connection with land…”35 Referring specifically to her film Stains of Oxus (2016), Ismailova relates how: I stumbled across this archetype while filming my previous project, Stains of Oxus (2016), where I followed the Amu Darya River from where it emerges in the Pamir Mountains to its mouth in the Aral Sea, collecting dreams of people along the way. The tiger started appearing repetitively in dreams, and that is when the puzzle started to come together—memories, shared dreams, stories, legends and episodes from epic stories or places that carry the name of the tiger. Each interviewee who told me about the tiger perceived it as a source of lost knowledge or as a bridge to a forgotten but safe past, as if there is an unspoken code that lives under the locals’ skin. For instance, through a dream the tiger taught a young shaman how to heal; an epic story teller had been constantly attacked by the tiger in his dreams before he started publicly reciting; a woman has an urge to make carpets in a disappearing technique to exorcise the presence of the tiger in her dreams.36

Dividing her time between Tashkent and Paris, Ismailova has maintained a strong spiritual attachment and connection to the region she was born and grew up in, which is clearly manifested in her works, as demonstrated 34 Ilaria Bombelli, “Neon Paradise: Shamanism from Central Asia.” Milan: Laura Bulian Gallery, March 14, 2017. 35 Anders Kreuger interview with Ismailova, published on VDROME online cinema site, 2017. 36 Ibid.

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by the fact that almost all of her major projects were produced in Transoxania. “My land is my aorta, my backbone. It is all that makes me and gives me an immense source of inspiration. I cannot imagine myself without it. I am an Uzbek film director and artist, and this is the only way I can define myself.” Ismailova’s film The Haunted (2017) renders multiple histories of subjugation and extinction into a strong and challenging personal account that takes the form of an open love letter to a bygone tiger. The nowextinct Turan tiger is today a mythical creature and sacred symbol in Central Asia.37 Saodat spoke about the film in an interview with Anders Kreuger: When I came across the totem of the tiger, which is deeply embedded in the psyche of the collective memory in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, it appeared as a mix of complex emotions involving those of ancestral presence, spiritual longing and loosing connection with land. The interviews of tiger-related stories and dreams that I collected were so lively that they would create a parallel space to where we find ourselves at now, and the same would happen to time, as if it had been inverted or displaced… When I was writing the text, I would let the tiger (Turkestan Tiger is how locals named the Turan Tiger) embed different souls like a transforming tiger creature. When I connected the soul of my great grandfather with the tiger, the association functioned well and the text became clear. Abdul Aziz, my great grandfather, was born in the city of Turkestan in a moment in which there was not a single Central Asian “stan”: there was no division of languages or nations.38

The powerful stories of Ismailova are captured poignantly in the interview with Anders Kreuger, stories which show the intricate mix of personal social, and cultural history, of how stories, legends, and myths are woven into the fabric of everyday stories and memories, so much so it is impossible to distinguish between them. My great grandfather was sent to a gulag for 11 years when he was only 21 years old. He was one of the few male survivors in the family. He

37 As noted in DOCUMENTA MADRID 2018: 15th INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL newsletter. 38 Anders Kreuger interview with Ismailova, published on VDROME online cinema site, 2017.

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couldn’t come back to his home but he came back to a different “home” that spoke different language, where the values were replaced, and one had to chose whether to belong to one or another territory. The land was tore apart into young Soviet Republics. I created a parallel between the fall of the last Turan Tiger and my ancestors’ life; they lived at the same time, I guess they faced similar challenges and they were both hunted. I was lucky to have met my great grandfather, he wouldn’t speak much, as he knew his knowledge didn’t correspond to the times we were born in and it might hurt us; he only asked each of us to “don’t’ forget who you are”—I believe this sentence embraces all possible known and unspoken nostalgias.39

In 2019, Ismailova went into the production of “Qyrq Qyz,” spending 18 months casting the seven performers, all of whom are musicians at the beginning of their careers. She collaborated with Séverine Rième, a Parisian choreographer and lighting designer, to ensure that their bodies communicated the same message as the sound. It wasn’t easy: as Ismailova puts it, the women had to counteract the weight of “a certain Soviet past which [dictates] how you go on stage, how you sit, and how you perform.” But they overcame these constraints, she says, and the result “is a wave like an audio wave, but it is related to their bodies.” “Qyrq Qyz” and the accompanying exhibition “Qo’rg’on Chiroq” (part of which appeared at the Venice Biennale in 2013) was shown in Uzbekistan. Ismailova’s only previous exposure there was on a much smaller scale. She is curious to see how her work will be received. “It is like bringing a child back to its home,” she says. “I think it is going to raise questions…What is it about? What is this language of communication?” Acceptance, transformation and mutation are returning themes in Ismailova’s work as in her ongoing project Qyrq qyz (“40 Women”) which looks at the spiritual world, the collective unconscious of a society beyond a given time and obligations of religious and political systems. Ismailova says “The present is a search for yourself which is hidden in your history (memory).” She considers films as historical documents which “cannot lie,” “they bear witness of a specific moment in time independently of their being categorised as ‘fiction’ or ‘documentary’ material”. This search for an historical truth has been part of her recent research on archives of silent Uzbek films from the early 1930s and film

39 Ibid.

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journals from the region, which she has been working on more closely during her OCA residency in the Ekely housing complex. How the female body has been represented in the public realm, and how we can think and question active emancipatory forms within society is part of an aesthetic question is how Ismailova defined her subject. With her qyrq qyz—40 girls—she defended the ancient clans from eastern invaders, leaving an imprint on the collective consciousness of her region. She bequeathed “a memory of a matriarchal society in Central Asia,” says Ismailova. “If you ask the Iranians and the Afghans, they don’t have the idea of these girl warriors, while over the Amu Darya [the river that divides Afghanistan from Uzbekistan], people are very aware of it.” Central Asia’s history—from the ancient Sogdian language to the soul of the extinct Turan tiger—permeates Ms Ismailova’s art, which ranges from feature films and documentaries to video installations and multimedia performances. Born and brought up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, she has lived most of her adult life in Europe; but she feels “an unconditional connection, like the unconditional love for your parents or children,” with the traditions she inherited. Ismailova’s retelling of the legend, has proved as epic as its plot. It emerged from a short film she made in 2014, and incorporates an 86-minute film shot partly among the ruined desert fortresses of Karakalpakstan, plus a live element in which seven young women perform an original score of traditional music. It had its premiere in New York and was also staged at the Centre for Contemporary Art, a new venture in a former power station in Tashkent. Ismailova’s apprehension is understandable. Though her themes and the languages she enlists—Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek— familiar to Central Asian audiences but, her techniques may not be. “There was no access to information about contemporary culture,” Ismailova recalls of her education in Tashkent in the post-Soviet doldrums of the early 2000s. “We were trained in the traditional way.” She and her work have become a bridge connecting two worlds. The lines Ismailova draws between Central Asia and Europe run in both directions. As well as introducing the West to Central Asia’s heritage, she is using her European experience and network to help develop the arts in her homeland. Lost to the Future will remain a lasting question, perhaps an unanswered one. Contemporary art in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan reveal the differences between these three former Soviet Republics, perhaps differences that will endure. The world did change in 1989 but, perhaps

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not enough or never enough. No one was to know what was to come; for some, these new beginnings presented a risk worth taking, however much an experiment. Spurred by ideas for new beginnings, their worlds did change, but did that fulfill the dreams and needs of all its people? Did it bring a democracy to people lives? For some it brought greater rights, greater participation in the social process of their re-presentation, better pay and better standard of living. But for those living outside of the city centers, no it did not change for the better and for others, neither. We are reminded of those who fell under new dictatorships, those who were left behind, disappeared forgotten, and others who did not appear to fit the outline of these new beginnings. What of them? This project belongs to an ongoing portrait of this long interregnum, an interval beyond the legacy of the past and the advent of the future. Waiting.

CHAPTER 10

Towards a Horizontality (Memory, Margins and Borders)

In 1989, Raymond Williams, one of England’s foremost cultural critics wrote: The innovations of what is called Modernism have become the new but fixed forms of our present moment. If we have to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition that may address itself not to this by now exploitable because inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again.1

This book takes up Wiliams’ challenge of exploring some of that “wide margin of the century” by taking up Piotr Piotrowski’s theory of horizontality, as outlined in Chapter 2, in the context of postwar and contemporary art. In this chapter, I wish to extend this theory further. By the 1990s, the idea of contact zones began to take shape and greater prominence in cultural studies and art history. It was a refinement of the terms of recognition in the postcolonial encounter. Discussions were no

1 Williams Raymond, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989, p. 35.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_10

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longer framed in terms of relations of hegemony, domination, and subjection that had defined colonial relations but, rather, the experience or effects of the encounter between peoples of different languages, races, and cultures. This opened the way for theories of translation in the cultural encounter that enabled the potential exchange and reciprocity between cultures. Subsequently, in a 1991 keynote address to the Modern Language Association titled “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of “the contact zone,” as a term to describe the meeting of cultures.2 Her examples, drawn from the colonial era, were predominantly asymmetrical, having to do with power and domination. In the following year, she published Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). She then used the concept of contact zones for social places (understood geographically) and spaces (understood ethnographically) where disparate cultures meet and cultural, ethnic, or racial differences are transformed by the experience. Contact zones are most often trading posts or border cities, cities where the movement of peoples and commodities brings about contact. Since this time James Clifford, among others, has taken up the term to explore cultural encounters.3 Such studies reveal the correspondences and affinities between different cultures, allowing also, for differences and distinctions to be recognized. This has led to comparative analysis across all fields within cultural studies as much as the social sciences and geography. At the same time, the idea of globalization had also gained greater currency, especially in the economic field as a way to describe the opening up to worldwide economic trade and exchange. However, applied to the cultural field, the concept has seemed an overreach as cultural differences between local cultural sites are essential to characterize as much as the similarities. Alternatives have been offered that explored the transcultural, not in terms of the global but rather, through lateral connections, as between different localities or regions. To this we will return in the latter part of this chapter.

2 Mary Louise Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone. Modern Language Association; Profession, 1991, pp. 33–40. 3 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century; Museum as Contact Zone. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

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Part One In 2015, the Osage Art Foundation in Hong Kong presented the exhibition South by Southeast curated by Patrick Flores and Anca Verona Mihulet. Flores wrote later that the South by Southeast project was conceived out of the anxiety to move beyond the burdened categories of nation and region. It was prompted by the desire “to exceed the limits of how localities are almost by reflex and default integrated into nations, which in turn are integrated into regions.”4 Flores noted that “this South by Southeast option leads us to revisit how we reflect on the place of region in the contemporary.” As a consequence of this, their exhibition “gesture(d) towards a theory of the global, the worldly, the hemispheric through not only the south but through the southeast. Not the center twice, the better for it to slide across the scales and registers of the geo-poetic spheres of exciting mingling.”5 Inspired by the direction proposed by Flores and Mihulet and their South by Southeast project, the Osage Foundation then presented a second exhibition in 2018: The sun taught me that history is not Everything, curated by the Brazilian Raphael Fonseca. The title of the exhibition was based on Albert Camus’s words from his 1958 preface to a new edition of his book L’envers et l’endroit, a collection of five short semiautobiographical and philosophical pieces about the difficulties of his early life in Algeria, written in 1935/1936.6 I was placed halfway between the misery and the sun. Poverty kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history was not everything.7

The aim of Fonseca’s exhibition was to find artists interested in raising questions about the historical past in the light of the present. In so doing, he asked two questions: (i) “How can the past affect the present and how can contemporary art practice transform historical documents in very different kinds of narratives?” and (ii) “what are the relations between 4 Patrick Flores, South by Southeast. Hong Kong: Osage Foundation, 2015. 5 Ibid., Flores. 6 Albert Camus, Preface to L’envers et l’endroit (1958). Raphael Fonseca, The Sun Taught Me That History Is Not Everything. Hong Kong: Osage Foundation, 2018. 7 Ibid.

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macro and micro history?”8 But, more than that, Fonseca wanted to establish a “regional perspective” platform that placed the production of art in Asia into a critical perspective, that is, in relation to other geographies. It was this point which established a correspondence with the South by Southeast project of 2015. Fonseca saw many points of artistic, environmental, and historical points of dialogue between Asia and Latin America, resulting in a project that brought together 26 artists, 14 from South and Central America and Mexico, 8 from Southeast Asia, and 4 artists from Hong Kong and Macau. Following this, Fonseca began to identify topics of interest. He notes “migration, diaspora, memory, oblivion and identity are all essential to each of the invited artists and to the historical narrative of their countries.” In this respect, he identified 4 points or topics of correspondence: (i) immigration and refuge, (ii) the relation between documents and historical truth, (iii) the borders between historical and fictional writings, and (iv) the tension between national histories and familial anecdotes. We return to our beginning and the opportunity to explore lateral relations between local points of artistic and cultural production as the exhibition “The Sun Taught Me That History Is Not Everything ” seeks to do. But, unlike its predecessor “South by Southeast,” subjects such as “immigration and refugees,” appear as a pressing contemporary issue to be addressed within a broader rubric. Once the character of the local is in place, the positionality of subjects can then be distinguished in relation to its correspondences, affinities, and distinctions with other localities. In this way, a mapping between and across localities exceeds the limits of the local—without collapsing into the global—enabling broader issues and urgencies that impinge upon the daily character of everyday life to be addressed, regardless of national boundaries. The breadth of these issues was an ambitious undertaking to cover in one exhibition and the work chosen by Fonseca explores some of these issues, seeking visual correspondences to the historically dense subjects as outlined. Furthermore, a number of these issues have been explored through certain exhibition projects developed over the last 20 years. Harald Szeemann’s seminal 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) in 1969 was perhaps the first of these in developing international exhibitions that looked across different places in 8 Raphael Fonseca, The Sun Taught Me That History Is Not Everything. Hong Kong: Osage Foundation. Op.cit.

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Northern Europe and America. More than that it challenged the European and North American essentialism and universalism, following the emergent new forms of internationalism and issues of globalization. Then, the Walker Art Center, presented the exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, curated by Philippe Vergne and colleagues Douglas Fogle and Olukemi Ilesanmi in 2003. The exhibition selected 28 emerging artists from Brazil, South Africa, China, Japan, Turkey, India, and the United States.9 Both these exhibitions and others that followed, challenged the idea of globalism, suggesting horizontal lines of connectivity, across regions and continents. In this regard, such exhibitions also reflected changes in the way contemporary art had begun to be seen. A good example of this was Eastern Europe that, in the 1990s, was redefining itself in the context of a post-Soviet era (as discussed in Chapter 2). But, this process of redefinition was not by geographical or for social reasons but rather, first and foremost, was shaped by political and economic factors. This was critical in distinguishing features of post-Soviet countries and their respective cultures that shared a Soviet past. National distinctions were understood as no longer the basis of comparison but, a point of reference. In the opening essay to Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, Boris Groys wrote: Can this art be said to possess a distinct character? Is it possible to speak about Eastern European art as a cultural phenomenon that crosses the borders of individual national cultures and unifies, to a certain degree, the Eastern European cultural space—being at the same time distinctive from that of other regions. Indeed, the Eastern European cultural space is extremely heterogeneous… In fact, there is only one cultural experience that unites all Eastern European countries and at the same time differentiates them from the outer world—it is the experience of Communism of the Soviet type.10

9 The 2003 exhibition followed Harald Szeemann’s seminal 1969 exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form.’ 10 Boris Groys, ‘Haunted by Communism’, in Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, edited Phoebe Adler and Duncan McCorquodale, London, UK: Black Dog publishing, 2010, p. 18. See also my discussion of this subject in ‘The Specter of the Soviet Union,’ in di’van, No. 2, 2017, pp. 28–41.

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Part Two As discussed in Chapter 2, Piotrowski observed, reflecting on the “global turn” in the humanities, that the type of locality related to the structure of nation-states and the modernist form of nationalism “is now changing on account of the process of globalization,” specifically with “the transformation of nation-states into more cosmopolitan organisations.”11 The concept of universalism, and its underlying principle of modernism, had given rise to a vertical and revisionist history of art, oriented around the center–periphery distinction. In its place, Piotrowski had proposed a horizontal approach, raising issues of locality and difference, rather than a universal reading of contemporary art. Piotrowski’s concept of horizontality accommodates the concept of “contemporaneity,” providing a comparative means of evaluating contemporary practices. However, despite his enthusiasm at the time, Piotrowski was still hesitant to accept the loss of locality as an identity marker. On the one hand, the nation seen from a postmodern perspective is deprived of its essential features. On the other, a postcolonial scholarly practice relies on the essence of the nation in order to define its critical strategy and resistance to “the centre.” By using an international horizontal art history, Piotrowski argued, one could still use the notion of the local in defense of the (national) subject. In this regard, the concept of geography becomes critical. But this required rethinking geography and, as Irit Rogoff wrote in Terra Infirma: Geography is at one and the same time a concept, a sign system and an order of knowledge established at the centers of power… Geography as an epistemic category is in turn grounded in issues of positionality, in questions of who has the power and authority to name, of who has the power and authority to subsume others into its hegemonic identity. Critical activity which locates geography as its field therefore pursues an active form of unnaming, renaming and the revising of such power structures in terms of the relations between subjects and places.12

11 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History’, Umeni/Art, Vol. 56, Issue 5, 2008, pp. 378–383. 12 Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture. London & New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 21.

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The two parts of this chapter extend Piotrowski’s question of horizontality in different ways in terms of borders and margins and an exploration of artists whose lives and work bridge two countries. The question for me was, does their location make a difference to the character of their work? Is there a specificity in each work determined by where it has been made? Does their place of birth and upbringing determine and shape their work? Or, is it memory and place that ultimately shapes an artist’s work, as one of many factors influence a person’s life and work. The importance of materiality was also essentially important to each of these artists in different ways. In this regard, Georgia, for example, was important wherever the work by an artist from Georgia is made. For some it has to do with aspects of the cultural history and traditions in Georgia, seen by the breadth of artisanal traditions which have remained strong throughout the country. For others, the sense of materiality is tied to installation practices that have been a major part of contemporary art internationally. This materiality allows an artist to combine both an international language of form with the specificity of the local.

Part One: Perception and Memory The first part “Perception and Memory” considers the work of Alicja Kwade (Polish/German, 1979) and Nino Kvrivishvili (Georgian/Russian, 1984), two artists each of whom experienced growing up in Eastern Europe and then expanding their working lives more broadly another.13 What distinguishes these two artists is that their art appears simple but, on closer looking over time, our perception of the work changes. The works are neither completely stripped of their function nor material form. Rather, now isolated in a different space, that these objects gain a new meaning. What becomes evident as we look more closely is the degree of manual labor used to craft these objects and work on paper. This characterizes a strong strand of twentieth-century art, from the objet trouve to work of the 1960s, where the details, intricacies, and subtleties of a work

13 Part One of this chapter began as an essay for the catalogue for the exhibition Reflected Positions curated by the Office for Art in Berlin by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher in collaboration with Irena Popiashvili for the Kunsthalle Tbilisi at the State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia (October 25–November 30, 2019). Special thanks to Nino Kvrivishvili and Irina Popiashvili.

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that reveals itself with more time. Art becomes an experience of a concentrated looking. It is about human perception and memory, what we see and make sense of. In the hands of an artist, they become signifiers. Born in Katowice, Kwade went to Berlin to study sculpture at Berlin’s University of the Arts at the age of 19 in 1998. While she was there, she did an exchange for one year at Chelsea College of Arts in London, England, graduating in 2005.14 While based in Berlin, Kwade began to produce a series of works that manipulated common materials like wood, glass, and copper through chemical processes to explore the structure and ephemerality of the physical world and our perception of reality, of time and space in our everyday life. In an interview with the Art Review magazine, she responded: I’m trying to see what could be the structure of reality. I mean, we’re living on a ball that’s flying around. That’s crazy. Imagining that, everything is kind of possible. Because we can’t understand it anyway. We’re just animals, our brains are too small. Trying to understand the situation we’re all in, is kind of incredible.15

Die Gesamtheit aller Orte (The Totality of all Places, 2012) was made of 54 pieces: metal plates, metal pipes, metal mesh, perforated metal, metal rails, steel plates, steel bar, copper tubes, brass rings, brass rods, euro coins, wood moldings, wood panels, glass panels, mirrors, door, bricks, bicycles, door, window, lacquer, and rust. A bulb was swinging from a very long cord (14.5-meter) in a dark space, the windy, whooshing sounds of the swinging bulb were amplified to dramatic effect. It was calibrated to shift its swinging axis against the earth’s eastern rotation, something Kwade worked out with professors and engineers. As she says 14 Recent selected Solo Exhibitions of Kwade include: ParaPivot, The Roof Garden

Commission, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The Resting Thought, Centre De Creation Contemporaine Olivier Debre, Tours, France (2019); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland and Materia, Per Ora, Fondazione Giuliani, Roma, Italy (2018); ReReason, YUZ Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Medium Median, Whitechapel Gallery, London; de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, (2016); Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Germany; Hector Prize, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany; Public Art Fund, New York; Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt, Germany; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany (2015), Recent Selected group exhibitions: Hayward Gallery, London, (2018) 57th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Venice, (2017); Me, Schirn Kunstalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2016). 15 Kimberly Bradley, Alicja Kwade London: Art Review, December, 2013.

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“I’m fascinated with the borders between science and suspicion. All the in-betweens.” For the inauguration of Johann König’s new gallery in Kreuzberg in the following Spring 2013, Kwade installed Nach Osten (To the East, 2013) in which she took Michel Foucault’s pendulum concept and translated it into a bright light bulb, swinging from a very long (14.5–meter) cord through a very dark space. The effect was “whooshing sounds amplified to dramatic effect. It’s an idea Kwade had been waiting to execute, but hadn’t been able to do in smaller spaces. The bulb was calibrated to shift its swinging axis against the earth’s eastern rotation, something Kwade worked out with professors and engineers. The vernissage was a spectacular show of sharp shadows and sound, attended by hundreds, and talked about for weeks afterward.”16 Another work of this period entitled Option (2014) is simply two cut beams that are paired together, both resting next to each other against the wall. Except for their length, they look almost identical but, on closer viewing, we realize one is wooden and the other bronze, discovering through repetition, the play and openness of visual perception and form. Kwade’s first solo public art commission in the United States, Against the Run, was in 2015. Curated by Nicholas Baume, director of the Public Art Fund. An installation of a 16-feet-tall aluminum timepiece at the entrance to Central Park, New York. The clock’s face moved counterclockwise while the hour and minute hands turned in the opposite direction. Running backward and forward simultaneously, the clock still managed to keep the correct time. The minute and hour hands will function normally, and the clock will always indicate the correct time despite simultaneously running in reverse. For Against the Run, Kwade has completely subverted the normal, everyday experience of telling time, a learned task that becomes second nature. As Baume writes “We find it very hard to process that information if it’s given to us differently…We expect it to behave in a certain way, and when it doesn’t it’s kind of more confusing than it should be, simply because we’re perceptually and conceptually bound by conventions.” “What Kwade’s work does,” as Baume suggests “is to break a lot of the systems that govern our lives and are quite arbitrary.”17 A similar play with time is to be found with

16 Kimberly Bradley, ibid. 17 Nicholas Baume cited by Sarah Cascone, Artnet News Online, August 20, 2015.

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her work In-Between (2018). It is simply a drawing of a watch-hand horizontally across a page, sequentially marking the progression of time, or a series of candles stumps forming a circle, suggesting an endless repetition of past moments. A more recent exhibition “In Between Glances” was at the MIT LIST center in Boston Massachusetts (October 18, 2019–January 5, 2020) included an installation entitled Light Touch of Totality. The installation was made up of five stainless steel rings, each about 16 feet in diameter at various angles and points of contact. The rings were representative of both planetary rings and longitudinal lines. Curtains of stringed beads were hung from different parts of the rings and angulated slightly with the movement of the air in the room. The rings are representative of both planetary rings and longitudinal lines, while the beads represent units of information. Born in 1984, Nino Kvrivishvili studied textile design at the State Academy of Arts in Tbilisi before working in Europe, especially in Lithuania and Germany, and eventually returning to Tbilisi. Between 2014 and 2018, she did a number of residencies.18 After one of these, her residency in Klaipeda in 2014, Kvrivishvili produced a body of work she then exhibited as Exile’s Suitcase. The work was composed of a series of silk paintings and a small suitcase as a ready-made. As she wrote, the designs of the silk paintings were reminiscent of simple housing structures. In a short concept of her work at the time, she wrote: Exile’s suitcase tells the story about humans who are leaving the countries and are going far away from their birthplace. They experience lots of difficulties, especially when they are forced to be migrated or exiled. The simple pieces of silk paintings give a visual depiction of the architecture of Klaipeda as a virtual tool illustrating people’s personal identity.19

For Nino Kvrivishvili, objects have always sparked the remembrance of things: a ceramic plate, a piece of black fur, old cardboard boxes, a string of lights or Christmas tree decorations and old postcards. As such 18 Kvrivishvili’s ‘Artist-in-residencies’ include in 2018: Museum Kunst der Westküste MKdW, Alkersum, Föhr, (Germany) and Frauenkulturburo NRW, Dusseldorf and Goch, (Germany); an Artist in residence -Foundation BINZ39, Zurich, Switzerland (2016/2017 ); Achterhaus Residency, Hamburg, Germany (2015) and Klaipeda Cultural Communication Center, Klaipeda, Lithuania (2014). 19 Newsletter, Klaipeda Cultural Communication Center, Klaipeda, Lithuania, 2014.

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Kvrivishvili’s work resonates with the tradition of the objet trouve but with a specificity. She personalizes the gesture with the use of a family belonging that is embedded with personal history and then placed in another context. Seen outside of their everyday context these mundane objects gain new resonance, embedded with memories and stories. Before the advent of the textile industry, rugs had been woven in almost all regions of Georgia. Kvrivishvili has always wanted to work with textiles and produced both handwoven and painted textiles, connected with women and the working industry. Working with textile installations, Kvrivishvili’s recent projects are focused on processes of changes, investigation of history and inverting them in a new reality with colors, shapes, patterns, and textures. Most of her textile works constitute by depiction of abstract images and are charged with narrative meaning, unlocking its latent stories. As such, she shows how images and materials unfold through history by transforming traditional textile making into contemporary art both formally and conceptually. One example of this was a woven receipt 12 pyb. 50 kop. (2015). The work uses or mimics receipts from Soviet times, playing with the official stamps and inscriptions on receipts. They are woven writings and in 2015 she held a one-person exhibition Width (Xipina) 126 ± 2 cm at Galerie Melike Belir in Hamburg. An installation of handmade textiles, the works were executed in wool, linen, and hemp based on the textilemaking traditions in Georgia and former Soviet countries. They represent the old patterns from the Soviet textile industry as the historical data. Starting with hand weaving textile technique and later continuing with it’s industrialization era textile production had a significant influence on the development of the light industry in Georgia. In the mid of twentieth century the Soviet period machines which made the manufacturing processes more efficient and faster developed new perspectives of textiles striving to evolve different techniques and styles. Thus, inspired by the narratives of the surrounding textiles, mill stories, feminine work that occupied a specific place in the political economy of Georgia, Nino Kvrivishvili came up to her handwoven works made in old technique where images depict the characteristics of the Soviet period light industry, as a tool for contemporary textile-making process. The title of the exhibition: “xipina” (Width) is one of the characteristics she uses for measuring the size of the work, to indicate how fabric could have been increased or reduced during the production. Patterns from the textile industrial history woven into her works describe the

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weight, quantity of produced pieces, date of production, and fixed price— which had been officially set by the economic policies of the Soviet government. Accordingly in her installation, the artist shows us the works with these symbols, and as a result exposes her approach to past soviet textile production as an art. Another good example of such an inscription is Story as a Woven Carpet (2018–2019), composed of 3 works: 2 woven wool pieces and 1 black felt rectangle. The handwoven tapestry with black carpet abstract details, as well as artists’ name and date of its completion, tell the history of its creation. The story behind the wool and material she used to make the piece is a testament to the real-life story. The artist bought a piece of an old rug from a Tushetian shepherd who was selling it to buy Nabadi (a kind of felt winter coat shepherds wear in the mountains). In return, Kvrivishvili bought the wool from the shepherd and weaved the story with abstract elements in her carpet. She also made felt works that resemble large-scale abstract paintings. Later in 2019, she would make Black (rectangular felt), a piece of wool that, at first, looks like a large monochrome painting, reminiscent of Ad Reinhardt. In 2019 Kvrivishvili continued to explore the objet trouve with a series of works called “Do you want to live in Paradise?” that were part of the recent exhibition “Reflected Positions.” Nino’s work is not about a nostalgia for a past but about family and their histories. Much of what she showed was based on a biographical story of her grandmother and people coming to the city of Gori in Georgia in the 1950s and working in the textile industry. They had experienced the War and were seeking to begin a new life in a new city. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, many industries had closed down in Georgia and people returned to their home country. Many of those people had left behind their personal belongings in Georgia, with the hope that one day they would return. The belongings of such families in Gori were left with her grandmother, Raisa Zatyukova, who was one of those people who had settled in Gori when she was eighteen. Her private belongings reminded Nino of her childhood. With Black Fur (2019), for example, Nino used a piece of grandmother’s fur that she had worn when first coming to Georgia in the winter of 1953 from Ivanovo in Russia having lived there from her first years, after her hometown of Kalinin had been bombed. Nino placed it in an upright cardboard box like a jewel found in the midst of debris. These boxes recall her seeing such boxes used by people to store their possessions and, such boxes stand for this experience of perpetual displacement.

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In work of 2019, Nino has continued along a similar path of retrieval, finding objects that once removed or isolated from their original context take on a life of their own. New Year is Different (2019) uses the original paper box and the wrapped Christmas decorations inside, while the work I Remember only Colors (2019) uses wood and Christmas decoration. Likeness (2019) is a work of gypsum, a diptych, each with fringes and one of which has a b/w photo of a woman with a crane. The other 2 works include photos that had come from her family in Gori. Daugavas kraces (2019) with a riverscape, the other I dreamed of grapes, (2019), a reproduction of a painting of a woman with grapes. A recent work Incidents (of Travel) was made in 2020 with curator Tara McDowell. Exploring various places in Tbilisi characterized as Spring itinerary through the city’s former silk industry and the heart of Nino’s practice, the tour took place via a screen in Australia as Georgia emerged from lockdown. As Kvrivishvili wrote after the state of emergency had been lifted because of the coronavirus pandemic: I first imagined this itinerary as a conversation that could be told through the city and my work, the textiles and materials familiar to me. As times passes, I notice that I grow closer to and believe in the city in which I live. I want to lead you to places that somehow preserve their unique value, that make a new form of history, and that have been important to my practice.20

Kvrivishvili’s work reminds us of a significant strand of modernism in which objects were recycled and the objet trouve. This begins with Picasso’s collages, Duchamp’s ready-mades, and Tatlin’s counter-reliefs and continued later with the art of assemblage in the 1960s and the more recent recycled art movement having to do with debris, trash, and consumerism. Alternatively, the art of the 1960s also raised issues around objecthood, as with the work of both Arte Povera and Mono-ha. Art Povera was a group of Italian avant-garde painters and sculptors who used industrial and organic materials—slate, wax, coal, water, neon, earth, fire, and felt— or ephemeral materials and found objects, including worthless materials, like soil, bits of wood, rags, and scraps of newspaper. Their favored materials were ephemeral. Mono-ha (School of Things) emerged in Tokyo in 20 Incidents (of Travel), exhibition Brochure, 2020.

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the mid-1960s whose artists explored the encounter between natural and industrial materials, such as stone, steel plates, glass, light bulbs, cotton, sponge, paper, wood, wire, rope, leather, oil, and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states. The works focus as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves. Another side to this is the recycling of objects that embody personal or social histories. Christian Boltanski (1944) is a key artist to mention in this regard with his installation Monument Odessa, of which there were three versions made in 1988, 1990, and 1991. There was also a large installation at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto. Boltanski had bought a massive amount of old clothing he had found in local secondhand stores, and exhibited them together with photographs of victims of the Holocaust, to retell the history of the Jewish holocaust.21 What distinguishes Kvrivishvili’s work is her use of objects from her own family (i.e. fur, Christmas decoration, trinkets, photos), along with disposable objects, like paper cardboard boxes in order to recapture the history and memories of her family. Materials and objects that were to be discarded or thrown away as valueless retain a memory of an event, a time past. Their recovery becomes not so much a recycling of objects and making of new work but, rather the singular attention given to its very existence as if it embodies the physical presence of individuals and families.

Part Two As Boris Groys wrote: the socialist alternative (for post-Communist artists) is not only a utopian, idyllic dream project into the future but, also a nostalgic and simultaneous traumatic memory of their recent past. In this sense, it is simultaneously utopian and dystopian. Today the art scene is a place of emancipatory projects and participative practices but, also a place of memories of the social catastrophes and disappointments of the revolutionary twentieth century. In this context Eastern

21 For a detailed account see Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

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European (or post-Russian art) plays an important role because the revolutionary past is its own past. Just as the demise of Eastern European Socialist regimes left a vast territory and resources for private appropriation, the simultaneous death of Socialist humanity left a vast empire of feelings, a huge emotional estate released for individual artistic appropriation.22

Such artists, as I have discussed, show the capacity of contemporary art to explore issues of the construction of history and “war of memory” and the inequalities of both gender and ethnicity that govern our lives. Not only the continuing presence of Russia but the chronic lack of a local infrastructure, of resources, and support for contemporary art in almost all these countries needs to be recognized as issues to overcome in order to make possible their cultural development. To say East is West is both a provocation and reminder of the kinds of differences that had been used to characterize the world, most especially from the Modern Imperial Era of the sixteenth century on. In the twentieth century, these differences were etched again in the imagination of peoples as ideological, defining a people’s subservience under the banner of the national championed by totalitarian regimes. The end of an era we may say, with reference to 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, a period following the Ottoman Empire. It is true that there has been an enormous influx of peoples from “Eastern” countries, of those parts of the World into the “West,” reminding us of the history of such terms that, while historically informed, have been more recently driven by the political economy of globalization. And yet, perhaps too, these historical lines of demarcation and difference have been also shaped by changes and imperatives of survival and by the character of social formation, of individual perception as much as the shared geography of their lives. This is the provocation. Can we then simply say the East is West? Perhaps, not quite. What is important to recognize in the work of these three women artists is that they do not fetishize their homeland or origin, as if preparing the ground in order to sell it off to the voracious global marketplace. This is not to say they abandon their cultural point of references that they

22 ‘Haunted by Communism’, Introduction Boris Groys in Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, edited Phoebe Adler and Duncan McCorquodale. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010, pp. 20–21. Cited in my ‘The Specter of the Soviet Union’ Melbourne: Di’van, No. 2, pp. 28–41.

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are most familiar with, in which they have grown as artists and which they nurture as an integral reference to their practice and to being in the world. Rather, it is quite the opposite, for each of them seek to share differences as a point of exchange, a conversation, not a line of demarcation. These three women artists are brought together to provoke this subject of discussion. Each of their works explore the line between biography/autobiography, between the individual/social, to rearticulate, reconstruct if not then to redefine the concept of a shared community. Their work is animated by an energy that seeks to open up, to share, and at times transform distinctions and differences. This is played out through the performative, through a relation to and interaction with their audience. The performative demanding its subject to stage the “now” time, a demand that calls upon an immediate engagement with an audience, a shared space. And yet while performance unites them, they take three paths that, in their winding and unfolding are parallel in movement. Through the focus on the performative, on physicality, on the body, each of them takes the everyday as a recurrent point of departure. What is given by each, what we see or observe are performances of the everyday, small gestures and rituals constructed through various forms of technique such as duration and repetition. Through this means, they create a symbolic narrative of the everyday. In this regard, the work shares certain forms with an older generation of performance artists, a generation that shaped the character and condition of contemporary art from the 60s onward. On the one hand, this younger generation is less engaged with the kind of extreme challenges that artists like Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Yoko Ono, Valerie Export, or Marina Abramovic brought to their audience. On the other hand, this present generation continues to emphasize the body, on its immediate presentness and on its shared conventions and limits or boundaries that shape its survival in the everyday. Arthur Danto writes of this in his essay “Danger and Disturbation: The Art of Marina Abramovic”.23 Danto likens the character of “presence” to that of a metaphysics of art and to the discourse on icons. We see this most clearly in the films of Soviet director Andre Tarkovsky, some of whose work was powerfully informed by icon painting and writing of the great Russian theoretician Pavel Florensky. This creation

23 Arthur Danto, Marina Abramovic, The Artist as Present. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010, p. 29.

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of a space, a performative space of the body, that encircles both the performer and audience, is what unites these women artists. The bringing together of these artists is based on their sharing of the Eastern European experience as a common source of reference if not inspiration for the subject of their work. But then such is the character of much of contemporary art that the concept of their practice is not overdetermined by the country of origin of the artist nor the place of their residence or practice. Perhaps, it is all three but if so, complex enough to not be dominated by any one factor. This second part explores the work of 3 artists from Eastern Europe who live in Western Europe. These are Nezaket Ekicici (Kirshir, Turkey, 1970), Natalia Mali Makhachkala, (Dagestan 1971), and Mariana Vassileva (Bulgaria, 1964). This dual experience has allowed them to explore the line between autobiographical/biographical, the individual/social, to rearticulate and redefine, the concept of a shared community.

Part Three Nezaket Ekici moved from Turkey to Germany in 1973. Ekici leads her audience to imagine a space in which to share an experience that borders on pain or a dreamworld, the unimagined, that crosses the borders of difference, transgressing them at times, collapsing these cultural differences through the intimacy of her performance. She creates this performative space of action, of interaction, using her body in the most mundane, everyday gestures and actions. Drawing from the everyday, through a performative reading, she creates a metonymic form of the everyday. The performance creates a space for the audience to go beyond the immediate everyday. Through an emotional attunement, her work suspends the relation of the audience and individual to the real, of the grounding to matter of identity or the materiality of the contextual. In 2008, Ekici presented a Performance installation “Atropos” at the Sinop Biennale, Turkey in 2008.24 With a duration of 1 hour, Ekici works on the act of liberation in an abstract way. Tied up with rope and hooks, she carries out an act of self-liberation, while she frees herself by separating 24 Located near the coast of the Black Sea the northwest part of Cape Sinop, Turkey, the city of Sinop is famous for its fortress that became a prison. The city was refounded as a Greek Colony.

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her hair with the help of scissors. She cuts herself from long ropes fastened at the roof and from her hair. Cutting off a part of her hair, she dissociates from a piece of herself. “Atropos ” is related to the Greek myth of the Moirae, the three goddesses of fate. Atropos, who is one of the Moirae, splits according to the myth the fate threads of life with scissors. The work can also be seen as a vital discussion about the question being held in a prison, characterizing the striving for freedom of former inhabitants. Particularly, because hair can be considered as a symbol of life. The body of the artist becomes a kind of puppet, locked up in herself, knowing, it is up to her to free herself. As she is now tied up, the artist shows a way out by yanking out and cutting her hair. She takes fate into her own hands and frees herself. This performance shows out, that everyone can free himself from the fate threads, like Atropos did.

Part Four Natalia Mali (Dagastan 1971) lives and works in London, having been born in Dagastan. She graduated from Yale School of Art and Architecture, USA (1999), majoring in film and photography. Eight years later, she completed her M.A. in Performance Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2007), submitting her thesis on Performance and Culture. Mali has been producing cross-disciplinary projects combining photography, video, performance-based installation art, and, more recently, collage/photo montage. Her predominantly research-based practice is focused on historical narratives and representation. Rooted in postfeminist discourse, Mali’s work addresses the construction of identity and explores the clash of values between the Islamic conservative traditionalism of her native land (Dagestan) and Western pluralism, advocating women’s rights, emancipation, and empowerment. Having dubbed herself a postcolonial hybrid, Mali probes into cultural definitions of freedom and self-expression and examines contemporary collective identity. Mali’s oeuvre builds on found objects and materials, such as archival photographs, traditional patterns, designs and ethnic traditional dress, jewelery, and weaponry. This is what forms her visual repertoire, replete with collective memories, cultural artifacts, historical upheavals, and social contradictions. In a found location in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, Mali

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has made three performances for camera A Solution, Obliterating Ablution, and The Seven Circles. Performed in 2019, Mali invents ritual as an embodiment of herself as a woman. In A Solution, we watch her in a derelict abandoned room, placing a ladder next to a piano against the wall, which she climbs on top of and then lies down in solitude. This is followed by Obliterating Ablution, in which she sits in the same room, with its broken chandelier, pouring water over her hair into a bucket. And then in The Seven Circles, she sifts flour onto the floor around where she has been sitting between the piano and chandelier. She does it seven times, making seven circles around her. Mali’s more recent work distinguishes itself from her earlier work. It has become more powerful in its singular focus on the everyday. Sometimes, her singular action is repeated. Together, the performances extend the spontaneity of everyday gestures, almost to the point of an understated absurdity. Shot in one take without voice, the video performances are a study in observation: slow-moving, measured, controlled. Accompanying the videos is sound that draws upon traditional African music Kalimba, festive Japanese drum bit Taiko, and an Indian Raga improvisation. For the last few years, I am being captivated by various national dances, elements of which coming from different cultures but often related. I am talking about body movements, ritualistic, sacral dance from a cultural point of view.25

In an artistic statement, written around 2014, she spoke of how: Contemporary art often represents itself as a zone in which freedom of experimentation, innovation and self-fulfilment is the acceptable norm. As an artist I have continually returned to the fundamental ideas of cultural identity, sexuality, semiology, linguistics and feminism, as well as the position and interpretation of women and their perception of themselves in contemporary society, both in the developed world and today’s expanding economies.26

25 Correspondence with Natalia Mali, July 5, 2020. 26 Written statement by Natalia Mali, 2005.

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There is a theatricality and artifice about the performances. Through this style of their presentation, Mali is able to focus on the deliberate movement of the figure of the woman, continuing her exploration of the everyday life of women. It is as if through the act of lying on a piano, she is submitting herself to solitude or to performing the act of ablution, as if ritualistically cleansing herself or performing a ritual of walking around a circle seven times, as if invoking the sacred. Mali’s last two video films were based on the dance performances for the camera which she choreographed and performed herself. The first was in Barcelona in 2019. The second dance performance was held in Makhachkala in early February 2020. Natalia Mali, British artist of Dagestani descent, was invited by the Museum of Makhachkala City History, reproducing her personal story in the form of body narrative. “The Energy of Survival. A Return” consists of a series of urban interventions, live performances, and video installations. As reported in Russian art and Culture: Touching the native, but already unrecognizable city with its modern injuries and its energy; “synchronizing” with the cultural memory of the ancient people of the Caucasus – through this the artist returns to the place of discontinuity and vulnerability. This becomes a strong sensory experience, a long-awaited, liberating embrace of a little girl, a strong woman, the city, the past and the present.27

All of Natalia Mali’s urban interventions are documented on camera as stage performances and assembled into one video accompanied by music written especially for the project by renowned composer Aziza Sadykova. This film was presented during the opening of the exhibition, where the artist performed live in the Museum. The personal story of the artist’s reunion with her homeland, a place of power, is already woven into the history of art in the city of Makhachkala with streams of energy and love. The format of the museum becomes one of the territories that the artist has chosen to exhibit, the one in which she survives. Presence, both real and virtual, is an important semantic component that combines video art, choreography, and performance. Mali in her characteristic aesthetics creates a musical score for the dance, drawing a new “ornament” of her life with body language. She writes: 27 ‘The Energy of Survival. A Return,’ Russian art and Culture on 23 February 20.

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The main drama of this project is the clash of two themes, although perhaps this time there will be more. A lot of topics have accumulated over time, especially when it comes to performing in the city and place of my origin, my historical motherland. This is the implementation of memory, the implementation of one’s own reality, and the conflict between memory and oblivion in addition to the gender prison, which is transmitted only with your genetic code… With dreams I am immersed into temporary oblivion and this is how I’ve come to love working in my dreams. My dreams are usually colorful, refined, ambiguous and sometimes dramatic. Very often they show me the plot of my new performance. This time, I dream of eagerly hugging a little girl. Hmm, I think, perhaps in my next performance I will be hugging myself. The little, untamed girl from Makhachkala, born on Kirova street. The one who was taken away by an old red Lada, having crammed her memory of the past into the trunk. I think that the time has come to reconnect with my own self, but for this it is essential to return and reconnect with my birthplace.28

Part Five It is difficult to define with any singularity the practice of Mariana Vassileva’s work. She moved to Berlin after leaving Bulgaria at the time when the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1989, studied pedagogy and psychology at Veliko Turnovo University then Leipzig studying theater. Then, she continued her education at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. One of the meetings that gave her great encouragement was with Sol Le Witt, the New York artist. She worked for about three years in scenography for a film company, drawing large-format mountain- and cityscapes for film backdrops and then became an artist full-time. From the 1990s, Vassileva has developed an impressive range of work from watercolors, videos, wall installations (of mirror and glass), sculpture, and, most recently, film.29 Yet, we cannot rigidly divide her work 28 Correspondence with the artist. 29 Vassileva has participated in exhibitions at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

(Canada), Tate Britain (UK), Centre Pompidou/Paris, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Edition Block, Berlin, The Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Total Museum, Seoul, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong. She has also participated in several Biennials, such as the 17th Biennale of Sydney, the 4th Moscow Biennale of

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according to media but, rather see their interrelatedness. In fact, her range of practice continues expanding to incorporate new media and different forms. Throughout this wide-ranging body of work, Vassileva has sought to capture ordinary incidents of everyday life, at times with a wry and at other times, a melancholic, if not dark humor. Her actions are informed by the observation of the incidental, almost seemingly casual, occurrence that provokes a space for meditating on time and on an unbounded space that exceeds the transient nature of everyday life. The sense of this space is like an imagined possibility that energizes the characters beyond the physical or mundane of everyday actions. This create an interaction with the audience, a form of sentient communication with others or with the immediate world around them. And, even though this is, at times, driven by a sense of solitariness, the work of Vassileva seeks to bring it into a shared space as a form of meditation, a self-reflexive relation to being in the world. Engaging with the work of Vassileva, we experience a kind of lyrical anthropology of the self and the rhythms of everyday life which appear to be different or singular in its relations to the commonplace norm of everyday life. This is measured by a sense of humor, of an irony that seeks to share such differences lightly. We may say, such work is offered as a form of gift, a space in which to see and experience the world differently and hence the possibility of seeing the world anew. Her sculptural practice began to take shape in 2007, moving from wall installations to freestanding figures, forms made in various materials. In that year she completed four sculptural works, not having made any before. Three of the four works were cast in bronze: Speed Formel (begun in 2004), Landscape, The Woman Who Turns Seven Times, and Joey, made of mixed media. The bronze sculptures are elegant, abstract figures, either standing or in repose, recalling Brancusi in their spare abstracted contours. Speed Formel suggests a long low chair, Landscape a long, reclining female figure, reminiscent of an African chair

Contemporary art, Moscow, Biennale Vento Sul in Curitiba, Brasil, 1° Bienal del Fin del Mundo and Bienal al Fin del Mundo, Ushuaia. 2007. Some of her works are part of the Collections of: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Rene Block Collection, Berlin, Koc Museum, Istanbul, The Israel Museum/Israel, La Caixa/ Caja de Ahorros de El Monte y Fundacion el Monte/Spain, Lemaitre, London-Paris, Kunsthalle in Emden/Germany, Lidice Memorial, several private collections.

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and The Woman Who Turns Seven Times stands tall at 200 cm, pirouetting with its corkscrew legs in the ground. Joey, on the other hand, is a freestanding, provocative figure, providing an example of Vassileva’s understated humor. A somewhat androgynous figure stands covered by their long straight hair down to his/her thighs. In the middle, a gold-covered thumb points out from under the hair, suggestive of a phallus. In 2009 Vassileva, while continuing her earlier glass and mirror wall installations, finished a sculpture called Balance. A black-cloaked mannequin figure precariously balances on the top of a chair. Leaning over, it reaches out for a light bulb that hangs near the wall. As with much of Vassileva’s work, the scene is both commonplace and disturbing, provoking a wry smile, as one might recall memories of such an occasion. We may be provoked to say that there is a fine balance between achieving a desired action or failing to do so. At this point, one may reflect, this is how life is: experiencing that point which can tip over to one side of the other: a point of equilibrium in the movement of aspiration. Success can be reached, but involves, in the process, overcoming the challenges, the doubts, the past. It needs, in short, a precarious reaching out beyond oneself. Yet, Bulgaria always remains Vassileva’s home, even though she has been based in Berlin for the past twenty-five years. Every year she goes back visiting her mother, who lives in the north of the country. From this perspective, as suggested in the early video Journal, (1990-2005), reflects a world outside or beyond where she is. When I first wrote of Vassileva’s video practice, I referred to an early work, a video piece entitled Journal made between 1990 and 2005.30 Disarmingly straightforward, the essential character of the video offers a touchpoint for understanding her work in general. Begun soon after her arrival in Germany only to be finished years later, the video is composed of a continuous shot of herself running her hand along a fence that separates one side from the other. This creates a sense of physical separation. Moreover, Journal is a loop that suggests an endlessness. The camera films her hand on the fence as a loop endlessly repeating itself, a gesture that endlessly repeats itself, a story that never finishes. Sight, or to see 30 Vassileva, email correspondence 5 January 20. See my essay ‘Being in the World’ Exhibition: Mariana Vassileva: Solo Video 2000–2012. Casal Soleric, Fundacion Palma Espacai d’Art, 2012.

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beyond oneself, we might say, is measured by the barbed wire fence along which she walks. Disempowered, sight offers the illusion of plenitude, but nothing more. It reveals nothing more than its own repetition and the persistent yet frustrated desire of its subject (the artist-protagonist) to touch. Recalling the Cartesian phrase “I think therefore I am,” Vassileva wrote in relation to the video: “I feel therefore I am. In this regard, the skin acts as the frontier between the individual and our surroundings. Touch confirms our existence.” She cites the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and his appeal toward another as a means of confirming oneself. But this is questioned by Vassileva. She continues: “All relationships are transitive. I touch an object, and I see another person, but I am not that person. I am completely alone.”31 The sense of the other, in fact, exposes for her the solitariness of the individual. For her, there is always the promise of community, but it is a promise that is subject to the dis-symmetries of daily life, the boundaries, borders around us, the nonnarratives that disallow the possibility of communion. To be taken out of the self—the comfort zone of the self—to be other is the primary challenge for an artist. Part of this anxiety is the result of growing up in a repressive socialist government in Bulgaria. Nevertheless, as Vassileva remarks: “Questioning and insecurity give us the possibility for new ways of seeing, thinking and creating – in different ethic, aesthetic, political or social contexts. And, we hope, it is for the better as opposed to before.”32 That is the challenge: caught between being untethered and free to be able to explore the unknown or alternatively, to belong, to be part of a community of shared interest and mutual support. Boundaries are tacitly implied. Walking the boundary is the fine line between the known and unknown, the accepted and unaccepted in a manner that is resonant with a sense of balance. It comes back to her own situation, this movement between places, leaving behind the communist regime for the promise of Europe and united democratic Germany. And yet this promise also means the separation from her beloved family. Another life. The play between the autobiographical and biography, between the individual and the other, between personal and social needs,

31 Ibid. 32 Vassileva, email correspondence 5.01.2.

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and both memories and aspirations, are recurrent subjects throughout her work. In fact, there is a persistent sense of “otherness” that has been both a source of inspiration and the subject of her work. During her early years in Germany, Vassileva also made a number of other significant videos, including Jumping Man (2005), The Milk Maid (2006), Reflections (2006), Tango (2008) Traffic Police (2008), Toro (2008), and Lighthouse (2009). The emphasis is on the performative: small gestures and everyday rituals constructed through various forms of technique, such as duration and repetition, and the boundaries that shape our mundane survival through the everyday. The actions taken in Vassileva’s videos are informed by the observation of the incidental, almost seemingly casual, occurrence that provokes a space for meditating on time and on an unbounded space that exceeds the transient nature of everyday life. The sense of this space is an imagined possibility that energizes the characters beyond the physical or mundane of everyday actions. This creates an interaction with the audience, a form of sentient communication with others or with the immediate world around them. And, even though this is, at times, driven by a sense of solitariness, the work of the artist seeks to bring it into a shared space as a form of meditation, a self-reflexive relation to the world. The idea of community is captured in her video work Reflections (2006) in which a group of people can be seen to be relaxing on a grassy park slope in Berlin. Vassileva focuses her camera on each of them over time and they respond, reflecting the sunlight with mirrors to create a maze of light as in the stars of a clear night sky. Gradually more and more people are using hand mirrors creating a virtual symphony so that what appears is a radiating fusion, an almost “mystical light”.33 In a certain manner, it recalls this mystical experience captured by the painting “Starry Night” by Jean- François Millet in 1851 (ca.). The video by Vassileva is animated by an energy that seeks to open up, to share and transform distinctions and differences. This is played out through the performative, through a relation to and interaction with a public as a participating audience. Having arrived as individuals or separate groups, the public discovers a shared space between each other.

33 Ralf Bartholomäus, Mariana Vassileva. Berlin, catalogue. unpaginated.

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We may say, such work is offered as a form of gift, a space in which to see and experience the world differently and hence, the possibility of being oneself in the world. Toro (2008) films a man standing by the edge of the sea and as the waves roll in and crash along the shoreline he responds by using his cape as would a bullfighter. He responds to the ebb and flow of the sea, inviting it to pass through his cape rolling out along the sand, warding off as it runs back in retreat. There is little else to this video loop of five minutes. And yet, as becomes a form of signature style of the artist, Toro captures as Louise Ismert remarks “the solitary and senseless struggle of a man imitating a bullfighter’s movements… futile efforts to exert control and a refusal to acknowledge reality.”34 Engaging with the work of Vassileva, we experience a kind of lyrical anthropology of the self and the rhythms of everyday life that appear to be different or singular in its relations to the commonplace norm of everyday life. This is measured by an irony that seeks to share such differences lightly or a sense of humor as in Traffic Police (2008). In this video two policemen in Mexico City are filmed as they seek to conduct and control the movement and flow of traffic. As the camera focuses on their signals amidst the heavy movement of traffic, we can imagine a choreography of dancers on stage. In more recent videos Vassileva has brought a certain lightness and whimsy to her subject. Never carry two watermelons under one arm (2011) is punctuated by inter-texts that serve as sayings or proverbs that offer guidance in the conduct of every life. The video alternates between a watermelon being seen in different walks of life and the artist herself sitting quietly at a café table writing. In one such scene, the watermelon slowly makes its way across a street or along a dirt path that crosses a city park. The video ends with the melon sitting in an apartment hallway, followed by an inter-text “If you sit on the threshold you’ll never marry” and then the watermelon falling from the sky into the waiting arms of the artist and the inter-text “Everything good comes from above.” The wayward melon has found a home. The protagonists of Vassileva’s videos are either herself or ordinary people of the street, latter-day flaneurs who both Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin passionately observed and wrote about in regard to

34 See Mariana Vassileva. Berlin, catalogue, unpaginated.

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redefining the newly emerging lineaments of modernity. We are now at another time and place, perhaps still the protracted end of modernity as it was once defined and which bore a great deal of aspiration and hope. These are the nonnarratives of the ordinary that, in breaking the pattern of the everyday, expose if not propose how one might open up spaces of chance in order to find oneself in the world through a proximity to another. Vassileva has referred to Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum, and Francis Alys as contemporary artists who have impressed her. While comparisons or influences are in general illusive to pin down, each of these artists, at different points in their career, share an idiosyncratic approach of art-making. In particular Bourgeois throughout her career demonstrated a quirky, at times playful, almost perverse humor. Vassileva refers to Bourgeois’s ability “to work through her trauma – her own personal experience,” while admiring Hatoum’s “social–political engagement” and Aly’s ability to “transform everyday life” into artwork.35 In 2011, Vassileva made Puddle (2011). Composed of a slab of dark material (silicon) marked by tyre tracks over it, lies on the floor with a pool of dark water lies in its middle. Over the pool hangs a light bulb. She wrote: “One does not see the puddle on the black path, the silent landscape…In my childhood, the inhabitants from the small place were waiting for such a long time for the asphalt.”36 In fact, solitariness and companionship become the key subject of her sculptural work around this time. She makes My Old Friends (2011), a small cluster of four different sized walking sticks; Will they be friends one day? (2011) composed of two different nails hammered into the wall next to one another with its title handwritten below; Selfmade (2011) a wall sculpture of two hands stretched out, bound with barbed wire and Communication (2012) of two sculpted heads connected with one another by neon tubes followed by Hands (2013) with its two hands made of burnt wood, outstretched from the wall, holding a neon light cord. All disarmingly simple but, suggestive of a gesture of appeal toward others. These works stand in stark contrast to Puddle and then Break IN/Out: Breathing Light (2013), a grim-looking vertical, metal cage, free standing from ground to ceiling, with a light bulb hanging down inside.

35 Vassileva, email correspondence, 17 January 2017. 36 Vassileva, email correspondence, 11 January 2017

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A sense of a desolate sparseness suggests a visceral feeling of emptiness. She wrote at the time: I missed so many people, behavior, social communication, Landscapes, Places. I wanted to understand… but the time was so fast and there was a hole and some melancholic sadness in my stomach. We always miss something. The passage of our own life is just in some moments all, otherwise we never loved somebody, some place, some behavior before.37

Communication (2012), a sculpture of two heads facing one another connected by a circuit of neon lights. To be taken out of the self, the comfort zone of the self. To be amidst others, to be an-other. A challenge for an artist: to belong, to be part of a community of shared interest and mutual support, and yet to be untethered, to be free to be able to explore the unknown. Questioning and insecurity give us the possibility for new ways of seeing, thinking and creating – in different ethic, aesthetic, political or social contexts. And we hope it is for the better as opposed to before. (Vassileva)

Boundaries are tacitly implied. Walking the boundary, the fine line between the known and unknown, the accepted and unaccepted in a manner that is resonant with a sense of balance. It comes back to her own situation, this movement between places, leaving behind the communist regime for the promise of Europe and united democratic Germany. And yet this promise also means the separation from her beloved family. Another life. Vassileva’s home was and is always Bulgaria, in the north of the country where her mother still lives. From this perspective, her work has always reflected another world, a world outside or beyond that of where she is. Nonetheless this persistent sense of otherness has finally been a source of inspiration for the work of Vassileva. The play between the autobiographical and biography, between the individual and the other, between personal and social needs, between needs and dreams, are recurrent subjects throughout her work. Balance (2011), from which the title of the exhibition is drawn, is an installation of a mannequin figure in a black hooded coat, balancing 37 Ibid.

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on the top of a chair.38 The figure hovers, leaning over to reach for a light bulb that hangs near the wall. We might say, there is a fine balance between succeeding in achieving the action or of falling over. This is how life is: a point of equilibrium reached in the moment of aspiration. Success can be reached, despite the challenges, the doubts, the past. It needs just a precarious reaching out beyond oneself. As with much of Vassileva’s work, the emphasis is on the performative: small gestures and rituals constructed through various forms of technique such as duration and repetition, and on the body, its presentness and boundaries that shape its survival in the everyday. Over the course of 2014/2015, a decade on from Journey, Vassileva made more installations and sculptures. Yet there is still the same questioning, although now perhaps with a clearer sense of her aspirations and ways forward. The Color of the Wind (2014) was made during her residency at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) in Kronstadt, (St. Petersburg) in early 2014. A performance video, the artist carries around the city a blank white canvas that is shaped like a small yacht sail. Traversing the city of Kronstadt and its surrounding landscape, we see the city which represents the main seaport of St. Petersburg and, that was once an old army town which had been the site of political struggle during the early years of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. “Why did you not write anything on the banner?”, she was asked by people on the street. Her answer was an empty flag serving as an act of silent protest, a gesture of empathy and concern. It was, in other words, an invitation for people to consider for themselves the rights and wrongs of living in a cultural climate of censorship and infringement of the freedom of expression.39 The flag was an offering to the people of Kronstadt, a flag to be inscribed by the people, for the people, not the State. During 2014/2015 Vassileva made more installations and sculptures. Yet there is still the same questioning, the sense of unease, of an uncertainty or a humor gone awry. Christmas Tree (2014) is of women’s and men’s shoes displayed on a small vertical pole or Palm (2014), a green metal chain rising up to the ceiling with an anchor on top, produced when she was in a residency in Kronstadt. This is followed by a major 38 Balance was the title of Vassileva’s first solo exhibition in her home country of Bulgaria. Curated by Maria Vassileva, it was held at the Sofia City Art Gallery, presenting twenty-three works, including installation, objects/sculpture, photographs, and video. 39 See Momentum Collection catalogue, Berlin, 2014.

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work Boat People in 2015. Composed of three rows of white shoes each lit with a LED light; the work was a way of referencing the endless numbers of refugees seeking safe asylum and harbor from their country of origin. Suffering from impoverishment and threat of their survival and that of their families, they lose their individual identity and become the unwilling subject of anonymity and a fate left in the hands of others. Nameless shoes without identity, a matter of longing and belonging. A sense of social displacement is evoked, a departure without any clear destination or even certainty of arrival. As if in counterpoint to this work, Vassileva made in 2015, Boat People. (Mixed media: shoes, LED lights and cables, 2015). Recalling an earlier work, Leaves (2012), the work is composed of three rows of white shoes. Her concept was: “When life was a sea and the shoes are boats. In every boat is a human life, that is fighting with the big wave to stay in this so wonderful world.”

This is, for Vassileva, a way of referencing the endless numbers of refugees seeking safe asylum and harbor from their country of origin. Suffering from impoverishment or the endangerment of their lives and that of their families, anonymity overwhelms them. Always elsewhere, they become a part of uncontrollable statistics and subject of fate. This is also captured in her sculpture Compass, also made in 2015. It is a large sculptured mannequin figure carrying a kayak on its head. As she writes: “If I have an idea, I have a house and a boat. At the same time, I am the river and the wind, they rock me, make me crack, move me forward, as well as they bring me closer to destruction, but I have a home.”40

This is how life is: not only the sense of both belonging and longing, but of restlessness or cultural displacement. For Vassileva, it is both a question of orientation and the point of departure, without any clear destination or even certainty of arrival. 40 Vassileva, email correspondence, 11 January 2017.

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More recently, Vassileva has made The Origin of the Ending (2015), a small vertical cluster of white eggs, almost whimsical in character. And then Matches (2016), a set of three “couples,” composed of thin, elongated figures. Made of painted wood they are grouped together in slightly different poses. This is followed by Denkpause (Think-break) (2016), a sculpture of seven chairs stacked on top of one another, rising some 500 cms; and Flying and other daily Necessities (2016), a small white figure in the posture of a diver, suspended on a white, coiled rope that curls up some 600 cms. from the ground toward the ceiling. Each of these plays with the commonplace image of eggs or chairs or the diving figure. The most recent work is Proppeline, (2017), its name referring to a plastic polymer resin, even though the sculpture is made of bronze, standing some 270 x 50 cms. Vassileva writes “Proppeline is because we are getting too fast and too technical and we are ourselves, part of the big machine our time.” These three most recent works offer a sense of aspiring hope as freestanding sculpture and sheer verticality. I have been living in Berlin for twenty years. But in my memory, I keep so much experience of a bygone time that was so different from the time today. This experience still pushes me to make the kind of works that I make.41

41 Ibid.

CHAPTER 11

Russian Affinities and Its Correspondences

These next two chapters look at the influence of Russian art beyond the immediate sphere of the former Soviet Union. In this Chapter, Part One looks briefly at the impact on and correspondences between Russian/Soviet art on the emergence of contemporary art in China. Attention is paid to the development of contemporary art after the death of Mao Zedong and emergence of a more critically engaged realism, drawing on socialist realism. This was in keeping with the political and social changes occurring within China at the time, especially under Deng Xiaoping from 1978–1989. Part Two focuses on the Filipino artist Roberto Chabet (Manila, 1937–2013) who produced an extraordinary series of “Russian paintings” from the mid 1980s. While cultural and artistic relations between the Philippines and Russia were minimal, Chabet engaged personally with the artistic legacy of Russia/Soviet Union through reading and seeing of exhibitions and works of art while traveling. This is a unique case of a direct influence of modern Russian and Soviet art in South East Asia.

Part One Over the past few years Russia has increasingly extended its relations across Asia, to include Southeast Asia, particularly in the areas of economic ties and arms sales. Those countries in Southeast Asia have © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_11

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included Vietnam and Myanmar and to a lesser extent Malaysia, Indonesia and, most recently, the Philippines. Any cultural initiatives have been small. Before then there was little effort and, as we saw in an earlier chapter, Russia’s efforts were directed to maintaining their influence in Central Asia and a long-standing relationship with China. Sino-Russian relations have been ongoing throughout the twentieth century, and while influenced by the radical change in Chinese leadership, cultural relations have continued to prosper with a continuous exchange of specialists and students in the cultural and artistic field.1 In Russia with the Moscow Conceptualists, and in China, where contemporary art is often periodised as having begun in 1976 as the Cultural Revolution ended, artists moved on from socialist realism into new forms and subjects, but in ways that quite clearly referenced the aesthetics and ideals of socialist realism. As the Russian emigre artist Alexander Melamid said, “What we wanted was to recreate the dream, to recreate the great art as we understood it in our childhood.” Comparable to the period of the late 1950s in the Soviet Union, the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 did not signify the end of socialist realism but, rather the easing of any doctrinal imposition by the state. In fact, both in the Bulldozer Exhibition in Moscow held in 1974 (as discussed in an earlier chapter) and the Stars Exhibition in Beijing in 1979, artists showed unwavering dedication to the socialist ideal, even as their respective governments seemed to be willing to let it slip away. In both cases, these events opened the way to powerful cultural movements devoted to questioning and articulating what socialism and collective culture could mean for both countries. In a recent essay, noted Chinese art critics Carol Yinghua Lu and Ding Liu argued that We believe that the trajectory of Chinese contemporary art, from creation to discussion, did not take place entirely removed from Socialist Realism, but rather that it has continued to follow Socialist Realism and the pursuit of modernity as its evolution was shaped by China’s political environment. Describing contemporary art as a “rebellious and progressive” set of ideas

1 See: Su, Fenglin, “Questions Regarding Past and Present Sino-Russian Cultural Exchange.” Web.

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and actions is actually in keeping with Socialist Realism’s historical demand to present reality in creative work.2

They go on to suggest that while socialism is a memory in Russia, it remains in many ways a reality in China. The work of painters like Liu Xiaodong and Song Yonghong, unmistakably alludes to socialist realism, even if it deviates or innovates in many critical respects. The impetus for socialist realism, though—the desire to create an art that truly represented the lives of the people, not only as they actually were but as they could be—continued. A group of realist paintings executed in 1989 can be seen to represent a third wave of realism, one that differed from both Socialist Realism as well as post-Cultural Revolution realism that engaged it in dialogue. The realism that emerged during this period did not magnify reality, but instead sought to directly depict it. As a result, it also expressed the negative, disoriented sentiments of life. The rock music, literature, and artistic creations that emerged after 1989 extracted fragments of reality from homes, streets, parks, buses, and corners, recreating the most common, public level of reality using the most direct, naked, and unadorned language. It was as if all of our lives could enter the painting, the song, or the story. Song Yonghong and Liu Xiaodong were among the artists who engaged in this direct depiction of reality in life. They turned their observations of life on the streets, the most mundane scenes of family life and common and uneventful scenes of their friends, passers-by and family members into the content of their paintings. Song Yonghong once described the original intent behind his 1990s series that openly depicted sex in this way3 : From this perspective, the paintings and photographs of Liu Xiaodong can be directly associated with a number of Sixth Generation Chinese Filmmakers such as He Jianjun, Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, Zhang Yuan, and Wu Wenguang. Wang Xiaoshuai, in particular, was a close friend from the mid 1980s. Representing that of a generation and epoch evident in the work of his fellow artists, writers, and filmmakers, the locus 2 Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: Echoes of Socialist Realism. London: Tate Research publications, 2018. 3 Ibid., Gao Minglu explores the Stars Art Group of 1979–1980 as it emerged in a period of relative transparency and openness in the Chinese government following the end of the Cultural Revolution.

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of the cultural imaginary became a space that was relatively autonomous from that of the political. Since the period of the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, Liu Xiaodong worked in film as a photographer as well as, on occasion— together with his partner, the artist Yu Hong—appeared in his films as actors. Either through documentary or fiction film this generation of filmmakers depicted Beijing urban life and those of ordinary people as a corollary to their own lives. As Wang Xiaoshuai noted of his film The Day in Winter-Spring, in which Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong acted, “producing the film is like writing our own diary.” The significance of this association in regard to the photographs of Liu Xiaodong is what has been characterized as a style of ‘on-the-spot-realism’ (jishizhuyi) that entailed a level of spontaneity and contingency as much as a style associated with the genre of reportage. While both the paintings and photographs of Liu Xiaodong do not directly reflect a country seized by a booming economy and development, this rawness relates to growing up in a city like Beijing. Filled by peasant labor from the countryside, the city is characterized by the increasingly stark divisions between their life and that of the affluent as much as the effect of an unregulated consumer economy. Through a form of street reportage, Liu Xiaodong captured incidents of an uncontrollable and accidental life, scenes of transgression and taboos breaking with and redefining the mores and habits of older generations and marking the advent of another epoch. Against this exists the possibility of a private space in which the personal and individual defines herself; a space that was not determined or shaped by but, rather in contradistinction to the domain of the public and social sphere of everyday life. The focus upon the individual and private sphere suggests a level of impotence or, a turning away from any direct engagement with a larger political sphere. As if in response to this sense of loss, the work of Liu Xiaodong represents scenes and expressions that suggest an interiority in its subject. For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny. And the more gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers, the more life becomes indecipherable. In this phase the bourgeoisie which, just a few decades earlier, was still firmly

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in possession of its symbols, succumbs to interiority and gives itself up to psychology.4 By virtue of recording figures gazing into space, sleeping or bathing, there is an absence of any overt significance to the scene. And yet, there is nothing that replaces this absence, creating in its stead a disquieting atmosphere of ennui and torpor—or as the artist remarks, a feeling of numbness—as if their lives are arbitrary, without purpose or motivation signifying a loss of a central defining core of values and beliefs. While, arguably this suggests a culture in violent transition in which there is unequal scale of development between the economic, social, and political spheres of daily existence, Liu Xiaodong makes a fascinating remark in his interview to suggest more than this. He notes that in taking photographs people assumed the pose of one of their leaders such as Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai. Reading Agamben against the grain—“for human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny”—the mood of detachment and vacancy that pervades Xiaodong’s figures signifies an existence in which, once having been ciphers filled by a political imaginary, they have become empty shells and remnants of a historical moment that no longer exists. The work of Liu Xiaodong forms a latent analysis of an epoch that began with the death of Mao and end of the Cultural Revolution through to a period of tremendous social change and economic transformation brought about during the period of reform under Deng Xiaoping. This led to the phenomena of massive urban growth and continuing spiral of an increasing division between the impoverishment of the majority of people’s lives and the growing wealth and privilege of the few. We are reminded of the painting. Svadba na zavtrashnei ulitse (A Wedding on Tomorrow’s Street, 1962) by Yuri Pimenov—and Dmitri Gutov’s subsequent parody—of a young, newly married couple walking on planks over a churned-up suburban street and construction site of new blocks of flats (See earlier discussion of Gutov). Liu Xiaodong does not document these changes in any manifest form or direct manner but rather, through recording small incidents, gestures, and expressions of daily life. Within a broader perspective, they are a subtle critique of socialist realism, deflating the figure of the heroic 4 See Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000.

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male figure, symbol of a virile, powerful State. Rather, Xiaodong’s work becomes a visual anthropology of everyday life that signals a culture in violent transition and change. By reference to time, event, character, viewing his work becomes a vivid reminder of what has taken place within.

Part 2 The history of the avant-garde and conceptual art in the Philippines is yet to be extensively written while important books and articles by Filipino authors have established the field of historical knowledge. What is remarkable is Roberto Chabet’s own study and engagement with Russian/Soviet art of the pre and post Russian Revolutionary period and the inspiration it served towards producing one of the most important practices of the region and Southeast Asian modernism.5 Whatever the argument about who were its principal artists, Chabet was one of them. David Medalla (1942) was one of these significant avantgarde and conceptual post-war artists in the Philippines but, left for the Europe at the end of the 1960s to play a key role in the London-based group Signals. These artists traveled and were well aware of European and North American art having, like many of their contemporaries elsewhere in the world, access to European and most especially North American art magazines. In Manila, a group of artists, including Chabet, Fernando Zobel de Ayala, Arturo Luz and Lee Aguinaldo among others, met when young and became close friends. They were also supported by young commercial galleries at the time, notably the Philippine Art Gallery (founded in 1951), and later, the Luz Gallery. There is no doubt of the impact of Western and Eastern European art on his practice and that of his colleagues but, no more than any other artist of the era. Moreover, he radically rethought and recalibrated those influences whether they were drawn from the Russian avant-garde or postwar American minimalism. Chabet began to show his work in the Sixties, having his first one-man exhibition at Luz Gallery in 1961. Held soon after he had graduated with a degree in architecture from the University of Santo Tomas. The exhibition was composed of gouaches and watecolours on chipboard and

5 A different version of the following remarks on Chabet was published as Chabet: The Russian Connection, in the Oxford Journal of Contemporary Painting, 2020.

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empty cardboard crates.6 Arturo Luz, the gallery director, noted in the press release that Chabet was more interested in the craft than the subject and that they were “landscapes with architectural overtones, figures posed against simple backgrounds, and collages made of clippings from newspapers and magazines. Buildings and houses predominate, rendered in abstract terms, improvised, imaginary and simplified…”7 In 1962 at the age of 25, Chabet had traveled to Europe from Manila, studying at the University of Madrid, after which he went to the United States where he studied at MIT until 1964. In 1967, he took up a Rockefeller Grant he had received, to observe museums practices in the US, Mexico and Europe, followed by the Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1972).8 Meanwhile, he had become the founding Museum Director of CCP where he initiated the “Thirteen Artists” in 1970, supporting young artists whose works show “recentness and a turning away from the past.” After his brief tenure in the CCP, Chabet led the alternative artist group Shop 6, and begun teaching at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in Diliman and at key artist-run spaces in Manila. During this time, Chabet also curated landmark exhibitions of young and emerging Philippine artists. His influence as an artist and director was profound and long-lasting. Correspondence reveals Chabet visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York in early 1968.9 He probably missed Pontus Hulten’s “Machine as seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” that was not held until November 1968. The exhibition had also included a reconstruction of Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International.”10 Nevertheless, Chabet may well have seen the important “Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection,” held between January–March 1968. If so, he would have had the opportunity to see the recently acquired El Lissitzky’s “Study for page from A Suprematist Story – About Two Squares in 6 Constructions ” 6 See MA. Victoria Herrera, “Insider/Outsider: Revisiting Lee Aguinaldo,” pp. 3–92. 7 See Ringo Bunoan, “Seeing and Unseeing: The Works of Roberto Chabet” by Ringo

Bunoan (Hong Kong: Osage Contemporary Art Gallery, 2012, p. 24). 8 In 1970, Chabet also traveled to Osaka (Japan) with Arturo luz to participate in the famous Expo 70 in Osaka. 9 See the details on the web of MOMA’s holdings and acquisition date as well as their exhibition history. 10 There was a reconstruction of Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International ” in the Shchukin Collection in Moscow.

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(1920), alongside other key European and North American modernists. As well, MOMA owned Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), acquired by the museum in 1935 and a series of Malevich’s “Suprematist ” paintings from the famous 0.10 exhibition of 1915, acquired by MOMA in 1935.11 MOMA also owned a copy of the brochure for Tatlin’s exhibition of counter-reliefs, shown at the “0.10” exhibition, one of which, dated 1914–1915, was on its cover. The Chabet Archives in Manila have his journals from 1980 onwards, a period when he had stopped traveling. Prior to then, Chabet had been experimenting predominantly with abstraction and collage but, had also produced begun to explore a more performative based practice alongside three-dimensional work with installations and stage design. Chabet’s early installations from 1970 to 1975 provide insight into the impact of his trip had, especially in expanding his practice within the terms of conceptual art, performance, and assemblage art. This is first seen in an early work after his return, such as Hurdling 1970. An installation, it was first shown as part of the 1970 group exhibition Sculptures at the CCP. In it he deployed ready-made materials, including a series of vertically suspended frames from which stemmed jagged protrusions made of found scraps of metal. Signaling danger and an impossibility for functional use, the work produced a spatial intervention in the gallery space at the CCP.12 Hurdling reflected a new stage in Chabet’s artistic development toward the making of immersive installations that is further elaborated in the work that followed. In 1972 Chabet won the Republic Cultural Heritage Award and then held an exhibition in the main gallery of the CCP between the 14 and 25 November, 1972, calling it “An Environmental Work.” In a rectangular gallery space, he had suspended some 50 plywood planks from pivots attached to the ceiling and lit the space with moving colored spotlights. This created an interplay of movement, light and volume. Writing about the exhibition, Raymundo R. Albano, in “Notes on the Exhibition,” noted that Chabet had combined sculpture and theater, creating

11 See the details on the web of MOMA’s holdings and acquisition date as well as their exhibition history. 12 Bentcheva, Eva, “From Ephemeral Experiences to Lasting Legacies: Discourses on Experimental Art in the Philippines During the 1960s and 1970s.” London: Tate Papers 32, Autumn 2019.

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a gallery space as a “forest” of hanging plywood. The audience walked through a darkened space, lit only by controlled colored lighting.13 In 1973, Chabet participated in a group exhibition at the CCP, An Exhibition of Objects, curated by Raymundo Albano, Chabet tore up a copy of a coffee-table book on Philippine contemporary art and placed it in a trash bin.14 Chabet practice had become more conceptually driven, including performance and installation. As Eva Bentcheva notes the work, entitled Tearing into Pieces, was seen as a scandalous critique of the conventions of the art world.15 Then in 1974, Chabet’s held his next one-person exhibition in one of the CCP galleries with his “Bakawan” installation.16 Extending his 1972 piece, it was composed of 56 pieces of Bakawan logs, hung vertically by nylon strings from the ceiling. Installed as a grid, the installation was lit by four fluorescent lights hidden in each corner of the gallery space. However, the audience could not enter the installation room but, only view the installation through the glass door. With these two exhibitions, Chabet was defining his own concept of installation, as he would with the concept of the “counter-relief” in his “Russian paintings,” ten years later. Between 1978 and 1986, beginning before the Russian paintings, Chabet produced three major series on paper: the “White Collages ” series (1978 and 1979), the “Ziggurat Collages ” (1978), and the “China Collages ” (1985/1986).17 The “White Collages ” show how Chabet was exploring the essential variations of form through combining cut, torn,

13 Raymundo R. Albano, “Notes on the Exhibition Environmental Sculpture,” Chabet

Archive, November 14–25, 1972. Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive. 14 Contemporary Philippine Art (1972) by the art critic Manuel D. Duldulao. Published independently, Quezon City, Philippines: Vera-Reyes, 1972. Duldulao’s book gave an overview of developments in contemporary art, including Chabet’s paintings as a key development in Philippine contemporary art. 15 See Eva Bentcheva, op.cit. 16 Bakawan is the name of an indigenous mangrove tree of the Philippines, used for

making charcoal and firewood for cooking. See also drawings by Chabet for this project and an installation photograph. 17 The following remarks on Chabet’s work on paper draw upon my ‘A Conjuror of

Forms: Roberto Chabet,’ World Sculpture Review (vol. 22, No. 3, Summer 2016), pp. 44– 47. In 2010, Chabet made a few new pieces of his China Collages and reworked some older ones. See also Chabet’s exhibition “Works on Paper” at Galleria Duemila and its valuable introduction by Ma. Victoria T. Herrera, a catalogue organized by the Galleria Duemila and King Kong Art projects in 2011.

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folds, and layers of white paper, each of which were then collaged together and placed in a small vertical frame. In the same period, Chabet produced his “Ziggurat Collages,” which show a different collage principal at work.18 Attached to a backing with masking tape, the work can read as a cumulative collage where, by placing one sheet next to another, one thing after another, one reads the work, as he himself noted. As such, this technique tacitly demands a closer attention of the viewer to each part as well as the over all. It is not only one composite as in one canvas or one sheet. The viewer moves in and out of each part, beginning a process of association between the character of each piece of paper with the others before and after. Ringo Bunoan notes, in her introduction to Chabet’s work, “ziggurat” is an architectural expression of man’s desire to reach the heavens, which is a recurrent undertone in many of Chabet’s work.19 In viewing or reading the work, the viewer begins to associate the character of each piece of paper with the preceding and successive collage. The “China Collages,” series begun in the same period, which Chabet described as his “picture morgue,” as his Russian paintings. Together, the series of seven works extended Chabet’s use of collage. While the idea of accumulation remains a constant, the paper and images are simply laid out in parallel, but also joined together that, with their rough or torn edges, overlap each other. With the work, Chabet recovers a diverse range of imagery from different media that includes architectural renderings, his own drawings and those by others, musical scores, photographs of sculpture, photographs of popular pin-ups, scenes of different parts of the world, as well as blank pieces of white or colored paper. The title of each collage appears almost arbitrary or, at best, they reference one image of many in each work.20 Together, the China Collages and Russian Paintings series extended Chabet’s use of collage as a method for gathering a diverse range of imagery from different media, including architectural renderings, musical

18 Op.cit. Fn.338. Ringo Bunoan also notes that “ziggurat” is ‘an ‘architectural expression of man’s desire to reach the heavens, which is a recurrent undertone in many of Chabet’s works….’ 19 Bunoan, R. ‘Seeing and Unseeing: The Works of Roberto Chabet,’ in Roberto Chabet. Hong Kong: Osage Gallery, 2012, op cit. 20 Bunoan ibid., 14.

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scores, sculpture, scenes of different parts of the world, photos of “pinup” girls, drawings as well as blank pieces of white and colored paper. The titles of each collage appeared almost arbitrarily or, at best, referencing one particular image from many in each of the works. In 1979, Chabet made a paper collage Tarelkin’s Death.21 Very little has been written about this work, but it has a significance in our understanding of the range of Chabet’s work and the Russian connection. It is composed of three pieces of paper with Chabet’s characteristic use of tape connecting the three pieces. To the right, appears to be an open notebook, in the middle, a blue sheet of paper with small, cut and torn pieces of colored paper on top and to the left, a copy from a page of a book “Meyerhold’ on Theater.”22 Chabet has included a page of the book on which the book editor, Edward Braun, is writing about Meyerhold’s production and Varvara Stepanova’s stage set and clothes design, for “The Death of Tarelkin” in 1922. A photograph of Stepanova’s costume and set for Meyerhold production of play, 1922, is reproduced in the Chabet’s work on paper, Tarelkin’s Death (1979). A similar photograph but, with different clothes designs, also appeared in Camilla Grey, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863– 1922.23 Chabet’s journals after 1980 show how much he was an avid reader of books and magazines and one of these was a copy of Camilla Grey’s book, a book that had extensively discussed Tatlin’s work. In fact, Chabet had brought this book among others to his exhibition “Russian Paintings ” in 1984, at the Luz Gallery for people to browse. Held between November 16th and December 9th 1984, the exhibition showed four ground-breaking paintings.24

21 Sukhovo-Kobylin, Alexander, The Death of Tarelkin (1857–1869), published in The Trilogy of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin. Translated by Harold B. Segel. London: Routledge, 1996. 22 “Meyerhold” on Theater, Translated and Edited by Edward Braun, with a critical commentary. London: Methuen and New York: Hill and Wang, 1969. 23 Camilla Grey, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922. London: Thames and Hudson, 1968. 24 According to Bunoan, there may have been more ‘Russian paintings’ but, they were most likely dissembled and re-used for new work. Four of the original works were later reconstructed in 2010 and, first shown in the solo exhibition of Chabet ‘To Be Continued’ at the ICAS. The exhibition was then shown at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in Manila. Isabel Ching wrote an important article on the ICAS exhibition: ‘The

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As with many conceptual artists, paper always served Chabet as the first visual elaboration of a work and, many times, a sufficient manifestation of a concept. Moreover, it is possible to recognize in these works a link to his major counter-reliefs and installations. Begun at the same time as his “China collages ” in 1984, Chabet made his four ground-breaking “Russian paintings ”: “Tatlin at Sea,” “Tatlin in Egypt,” (1985), “Shelf life” (1984), and “Tatlin and Co.” (1984) The work drew on his own experimentations with abstraction and collage that he had been making since the Nineteen Sixties, as well as art that he may have seen in his trips to Europe and North America.25 Made of basic construction materials: plywood and metal brackets, each work extended off the wall into the real space, mimicking architectural installations. They were the beginning of what would become his “Plywood” series and represent not only a turning point in his artistic career but, a major body of work in contemporary Southeast Asian art and oft times relations with European art. The first of the four Russian paintings was Tatlin at Sea, composed of a series of panels of plywood. The first panel of the work has, on its left side, a diagonal plank placed across its face with a small box frame at its top that held a folded paper boat in paper.26 The second panel has a horizontal strip across its top like a shelf. Between these two panels, Chabet hung a long black painted plank. The third panel is simply painted blue without anything more and the fourth panel had five adjoining panels, each of which was bracketed at right angles to the panel. The second “Russian painting: Shelf Life” is composed of a four plywood panels with shelves, bracketed midway across each of them. Smaller panels were then placed on each of these four shelves. The third “Russian painting: Tatlin in Egypt ” is composed of a large open box frame, the four sides of which were attached to the wall, each with three shelving brackets. In the top left corner Chabet had placed a small framed

Situation of Roberto Chabet’s Plywood Installations.’ Singapore: Glossary, ICAS (2011), pp. 46–55. 25 See Ringo Bunoan, ‘Seeing and Unseeing: The Works of Roberto Chabet in Roberto Chabet. Hong Kong: Osage Galley, 2012, pp. 5–27. 26 “Tatlin at Sea” (Russian painting 1), plywood acrylic metal brackets box frame with paper boat, made from another map). Composed of four 4 × 4 plywood panels placed on the wall alongside one another (243.84 × 426.72 × 30.8 cms. approx).

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map of the Middle East, Egypt, and North Africa. The fourth “Russian painting” is composed of one plywood plank diagonally attached to the wall with brackets and one large ochre-painted panel sitting flat, diagonally against the plank in a counter direction. As noted, the first and third of these four paintings reference one of the founders of Russian modernism, Vladimir Tatlin. Previous commentators on Chabet have noted the formal correspondence between him and Tatlin. Most notable was Teresa Bargielska who had written a review of the 1984 Chabet exhibition for the magazine San Juan, entitled “All Art to All People /Recent Works of a Wall Worker.”27 Bargielska uses the Bolshevik Revolution as background material to her introduction of Chabet’s exhibition and refers to both Tatlin and other works by the Russian Constructivists, without naming them. She noted the series were composed of: featured raw, unpainted plywood, cut in squares and strips, which were then arranged in a modular manner. The seemingly formal sequence and linearity are broken up by panels painted with a primary color. Flatness is contrasted by lines of shelves that jut out from the wall supported by metal brackets.28

On seeing Russian modernism in exhibitions and books, Chabet had discovered not only their use of ordinary everyday materials but, a simplicity of structure and design, with a strong emphasis given to the diagonal as a counter-rhythm and a multi-perspective.29 There was a widespread interest among Russian avant-garde artists and theorists at the time, in the potential of faktura. Faktura was a term that had various interpretations during the decade of the 1910s, but generally denoted the

27 Teresa Bargielska, “All Art to All People/Recent Works of a Wall Worker,” Review of Roberto Chabet’s exhibition, ‘Russian Paintings,’ Newspaper, San Juan, 1984. Manila: Pinaglabanan Galleries, 1984, p. 9. 28 Bargielska 1984, p. 9. 29 There are other artists from Asia whose work corresponds with Chabet, in particular

Kishio Suga, one of the key figures of Mono-ha in Japan in the 1970s and more recently Young Rim of South Korea. See ‘From Painting into Space: Towards a Culture of Materiality,’ in Fracturing Conceptual Art: The Asian Turn, edited by Kate Lim. Seoul: Art Platform Asia, 2017, pp. 110–127.

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way in which materials were handled to produce a work of art.30 Faktura implied not so much the invariable quality of the finished work of art but rather, made evident a mode in the process of its production. In this regard, Russian artists were developing an approach to artistic mediums that would distinguish them from their French contemporaries. They rejected the individualistic expression of the artist through the painterly depiction of real objects. Rather, the Russian artists sought a new relationship with the world and its materiality. This came at a time when Russia was moving toward an industrialization and hence a deepening awareness of modern industrial materials. This orientation toward materials, allowed them to move away from personal taste and toward an impersonal role for the artist. As Margit Rowell noted in her article “Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura, The Factory of Facts,” the Russians believed in what has been characterized as a “truth to materials,” the focus of which was that the medium and technique were the true constituents of the work of art. To speak of “faktura” was to imply the specific substance or texture and “the constructivist object exists in the viewer’s real space.” It was a selfcontained reality and entailed both an object of physical materials and its “social context within which it served a need or function.”31 In this regard, I suggest Chabet also found an affinity with Tatlin, not only in his engagement with the world through his profession as a sailor but, the importance of Tatlin’s position for the contemporary artist— the role of artist could play as artist-engineer in industrial design and workers’ clothing. This is acknowledged explicitly in Chabet’s choice of image of Tatlin for the poster to his “Russian Paintings” exhibition at Luz Gallery in 1984. The poster shows an image from a Russian newspaper of 1918 with a photograph showing Tatlin’s “New Way of Life” in his designed workers clothes, standing in front of a stove. Tatlin’s, designs for clothing and a stove, is also illustrated in the article “Novyi byt,” Krasnaia panorama, No. 23, 1924. A second Russian influence on Chabet may well have been El Lissitzky, who also had a strong link to architecture and pushed painting into space.32 El Lissitzky had initially subscribed fully to Suprematism and, 30 Rowell, Margit, ‘Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura, The Factory of Facts,’ October magazine, No. 7, Winter 1978: 83–108. 31 Rowell, Ibid., p. 85. 32 According to Ringo Bunoan, Chabet talked of El Lissitzky, particularly his Proun

Room. She suggests that “the red panel in one of Chabet’s Russian Paintings could have

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under the guidance of Malevich, helped further develop the movement. However, by 1919–1920 Lissitzky had become head of the Architectural Department at the People’s Art School and, with his students, primarily Lazar Khidekel, was working on transition from planar to volumetric Suprematism.33 Russia was going through a Civil War at the time, fought between the “Reds” (communists, socialists, and revolutionaries) and the “Whites” (monarchists, conservatives, liberals, and other socialists) who opposed the Bolshevik Revolution. In response Lissitzky made “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” (1919) that was appreciated as directly alluding to the similar shapes used on military maps. The image of a red wedge shattering a white form communicated a powerful message that left no doubt in the viewer’s mind of its intention. Moreover, the work was immediately recognized as one the first major steps away from Malevich’s non-objective Suprematism into a style his own. From this point, Lissitzky developed his Proun series of work, an exploration of the visual language of Suprematism with spatial elements, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives. These were uncommon ideas to Suprematism that was primarily confined to flat, two-dimensional forms and shapes. With Proun, Lissitzky expanded Suprematism, conceiving it as a utopian model for a new and better world. For example, in Proun Room (1923) he used wood and metal, extending elements of the painted surface out from the wall, heightening both the bodily experience and tactility in relation to the work of art. This in many ways corresponds to the experience of viewing of Chabet’s “Russian paintings ” and his first plywood works.34 The Russian Paintings in Context:

been a citation of the red wedge of Lissitzky.” See Ringo Bunoan, “Roberto Chabet: To be Continued” in CHABET: 50 YEARS, pp. 2011–2012. 33 See Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism, edited by Regina Khidekel (Prestel: Munich, London, and New York, 2014). Khidekel had studied under Malevich at the school in Vitebsk and a key member of UNOVIS (Champions of the New Art), set up by Malevich in the early 1920s. He went on to have a successful career fusing Suprematism with architectural design. 34 According to Ringo Bunoan, Chabet talked of El Lissitzky, particularly his Proun Room. She suggests that “the red panel in one of Chabet’s Russian Paintings could have been a citation of the red wedge of Lissitzky.” See Ringo Bunoan, op.cit., “Roberto Chabet: To be Continued,” in CHABET: 50 YEARS, pp. 2011–2012.

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Chabet called his “Russian” works simply paintings, but they may be also characterized as extended paintings, becoming, in time, architectural installations. Contemporary precedents for this genre of work were few. The 1980s had witnessed a resurgence in painting, especially in North America, and Germany. Galleries, collectors, and museums championed young painters like Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, or Jorge Immendorf, to name only a few. But there was nothing in this body of work that rethought painting from the inside out, as Chabet had initiated with his plywood series.

This period of a return to painting followed a period of minimalism and conceptual art, such as Fluxus, from the early 1960s into 1970s. Such movements had challenged the very foundations of painting, once again stirring critics to forecast the “death of painting.” However, two North American artists, Donald Judd and Frank Stella, were an exception to this judgment. In particular, we can refer to Judd’s use of industrial material (corrugated galvanized iron-sheets, neon lights). Chabet visited a Judd retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum on his trip to North America in late 1968. Ma. Victoria Herrera notes that Chabet had found it stimulating, compared to his fellow artist Fernando Zobel with whom he saw the exhibition. Herrera goes on to remark “Judd began as a painter and shifted to produce minimalist sculptural installation works, a move to liberate ‘geometrical shapes from his paintings and gave them sculptural form.’”35 Stella’s work in the Nineteen Seventies had also used prefabricated parts, as in his Mogielnica series of 1972. In this later work, we may also note the strong emphasis given to the axes of each work, especially the diagonal, recalling Malevich’s Suprematism, as well his transformation of a painterly surface into a dynamic relief construction. From this period in late 1984 Chabet was to produce a number of major plywood works for the next 5 years, following directly on from the Russian paintings as extended painting. These included Guitar (1986) and House paintings (1986). Guitar was a singularly powerful crossing of two diagonal pieces, composed of a large unpainted masonite board and a rectangular painted black board. The unpainted board had been cut in a staircase form, showing the natural grain of the board, which was then partially overlaid by the painted black board. This created a perceptual illusion that they are interwoven. “House paintings” was a powerful 35 Ma.Victoria Herrera, op.cit., 2011: unpaginated.

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iteration of Chabet’s allusion to architecture, with two large panels, each shaped in the form of a house, the left tilted on its side and on the right, inverted. The left panel had two narrow shelves bracketed to a panel on the upper top, holding two squash balls, while the right panel had a small unpainted model of a house. Between these two large panels, Chabet had added one long diagonal board on which he had hinged two additional shorter boards that appear as folds. Three years later Chabet made two more plywood works: Dutch painting (1989) and Cargo and Decoy (1989).36 The first work was part of a series, included Black Board. This was a simple large rectangular black painting over a larger square sheet of plywood and a plaster-cast of a bone on an affixed shelf beneath. According to published notes by Ringo Bunoan, this series “pays homage to Dutch artists, including Mondrian, De Stijl, Vermeer and Jas Ban Ader.”37 With Cargo & Decoy (1989), Chabet extended his practice, working across the floor. It was a powerful installation, with a series of wooden sawhorses holding blue-painted plywood placed together as V’s. Bunoan notes that Cargo & Decoy is informed by Chabet’s experience during WWII when as a small child he and others looked up at the skies anticipating bombs from fighter planes.38 When the air raid alarms sounded, they would run with backpacks of rations and clothes. The work’s title references the cargo cults in the South Pacific islands, who received rations from planes during WWII, and the unexpected after-effects of first-time encounters between cultures. After the war, the islanders continued to look up to the skies for gifts from the “Gods,”39 These works were followed by other plywood paintings, gradually expanding Chabet’s repertoire in the Nineties to become primarily installations. The first of these were Pictures in Ordinary Times (1992) and

36 Dutch painting and Black Board were part of a series made between 1989 and 2006. They were shown in an exhibition “Dutch and Other Works.” 37 Ringo Bunoan, op.cit, 2011: unpaginated. 38 A discussion of these works is to be found in R. Bunoan, CHABET: 50 YEARS,

op.cit. These works were shown in an exhibition “Regarding Place, No Place” at the Art Center, at the SM Megamall between 12 and 25 May 1996. The exhibition included Chabet alongside Danilo Dalena, Fernando Modesto, and Antonio Austria. 39 A discussion of these works is to be found in R. Bunoan, CHABET: 50 YEARS, op.cit.

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Untitled (1994), followed by Boat (1996) and Pier and Ocean (1996).40 Each of these works pushes Chabet forward into an installational practice, such as The Trap (1994), a large plywood box, painted black, filled with shards of broken mirrors that reflect back the image of the viewer multiple times. The work becomes other than itself, always a temporary and changing subject outside itself and by virtue of the mirrors, beyond the confines of the box in which it lies. The last of these works, Pier and Ocean, followed more directly on from his Russian Paintings, insofar as it was closer to the concept of painting, principally hanging vertical on the wall, as distinct from an installation. The work is composed of three rectangular painted boards on the wall, interspersed with an unpainted plywood strip that runs down between the second and third panel. This strip is then continued with another three identically sized unpainted strips (boards), hinged together, the first placed diagonally up from the edge of the wall out onto the gallery space, then another strip, hinged to the first board, at the top but angled diagonally down to the floor, and a third strip, hinged to the second and laid flat out from the wall, across the floor. One of the key effects of this work, as much as others from this period, was Chabet’s engagement with the real space, as his work begins to impinge on the actual gallery or museum space, not just its walls. Chabet wrote some curatorial notes that captures his thinking at this point for an exhibition: Regarding Place, No Place at the Art Center, at the SM Megamall between 12 and 25 May 1996. “Place: Art implies place. It depicts space, it exists in space, and is perceived in space. Placement, location, is central in art. The artist stakes out territories, establishes boundaries, presents or represents a sense of place. This sense of place is the artist’s sense of self… No place: The artist sees his territory as not only a specific place but as a departure point for an ‘elsewhere’. The artist builds boundaries and breaks down boundaries. Placement implies displacement. The artist’s place is self—a self that sees the ‘other’ for its realization. Art measures the distance between

40 These works were shown in an exhibition “Regarding Place, No Place” at the Art Center, at the SM Megamall between 12 and 25 May 1996. The exhibition included Chabet alongside Danilo Dalena, Fernando Modesto, and Antonio Austria.

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the artist’s known place and the unknown “no place”—a utopia that is glimpsed through the artist’s metaphor. Metaphor is displacement.”41 In fact, this sense of place and space, now seen in the context of a geography, become increasingly important to Chabet at this time.42 In 1995, Chabet wrote that “Intermediate Geographies”: explores the peripatetic nature of recent art and investigates nomadism and exile as realities of Philippine life, history, art and culture. It investigates the physical and psychic aspects of ‘place and displacement’ and examines their local and global implications in contemporary art discourse.43

This was written for an unrealized group exhibition that he had proposed to the CCP. In another note about this work, and written at the time, Chabet wrote “My sense of place is literal – the exhibition space and the virtual spaces generated by my installation. Though seemingly nonreferential, the work alludes to geography – or geographies.”44 The use of plywood as a prefabricated material increasingly signifies for Chabet a cheap, everyday material used by people.45 Chabet’s “Russian paintings ” opened a new chapter in the artist’s work and represent a breakthrough moment in the history of modern South East Asian art. The Russian paintings provide a conceptual framework to extend beyond painting into installation and in this way inspired younger contemporary Philippine artists, such as Nilo Ilarde, Ringo Bunoan, Juan Alcazaren, and Bernardo Pacquing among others. The correspondences and affinities between an artist of SE. Asia and Eastern Europe are uncommon. It is therefore significant in recognizing how the development of contemporary art and culture can be inspired by trends that cut across language and both cultural and social differences.

41 Chabet, 1996: See Chabet Archive, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, unpaginated. Part of the Chabet archive is also in Manila. 42 Ching, 2011: 55. 43 “Intermediate Geography” was first published alongside Chabet’s exhibition under

the same title in one of his annual simultaneous exhibitions at Finale Art Gallery and West Gallery, SM Megamall, in 2005. It was reconstructed and exhibited at Osage Soho, Hong Kong, 4 March–9 May 2011 and part of “Chabet: 50 Years,” a year-long series of exhibitions organized by King Kong Art Projects Unlimited in various venues in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Manila from 2011–2012. 44 See Chabet Archive, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Part of the Chabet archive is also in Manila. 45 ‘regarding place, no place,’ Manila: Finale Art File and SM Magamall, 1996.

CHAPTER 12

The Interactivity of Energies and Montage

Everything that happens in this world is nothing but a change in energy. (Wilhelm Ostwald)

We are filled with the enthusiasm for the new and contemporary, often forgetting that which was new and experimental at the time of its making and paved the way for what was to follow. In the following essay, I wish to suggest a connecting thread between the development, theory, and practice of montage by early Soviet filmmakers and recent emergence of digital media art, especially Virtual and Augmented reality. This thread is to be found in the continuities between the use of data visualization by film and digital media over the past fifty years. The continuity is, in essence, the primacy given to the audience as participant in the production of meaning. This led to the concept of interactivity, shifting from the relation between artist and material to that between audience and material. Since this time of course, many books have been written about both the history of cinema and to a lesser degree digital media. Hans Belting, more than any other scholar, has led the way in writing about the history of the image leading up to its contemporary manifestations. But few scholars have closely explored this question of continuity by looking back from within the framework of digital media. Three books that take new media as their starting point all recognize the influence of cinema. Lev Manovich, with The Language of New Media (2001), Mark B.N. Hansen, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2_12

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with New Philosophy for New Media (2004) and Katya Kwastek published her study Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (2013) acknowledge the indebtedness of cinema in their discussion of digital media.1 Manovich proposes viewing film montage as anticipating the new media aesthetic, one based on computation and algorithm.2 New Media was for Manovich a reworking of the language of cinema at the level of code. The computerization of culture had interpolated all media into the meta-medium of the digital computer. Cinema’s aesthetic strategies have become basic organizational principles for computer software. He writes: Cinema, the major cultural form of the twentieth century, has found a new life as the toolbox of a computer user. Cinematic means of perception, of connecting space and time, of representing human memory, thinking, and emotions become a way of work and a way of life for millions in the computer age…In short, what was cinema has become human–computer interface.3

Manovich proposes that the window into a world of a cinematic narrative has become a window into a data-scape. But the author overstates his case, arguing that film has been displaced by digital media. In fact, its development enhanced cinema, especially by way of its technology and the potentiality of its aesthetics. Three years later, Mark B. N. Hansen argued in his book for an approach to the human body that doesn’t end at the boundaries of the skin but rather constructs intimate relationships with digital information flows and data spaces.4 He argued for maintaining the body as the central focus capable of experiencing and adapting to digital media. Cyberspace, in other words, remains anchored in the body.

1 The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001; Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2004; Katya Kwastek, Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. 2 Lev Manovich, ibid., 239–243. 3 Ibid., 92. 4 See Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004 and, subsequently, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, New York: Routledge, 2006.

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In 2013, Katya Kwastek published her study Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art 5 One of the central aims of her book was to deepen our understanding of the concept of interactivity and to point to the recipient or audience as the performer of the work. Forms of aesthetic experience, she proposed, could now be produced through interactivity, such that the participant was no longer just an observer but central to the production of meaning.

Montage cinema: Looking back into the history of cinema, there was a virtual school of montage filmmakers in the early years of the Soviet Union, notably Lev Kuleshov (Tambov, Russia, 1899–1970) and Vsevolod Pudovkin (Pensa, Russia, 1893–1953) among others. Montage theory was based on the practice of bringing together disparate images to construct a third and new meaning. Even with the lack of new material, filmmakers could infinitely combine already existing film material. Kuleshov uses the phrase energetic montage in reference to American films.6 However, both Sergei Eisenstein (Riga, 1898–1948) and Dziga Vertov (Bialystok, Poland, 1896–1954) developed, respectively, a more radical theory of montage, intimating the development of a post-documentary practice. Each contributed significantly to the notion of audience participation in the construction of meaning through their exploration of the psycho-physical engagement of audiences. During the years 1920–1924 Eisenstein worked with Proletkult (the Russian Proletarian Cultural-Educational Organization), of which Alexander Bogdanov (Moscow, 1873–1928) was one of the founders. By 1923 he had begun his career as a theorist, by writing “The Montage of Attractions ” for the third issue of the art journal LEF (Left Front of the Arts)7 He described it as “the moulding of the audience in a desired direction (or mood) is the task of every utilitarian theatre (agitation, 5 Katya Kwastek, Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2013. 6 See Kuleshov on Film: Writing by Lev Kuleshov, edited by Ronald Levaco, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. 7 Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form (1942) and The Film Sense (1949) explore the significance of montage in detail. See also Annette Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera,” in The Essential Cinema: Essays on Films in the Collection of Anthology Film Archives, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press), 1975.

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advertising, health education, etc.” An “attraction” was: “…an aggressive moment in theatre, i.e., any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole. These shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological aspect of what is being shown, the final ideological conclusion…”8 At the time, Eisenstein was making his first film, Glumov’s Diary (1923), with Vertov as his consultant. Eisenstein believed that editing could be used for more than just expounding a scene or moment through a “linkage” between related images. Rather, he felt the “collision” of shots could be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience. Eisenstein had once called montage “the nerve of cinema.” Based on contemporaneous biological research and neural science, the concept of intersubjectivity was given a biological basis. As Pia Tikka explores in her extensive research and writings on Eisenstein, the processes within “embodied simulatorium” are assumed to be sharable, intersubjective, and socially conditioned. For Eisenstein, the image was grounded in gesture at the juncture between the socio-cultural and psycho-physiological. In regard to neuroscience, Eisenstein was also influenced by Ernst Kretschmer, Sigmund Freud, Ivan Pavlov, Vladimir Bekhterev, Aleksandr Luria, Lev Vygotsky and Jean-Martin Charcot, among others.9 Tikka cites Eisenstein: It is obvious that a work of this type has a very particular effect on the perceiver, not only because it is raised to the same level as natural phenomena but also because the law of its structuring is also the law governing those who perceive the work, for they too are part of organic nature.10 8 Taylor, Richard (Editor and Translator), 2010. Sergei Eisenstein. Selected Works, Vol. 1, Writings 1922–1934, London and New York: I.B.Tauris, Ltd., p. 34. See also John Biggart and Oksana Bulgakova, Eisenstein in the Proletkult. Aalto University: Spherical Books, Tangential Points Publication Series, 2016. 9 See, in particular, Tikka Pia, Enactive Cinema: Sensorium Eisensteinense (Helsinki, 2008) for a full discussion of Eisenstein, montage and neurocinema. 10 Pia Tikka, “Cinema Author’s Embodied Simulatorium—a Systems Intelligence Approach”, in: Essays on Systems Intelligence, eds. Raimo P. H¨am¨al¨ainen and Esa Saarinen (Espoo: Aalto University, School of Science and Technology, Systems Analysis Laboratory) 207–219.

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and … there is, or rather should be, no cinema other than agit-cinema. The method of agitation through spectacle consists in the creation of a new chain of conditioned reflexes by associating selected phenomena with the unconditioned reflexes they produce (through the appropriate methods)11

One of the key sources that Eisenstein drew upon for his understanding of reflexology was the work of both Vladimir Bekhterev (Sorali, Russia, 1857–1927) and Ivan Pavlov (Ryazan, Russia, 1849–1936).12 Eisenstein also drew upon Vsevolod Meyerhold (Penza, Russia, 1874–1940) and his development of a method of bio-mechanics when he had briefly directed the First Workers Theatre of the Proletkult in 1921. The Proletkult Theatre sought to affect audience emotionally and psychologically, producing a shock and greater awareness of the material reality and condition of their own lives. In this respect it corollated with the idea of defamiliarizing the familiar13 The term “defamiliarization” had been first coined in 1917 by Russian writer, theorist and critic Viktor Shklovsky (St.Petersburg, 1893–1984). In his essay “Art as Device” Shklovsky had invented the term as a means to “distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former’s perceptibility.”14 The purpose of art was to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. In other words, the technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.15 …art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known…A

11 Taylor op.cit., 2010: 45. See also Pia Tikka (Editor-in-Chief), Culture as Organization in early Soviet Thought: Bogdanov, Eisenstein, and the Proletkult. Spherical Book I, Tangential Points Publication Series, Aalto University, 2016. 12 Taylor, ibid. 2010, pp. 60 & 243. 13 Sergei Tretyakov had taught Brecht during his visit to Moscow in the spring of

1935. For this reason, many scholars have recently taken to using estrangement to translate both terms: “the estrangement device” in Victor Shklovsky and “the estrangement effect” in Brecht. 14 Viktor Shklovsky, “The Novel as Parody,” in Viktor Shklovsky and Benjamin Sher, Theory of Prose. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990, p. 147. 15 Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader. Berlina, Alexandra (ed.). Translated by Berlina, Alexandra. Bloomsbury. 2017, p. 16.

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crooked road, a road in which one feels acutely the stones beneath it, a road that turns back on itself—this is the road of art.16

Critical to understanding Vertov’s development of his theory of montage, we should first acknowledge the influence of factography, originally developed by Shklovsky and other Russian formalists Yuri Tynyanov, Vladimir Propp, Roman Jakobson, and Boris Eichenbaum. Secondly, Vertov reveals that his early educational experience had some influence over the development of his theory of montage and cinema. (17 ) In 1916, Vertov had enrolled in the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg. (18 ) The courses Vertov attended at the Psychoneurological Institute were aimed at understanding the totality of human behavior, in terms of various displacements and conversions (reflexes) of energy. These were defined as an energetic montage.19 It was at this time that his early camera work began to develop and the possibilities of cinema began to take shape. Montage theory then, as Vertov developed it during these years, represented a visual method to capture the energy of the body in motion, its energy flows and the trajectory of energy through the material world.20 As Ostwald had suggested: Matter is only a mirage, which the mind creates to comprehend the workings of energy.21

16 Ibid. 17 In a later article, Manovich points to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), in regard to the development of visualising techniques and data visualisation. See Lev Manovich, “Visualizing Vertov”, in: Russian Journal of Communication 5:1 (2013). 18 I am indebted to John MacKay’s article “Film Energy: Process and Metanarrative in Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year (1928)”, in: October 121 (2007), 41–78. Vladimir Bekhterev (1857–1927) was a psychophysicist and foundational figure in the development of Russian psychiatry and neurology. In 1907 he founded the Psychoneurological Institute. Nikolas Lange, Vladimir A. Wagner and other major figures studied at the Institute. 19 Energeticism, or transcendental materialism, developed out of the school of Russian

Helmholtzians. 20 A discussion of the importance of energetic and vitalist views at this time in art is also discussed in Edith Toth, From Activism to Kinetism: Modernist Spaces in Hungarian Art 1918–1930, doctoral thesis, 2010. 21 Cited by Holt, Niles R. “Wilhelm Ostwald’s ‘The Bridge,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 10(2):146–50, 1977.

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Montage film could capture the process of energy conversion, with human labor as its central relay point.22 This approach can be seen in Vertov’s film WE: Variant of a Manifesto (1922), made at the time he was developing his theory of the cine-eye. Shortly after, in 1923, Vertov wrote: I am cine-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them […]. Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations […]. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.23

The organ of the eye produces “the montage of life.” Vertov writes “kinothing[s] by the filmed frames” and creates “visual thinking.” Platonov writes “not by words, imagining and copying real living languages, but rather by the pieces of the living language.” This art of seeing, and of the unrepresentable non-seeing in the case of Platonov, organizes the chaos of impressions into a new “class vision.” Neither method has anything to do either with objectivity or with Lenin’s reflection theory. The montage of life involves the critique of representation, but it does not mean that Vertov and Platonov prefer a naturalistic photographical copy of reality. Instead they produce reality, or, better, the universal point of view of the laboring population of the earth.24 Kinochestvo was the main cinematographic mechanism of cine-eye. It characterized the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal rhythm of each object. By this means, Vertov could capture the non-acted film in order to produce a “truthful” depiction of life for cinema. This method became most clearly developed in his films One Sixth of the World (1926), The Eleventh Year (1928), 22 Op. cit. 23 Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Edited by Annette

Michelson, translated by Kevin O’Brien. Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 17–18. 24 Chehonadskih, Maria, Soviet Epistemologies and the Materialist Ontology of Poor Life: Andrei Platonov, Alexander Bogdanov and Lev Vygotsky. Thesis submitted 2017.

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and Man with a Movie Camera (1929). For Vertov, film was a dynamic geometry able to construct a new, objective depiction of reality. Joshua Siegel in 1979, when he was associate curator of the department of film at MoMA, explained the relevance of Vertov in the following way: I’m particularly fascinated with the ways in which Vertov’s influence has extended beyond cinema in the twenty-first century. Computer scientists, linguists, mathematicians, and musicologists have used digital technologies in recent years to better understand Vertov’s rhythmic editing, and his use of sound, at a granular level, and to explore the relationship of the neurological and the perceptual to the cognitive in his work—something Vertov himself, once a student of science, music, and neuropsychology, would have appreciated.25

Energetics is a theory physics backed by the philosophy that all reality is energy. Physical and mental processes are interpreted as energy exchanges. One of the key figures in the elaboration of theories of energy was Wilhelm Ostwald (Riga, 1853–1932). In 1909 he had won the Nobel Prize for his work on thermodynamics; and is considered the founder of the “school of energetics.” His book The Energetic Imperative, published in 1912, was on the postulate of the “energetic imperative” (or thermodynamics imperative). When Wilhelm Ostwald wrote that “Everything that happens in this world is nothing but a change in energy,” he touched on a subject that had been resonating across Europe for some decades.26 By the end of the nineteenth century, the theory of thermodynamics had been elaborated as a way to better understand the many forms of existing energy, notably heat energy, kinetic, electromagnetic, or electrical, to that of radiation, chemical, and atomic energy. There were three governing laws in thermodynamics. The first law was called the law of conservation of energy, suggesting that energy could be transferred from one system to another in many forms. The total amount of energy available in the Universe is constant. Einstein then suggested that energy and matter were interchangeable and that the quantity of energy and matter in the Universe was fixed. The second law of thermodynamics is that heat

25 Joshua Siegel, along with Yuri Tsivian, organized the MoMA celebration of the 60th anniversary of Soviet cinema in 1979. 26 Ostwald, Wilhelm, Der Energetische Imperativ (The Energetic Imperative). Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1912.

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cannot be transferred from a colder to a hotter body. Hence, natural processes that involve energy transfer, can only have one direction and that natural processes are irreversible. This law also predicted that the entropy of an isolated system always increases with time. Because of this, both energy and matter in the Universe are becoming less useful as time goes on. Entropy is defined as the measure of the disorder or randomness of energy and matter in a system. The third law of thermodynamics states that if all the thermal motion of molecules (kinetic energy) could be removed, a state called absolute zero would occur. Returning to Ostwald, Edit Toth has pointed out Wilhelm Ostwald’s ambitious scientific theories offered an inspiration for dealing with social relations, as he tried to develop energetics into a monist and pacifist worldview by applying it to all aspects of life, including the functioning of culture and social reform. His physical chemistry research on complex energy exchanges, flows, and relationships determined for Ostwald energy as a real substance, the cause of all sensations, and the basic governing principle underlying all natural phenomena.27

Charlotte Douglas has earlier taken this up in her article, “Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post Revolutionary Art,” (These) artists and theorists, spoke of and attempted to represent energy itself, the energy of gases, of electromagnetic forces, and of the cosmic flux. The study of energetic systems, which was a major topic of discussion in Russia during much of the 1920s, led to paintings of graphs and painted diagrams of relationship, and to the presentation of organization paradigms as works of art. The primary visual element these artists had in common was an avoidance of depicted objects, objects in this view of the world being merely transitory webs or nodules of energy. In major part, this artistic trend was the product of the immediate ideological demands on artists created by the October Revolution, which required an art based on materialism, science, and analysis, rather than an idealist of essentialist abstraction.28

27 Edit Toth, ´ From activism to kinetism: modernist spaces in Hungarian art, 1918-1930 Budapest —Vienna—Berlin. Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University Graduate School, 2010. 28 Douglas, Charlotte, “Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian PostRevolutionary Art,” in Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (eds.), From

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Part 3: The legacy of montage theory: Much has changed since the montage practice of Vertov and Eisenstein now more than a century ago. But their work was central to the development of the cinéma vérité movement in the 1960s and to the work of French New Wave filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker and his astonishing La Jetée (1962). And, while both Eisenstein and Vertov anticipated the future of media art, digital media itself has advanced. This includes increasing attention being paid to the interactivity between the viewer and the work—that is, between the human body and virtual reality. Digital media was developing such that there was a shift of agency, from that of the filmmaker to that of the receiver. There have been many figures in the development of digital media art, such as Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel, Roy Ascott, and Nicolas Bernier; and a handful of organizations have championed their work, notably the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz that began in 1979. From the 1970s on, Shaw had been working to extend the concept of “expanded cinema” as it was developed in the 1960s, into an interactive art or “immersive visualization” involving audience interactivity and focusing on viewer engagement rather object-making. By the mid-1970s, Shaw began to use the computer to further extend the centrality of audience participation. Shaw was born in Melbourne to Polish immigrants, studying architecture and art history at the University of Melbourne between 1962–1964. He then studied sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan (1965) and St. Martin’s School of Art in London (1966). The mid-60s was a time of extraordinary breadth in contemporary art practice internationally, including Europe and the UK where Shaw was studying. It ranged from Anthony Caro to young artists like David Medalla showing at Signals Gallery or Gustav Metger and his Auto-destructive art movement begun at the end of the 50 s and championed by him and others with the Destruction in Art Symposium in London in 1966. Similarly, in Milan, the work of Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana were making work that challenged painting and the canvas. Or, the emergence of the Arte Povera movement, for instance the Janis Kounellis exhibition of 12 horses in 1968, was capturing the radical spirit of the times. Equally, by the mid-60s, the idea of an expanded cinema was already being

Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 (pp. 76–94), pp. 76–77.

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explored internationally, from Andy Warhol in New York, in Poland and Czechoslovakia and Franz Zwartjes among others in Holland. In 1966 Shaw was a founding member of an artist-run organization, the Artist Placement Group in London 1966. Conceived by Barbara Steveni and John Latham in 1965, the group sought to develop opportunities for an artist outside the gallery, by attaching the artist as an autonomous agent in a business or governmental context. The artists would then create work related to those new experiences. Other young significant British artists associated with APG included Stuart Brisley, John Latham, Barry Flanagan, David Hall, Anna Ridley among others. Its aim was to widen the social context and impact of artists’ work by finding them paid yet unconstrained “residencies” in the private and public sectors. Shaw had studied and exhibited with Tjebbe van Tijen in Milan, and in the late 60s he also began to work together with the Dutch industrial designer Theo Botschuijver and the American architect Sean WellesleyMiller. Shaw was then a young man in his 20 s open and ready to embrace new challenges and make new engaged art. And, it is hard to convey the tremendous changes that Holland had undergone over the decade of the 60s in all sectors, politically, socially, and, culturally. This was similar in many countries, as in the international development of the artistic movement of Fluxus, in which play was a key component of its practice and its local manifestations in Europe, Japan, and the United States. Perhaps more than anyone, we need mention Constant Nieuwenhuys (Amsterdam 1920–2005) whose work as an architect, writer and theorist had a tremendous impact on Dutch culture. Constant had studied art at the school for the decorative and applied arts in 1939, transferring a year later to the Rijks Academy in Amsterdam. After the traumatic war experience, Constant met with the Danish painter Asger Jorn in Paris and together with others established “CoBrA” two years later. Across the ruins and borders, a group of experimental artists gathered together, thanks to Jorn’s international travels and international contacts. As an international group of artists, CoBrA (named after their common working language was French and their name CoBrA, after the three capital cities Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam) was dedicated to developing an art informed by social commitment. To nourish the collaborational attitude, Jorn started the Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste (MIBI).

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Jorn’s connection to the Parisian avant-garde environment drew more new artists to the city. They were in a group called Lettriste International. From England came a group of artists who had gathered under the name of the London Psychogeographical Association. In 1957, MIBI was supplemented with new members and renamed International Situationists (IS), which became a movement that had decisive political and artistic significance. Politically, they associated with the advent of radical youth movements: an attempt at finalization of capitalism, individualism, and consumerism, and through and through artistic because they successful combined community criticism with new artistic practices such as happenings, interventions, and provocations. Jorn became co-editor of the group’s journal, and collaborated closely with Guy Debord (Paris, 1931–1994), the head of the French group. Together they published the two books in 1957 Fin de Copenhague (The End of Copenhagen) and in 1959 Mémoires (Memories). Debord’s book of 1967, La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle), acted as a summary of the group’s ideas, describing a society in which everything has become an act where goods and services are picked up and contribute to the “spectacle.” In the book, it is described how everything we see and experience is designed and staged for the sake of capital. Living in Paris and London, Constant began to explore spatial and architecture-related issues from 1952. He became a cofounder of the “Internationale situationiste” movement. The future of the city became his subject, working on the “Nieuw Babylon” (“New Babylon”) project, imagining an urban utopia in which every individual designed his own home and broader environment. His designs focused on the creation of a “new man”—the homo ludens —who, by means of technological advance, would be free of the constraints of labor to lead a life of sheer playfulness and creativity. (The Hague held a major exhibition of Constant’s work in 1965) He wrote of the need to construct new situations for the integration of art and life that would in turn rebuild our environment.29 Constant was inspired by the book Homo Ludens, written by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johann Huizinga (Groningen, Netherlands, 1872–1945) and published in Holland in 1938. The book discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Huizinga

29 See Mark Rigley, Constant’s New Babylon The Hyper Architecture of Desire. Rotterdam: Witte de With center for contemporary art, 1998.

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suggests that play is primary to and a necessary condition of the generation of culture. Play he argued was older than culture and can be seen as enabling freedom beyond an ordinary life and neither connected to material interest or profit. More broadly, the subject of the individual’s relation to their environment had become the center of philosophical reflection during this time. Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty was translated into English in 1963 in which he argues for viewing the physical and sensory experiences of the human body as the primary means of knowing the world. His views could not have been more apt than in the 60s. Amsterdam had already experienced tremendous change in the 60s. The city had been the center of street happenings, demonstrations and clashes with the police in the preceding years, in the tentative early stages of a youthful revolt against established patterns of authority. The royal wedding in 1966 between Crown Princess Beatrix and the German prince Claus von Amsberg that had taken place in Amsterdam, provided a flashpoint for the expression of discontent. One of their most infamous acts was their disruption of the wedding of Princess Beatrix and the German prince, Claus von Amsberg in 1966 by setting off smoke bombs, an event which was broadcast around the world.30 While the Provo had formally disbanded by 1967, their methods were emulated by other social activists. By the late 1960s many protests centered on the country’s prominent, conservative—and heavily subsidized—arts institutions. Inspired by Constant’s work, Provo set the tone and provided a language for many of the public happenings, challenging the established order. “Ludiek” was the word Provo used for their style of public action, a word derived from Huizinga’s “homo ludens” and translated as playful, or carnivalesque. Through the playful provocation (hence their name Provo) of the established order, they staged public performances which they called happenings. The Provo movement was geared toward reshaping Amsterdam into an environment for a new, playful, human being, and taking its name from its “provocations” of police and state powers through games and ritualist performances. Provo cofounder Roel van Duijn explicitly rejected collectivist ideals of earlier Dutch anarchists in favor of a more individualist and antagonist form of anarchism. Instead of an emphasis on shared responsibility and social cohesion, Van 30 Much of this material about Amsterdam and Jeff Shaw comes from discussions with Shaw.

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Duijn advocated unlimited individual freedom. This meant that the social order was subservient to individuality and that the ideal society was better described in terms of constantly transforming forms of disharmony and inequality than of balance and equilibrium. Equally important were both composers and improvisers who sought to negotiate the place of their music in a wider social context, merging avant-garde music with the ideals of collective creativity of Provo and situationism. The Sigma Centre, founded by the Situationist and beat poet Alexander Trocchi and psychonaut Simon Vinkenoog (1928–2009) with support from Provo, was intended as a center where people could engage in “active recreation” and “experiment in the use of free time.”31 As a precursor to the new society envizioned by Provo, nobody would be required to work. It attracted avant-garde improvisers (including Breuker, Tchicai, and AMM) as well as composers to organize workshops and musical events, but disagreements soon arose. For one thing, for professional musicians, this “active recreation” was their job, and they expected compensation for their efforts, which obviously went against the egalitarian spirit of Sigma. Furthermore, the free participation of audiences, particularly the rowdy Provo, were experienced by musicians as a disruption of their music rather than a collaboration. Soon enough, both improvisers and composers started to instruct their audiences to keep quiet, thereby returning them to the role of passive spectators. The Provo and other Sigma board members felt, justifiably so, that the musicians were more concerned with their personal artistic development than with ideals of collective creativity. When the improvisers did involve the audience, their actions were closely circumscribed, so as not to interfere with the intentions of the musical performers. Such performances, organized as part of various “love-ins,” did not actively seek to expound an artistic vision, but offered instruments for audiences to play along with the music—if they felt like it. The more accessible music also helped to engage the audience; however, most composers and improvisers dismissed any form of popular music as ideologically suspect. Under the rubric of Sigma Projects initiated by Tjebbe van Tijen, Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver, Pieter Boersma, Willem Breuker, John 31 See Niek Pas, “In Pursuit of the Invisible Revolution: Sigma in the Netherlands,” in Between the Avantgarde and Everyday Subversive Politics in Europe: Sigma in the Netherlands. Edited by Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011.

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Latham, Nico Nijland, and Graham Stevens collaborated in a series of street art projects, including Emergence of Continuous Forms at Better Books in London in 1966. Another Sigma project was Corpocinema with Shaw, Botschuiver, Wellesley-Miller, and van Tijen (Rotterdam and then Amsterdam, 1967). Corpocinema, was an inflatable dome made of transparent plastic, five meters high and seven meters wide, onto which a film was projected. Smoke, colored powders, and foam was used and water sprayed over the interior space of the dome. Images were projected onto the exterior and a variety of films screened in this immersive expanded cinema performance. Shaw, Botschuijver, and Wellesley-Miller then made Movie Movie. Also initiated by van Tijen and SIGMA Projects, this expanded cinema performance was created for the Knokke Experimental Film Festival. In the foyer of its casino venue, three persons dressed in white overalls carried in the inflatable plastic, semi-transparent structure, and unrolled it on the floor. As the structure gradually inflated, film, slides, and liquid-light show effects were projected onto its surface. Its fully inflated shape was a cone of seven meters in diameter and ten meters high, with an outer transparent membrane and inner white surface and speakers on the inside and outside featuring live sounds by the “Musica Electronica Viva.” The projected imagery first appeared faintly on the outer envelope and then fully on the semi-inflated inner surface. In the intermediate space between these two membranes, performers and audience rolled about on the soft projection membrane and played with white balloons and inflatable tubes. In this way, flat cinema projection became animated as a kinetic, immersive space. As Shaw has written: The multiple projection surfaces allowed the images to materialize in many layers, and on the bodies of the performers, and then of the audience…In this way the immersive space of cinematic fiction included the literal and interactive immersion of the viewers. They modulated the changing shapes of the pneumatic architecture, which in turn transmuted the shifting deformations of the projected imagery.32

In 1969 in Amsterdam, Shaw co-founded the Eventstructure Research Group with Theo Botschuijver and Sean Wellesley-Miller. As before 32 Je Shaw, Scanlines: ‘Media Art in Australia since the 1960’s,’ Moviemovie, 1987. See also imaginarymuseum. org. 1967.

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their work was dedicated to surprise in everyday situations and therefore breaking through the conditioning in the conventional patterns of experience and behavior. In 1969 the Eventstructure Research Group performed six unannounced events in the urban environment of Amsterdam, using inflatable objects that people could enter and/or play with. Pneutube was one of these events. Performed on Frederiksplein on September 17, 1969, Pneutube was a three-meter diameter and sixty meter long transparent tube filled with air, containing a “jump-on” yellow tube also inflated with air. A few days later at Sloterplas, an artificial lake, another work Waterwalk was installed. It was a tetrahedron made of plastic, floating on the water that people could climb into. Closed by a waterproof zipper, people could then walk across the lake. Over the next decade Shaw continued to make projects related to expanded cinema using inflatables, laser projections and both video and computer installations. In 1977 Marga Adama, John Munsey and Jeffrey Shaw established Javaphile Productions in Amsterdam. Other artists then joined the core members in the group’s various works. While very much a part of the performative strategies of ’60s “happenings” and experimental theatre, it also had a strong affinity with the “poetic cinema” strategies of the Georgian /Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. In late 1984 Shaw proposed Inventer la Terre (The Invention of the World), to La Villette museum of science and technology in Paris. It was realized in 1986 as a site-specific, interactive, augmented reality installation for this museum. Inventer la Terre embodied a museum within a museum—a repository of sounds and images and an archival machine that incorporates the mythologies, cosmologies and sciences that “invented” the world. Its apparatus was a chrome-plated column that stands on a circular black terrazzo base inlaid with brass signs showing an ancient Hebraic astrological map. The column has a viewing aperture, two control handles, and a pair of loudspeakers. Inside the column there is an optical system constituted by a video monitor, a Fresnel lens and a semi-transparent mirror. Looking through the aperture in the column, the spectator could see a large virtual image projected out into the museum space. The projected virtual image showed a 360-degree panorama representing six different symbolic sites in an imaginary landscape. By rotating the column the viewer could then select any one of these sites, and linked to each is an approximately three-minute video sequence that articulates specific themes identified by that particular place.

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The following year 1987, Shaw with the collaboration of Harry de Wit on sound, made Heaven’ Gate. A video installation, the work was first shown within the four-story high stairwell of the neo-classical Felix Meritis building in Amsterdam. The conceptual and iconographic references in this work are largely derived from two sources—Baroque ceiling paintings and aerial/satellite pictures of the surface of our planet. A digital trompe l’oeil, it captures the view from space down onto the planet and inverts the ecstatic Baroque gaze upwards to the heavens. These images alternate in a computer processed videographic structure that deconstructs and manipulates the constituent pixels of the original images and then kinetically maps them into a virtual three-dimensional space. Its iconographic references include the Futurist’s embrace of the aerial point of view, and the spatial apotheosis of El Greco, William Blake and Yves Klein. The mirrored architecture of the installation, together with its digital-anamorphic image transformations, draws the viewers physically and emotionally into a virtual pictorial space that dissolves the boundary between material and immaterial identity. Then, in 1988, Shaw first presented The Legible City (1988–1991) as an installation consisting of a projection screen in front of which a real bicycle is positioned. The projection surface depicts the architecture of a city in the form of letters that visitors can explore by riding the bicycle. The text-lined streets of three cities were programmed by Shaw and co-author Dirk Groeneveld: New York City (Manhattan), Amsterdam and Karlsruhe. The architecture of letters and words used for Manhattan is divided into eight narrative strands, which are distinguished by different colors. Fictitious monologues by New York personalities were written by Dirk Groeneveld, including the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the real estate developer Donald Trump, the lexicographer Noah Webster, and a taxi driver. The Amsterdam and Karlsruhe versions on the other hand use actual historical episodes as the basis for Groeneveld’s texts. The bicycle gives the user control over direction and speed, and as they move about within the urban maze of words, phrase and sentences become a recombinatory meta-narrative created by the unique path each bicyclist takes. The physical effort of the cyclist in the real world is transferred to the virtual world, connecting the materiality of the physical effort with its graphic virtuality. The installation combines a video projection on a large screen to present the navigation through the virtual world, and a small monitor

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in front of the bicycle that shows the real-time position of the cyclist on maps of each city. Since this time, Shaw has continued to be a leading figure in new media art, emerging out of the performance, expanded cinema and installation paradigms of the 1960s into the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems, and interactive narrative. Looking back to the early period of Shaw’s work we are struck not only by the importance of collaboration and audience participation in the realization of the work but, the element of play and everyday life. For an exhibition WYSIWYG at the Osage Foundation (Hong Kong) in 2019, Shaw re-organized his online COMPENDIUM , an encyclopedic overview of his work, as an interactive installation divided into three relational groups: EVENSTSTRUCTURE, GOING AROUND and PAST PRESENT. The first group encompasses his early works in performance, air structures and expanded cinema, spanning the period from 1966 to 1980. The second focuses a recurrent theme in his interactive digital creations—the aesthetic and conceptual articulation of interfaces that afford the viewer the ability to freely move around and look around in virtual worlds, and whose panoramic forms are combined with rotational operations. The third group identifies Shaw’s recurrent cross referencing with the history of art in his oeuvre, and to his numerous co-authorships with Sarah Kenderdine of installations that engage global cultural heritage as a speculative context. Masaki Fujihata should also be singled out who by 2000 had developed a new dimension of interactivity on the basis of technological advances and new possibilities for computer-assisted analysis of large and complex data sets.33

With his “Voices of Aliveness ” (2012), Fujihata invited people to ride a bicycle on a specially prepared path, reserved exclusively for this project and called the “shouting circuit.” As participants rode their bicycles, equipped with a GPS recorder and a video camera, traces of their path and shouts were transmitted into cyberspace and transformed into the shape of a ring. The collected rings from each participant were then compiled 33 The composer Yasuaki Shimizu also collaborated on the project, arranging the recorded voices for the soundtrack.

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to form a tower-like “time tunnel”—a cyber tunnel of collected shouting that extends toward the heavens. Fujihata’s enthusiasm was clear as he wrote: The world today is full of sound and fury. Everywhere people are rife with angst over the present state of world affairs. In the midst of all this, sometimes we just want to shout—without any particular objective, and with no clear reason. What can we do about this? The project site at La Martiniere is a place for shouting, where people can shout into cyberspace, and see/hear their experience documented on the web. It is a collection of people’s shouts. It is a sculpture of voices. It is a “meta-monument” built of collective memory.34

Bridging real space and cyberspace, Fujihata writes that the main concern of the project was to find a way to express our life, our aliveness, our activity in cyberspace, and how we can document what we are doing as collective memories in digital format. The only way to tackle this problem is by designing a new medium, by expanding our creativity. Each person’s participation, their “shout” is the key to connecting technology and memory. In short, not only does Fujihata convey the enthusiasm of his subject but he also captures the essential energetics of its making through audience participation. This energetics has to do with the energy flow of the body in motion, the turning of the bicycle wheels, the voices of their riders. As I proposed in the opening of this essay, contemporary digital media artists reveal both the continuities and divergences from cinema, as pioneered by the montage practice of cinema by Eisenstein and Vertov.

34 See Masaki, Un espace pour crier - un collection de voix. Voices of Aliveness. Webpage. (2012) and Kluszczynski, Ryszard W. Monument as Archive: artistic strategies from antito meta-memorial, 2017.

Postscript: Dreaming of Russia

In his book Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky wrote that he wanted his film Nostalghia (1983), his first film after leaving Russia, to escape censorship, to be “about the particular state of mind which assails Russians who are far from their native land.” Tarkovsky’s personal struggle between love of country and creative freedom inevitably led to his defection to the West in 1983 with his wife, Larissa, leaving behind their son, Andriuschka, in the Soviet Union. Apart from a small handful of documentaries and books, Tarkovsky made seven feature films before he died at the age of fifty-four in 1986. His films were Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), The Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and The Sacrifice (1986). Individually these films are each quite extraordinary. And together, these films, in different ways, explore the concept of “fictive dreams.” They are often times based on true historical events or on novels, shaped in the form of allegories or parables that each are a measure of and reflect on the exigencies of life. Speaking about Tarkovsky, the film director Ingmar Bergman once reflected: When film is not a document, it is a dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. (Ingmar Bergman) And, Tarkovsky himself wrote in his book Sculpting in Time that:

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2

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Faced with the necessity of shooting dreams, we had to decide how to come close to the particular poetry of the dream, how to express it, what means to use… All this material found its way into the film straight from life, not through the medium of contiguous visual arts.1

Tarkovsky’s films were often categorized as “Science Fiction,” a genre in which fictive imaginings spin off the real. This fictive real suggests a parallel world, a future time or alien presence. Traditionally, this genre, especially in Russia, served as a critique of society, of totalitarian governments, and lack of free will, a dystopia in short. We can well remember the novels of Yevgeny Zamyatin (among others) and his novel We published and banned in the early period of the Soviet Union. Tarkovsky’s films are not based simply on an imagined future. Rather, they weave historical memory and an imagined past, a past out of which the real can be shaped and understood. Boris Groys commenting on Tarkovsky noted: These images are nostalgic, but not for the Soviet culture of the Russia that he left. Rather, they’re nostalgia for Russia before the Revolution. They reflect the neo-romantic mood of the time in which they were made …it reflects the mood of the period of [Soviet] stagnation. It’s sort of a gentlemen’s life in the country – a gentry life, not the proletarian Soviet reality. Everything takes place in Dachas, or private apartments of the wealthy or upper-class Moscow intelligentsia, people who made it somehow, or whose families did…What happened in the Soviet Union was a kind of collectivization of consciousness, a collectivization of the mood of the population, some kind of totalization of unconsciousness. Accordingly, people just wanted to have their personal space back. The religious mood at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s was the first wave of privatization. This was privatization of ideological space – a discourse of privatization that historically preceded economic privatization…He wants to have this romantic, spiritual, intimacy here and now.2

1 Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 1984. (Translated). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989. 2 See Boris Groys, Tarkovsky’s Documentary Romanticism, a conversation with curator Nadim Samman and Anya Stonelake of White Cube Gallery, London, February 1, 2019.

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Tarkovsky’s first film Ivan’s Childhood (1962) tells the story of a twelveyear-old orphan boy Ivan and his experiences working for the Soviet army as a scout behind the German lines during World War Two. However, it was his second film Andrei Rublev (1966) that begins to explore more extensively what we are calling the world of the fictive real. Presented as a tableau of seven sections in black and white, the film depicts medieval Russia during the first quarter of the fifteenth century, a period of Mongol-Tartar invasion and growing Christian influence. Commissioned to paint the interior of the Vladimir cathedral, Andrei Rublev leaves the Andronnikov monastery with an entourage of monks and assistants, witnessing in his travels the degradations of his fellow Russians, including pillage, oppression, torture, rape, and plague. Faced with the brutalities of the world outside the religious enclave, Rublev’s faith is shaken, prompting him to question the uses or even possibility of art in a degraded world. After Mongols sack the city of Vladimir, burning the very cathedral that he has been commissioned to paint, Rublev takes a vow of silence and withdraws completely, removing himself to the hermetic confines of the monastery. The film’s final section concerns a boy named Boriska who convinces a group of traveling bell-makers that his father passed on to him the secret of bell-making. The men take Boriska along, and are quickly enthralled by the boy’s ambition, determination, and confidence that he alone knows how to build the perfect bell. Boriska is soon commanding an army of assistants and peasant workers. Rublev appears; at first standoffish and mistrustful of the boy, he finds himself drawn to Boriska’s courage and unselfconscious desire to create. Moved to put aside his vow of silence, Rublev serves finally as the boy’s confessor, and he finds that, through Boriska, his faith, and art, have been renewed. The film ends with a montage of Rublev’s painted icons in color. It was not until some six years late that he was able to release his third feature film Solaris (1972). The work that goes beyond the boundaries of the historical real, uncovering a fictive world whose characters are filled with hope and disenchantment. Cowritten and directed by Tarkovsky, the film was an adaptation of the Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris (1961). Both the novel and film are largely set aboard a space station orbiting a fictional planet “Solaris.” The scientific mission has stalled because the crew of three scientists have each fallen into an emotional crisis. A psychologist is flown out to the space station to evaluate the situation, but finds himself experiencing also the same mysterious phenomena

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as the crew. The planet Solaris is trying to make contact with the crew by reaching into their subconscious and creating living replicas of whatever it finds locked in there. A replica of the psychologist’s wife, who committed suicide years before, appears to him on board the space station and they embark on an intense affair. The replica is an embodiment of his lost love and the residual guilty memory he has of her. Romantic fulfillment becomes an “an impossible ideal buried in the past.” Following Solaris Tarkovsky made The Mirror (1975), a nonnarrative, stream of consciousness, autobiographical film-poem that blends scenes of childhood memory with newsreel footage and contemporary scenes examining the narrator’s relationships with his mother, his ex-wife, and his son. The oneiric intensity of the childhood scenes, in particular, are visually stunning, rhythmically captivating, almost hypnotic. Tarkovsky weaves together scenes of nature and mundane everyday life with archival footage of events that have occurred within the narrator’s lifetime, notably The Spanish Civil War, the Sino-German conflict during WW2, and the Atomic Bomb. These two sets of images contrast with one another. In 1979 Tarkovsky finished The Stalker, another adaptation this time from Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic. The Stalker is far more pessimistic than his previous films. The film follows a Writer and a Scientist, who are guided by a man called “the Stalker,” on a journey through a mysterious wasteland referred to as the “Zone.” They have left the confines of a grim, rotting Eastern European city. The people are exhausted and worn down as their surroundings. The three protagonists walk through a charming-looking rural setting. The Zone is lush and green, an organic profusion of growth and chaos which creates a stark contrast to the decaying rigidity of the city. Their goal being to travel to the “room,” at the center of the Zone, where their innermost desires, wishes, and dreams may be fulfilled. To enter the “room” is to be granted one’s deepest unconscious wish. Although the “Zone” is off-limits to civilians, illegal guides known as “Stalkers” make their living by guiding customers through the Zone to the “room.” After much soul-searching, they fail in their quest through a lack of will power. None of the three men dare enter the “room” and the “stalker” returns to his distraught wife and daughter, who has been born crippled probably due to her father’s constant exposure to the atmosphere of the “Zone.” The arguments between these men slowly close in around the Stalker’s central concerns: the relationship between hope and reality, the vagaries

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of human intentions, and the need for mystery. The Professor seems intent on measuring the forces at work within the Zone. He is, the Writer claims, “putting miracles to an algebra test.” Even the seemingly supernatural granting of wishes, the Professor believes, will leave some physical trace, something which can be measured (or annihilated. A disappointed idealist, the Writer expects little good to come of hope. As Nietzsche wrote “Hope: in reality it is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of Man” (Human All Too Human). The film was shot near Tallinn. Vladimir Sharun, the film’s sound designer notes: We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Piliteh with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact, it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larissa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris….3

Six years after the completion of the film the “Fourth energy block” at Chernobyl exploded and the 30-kilometer Zone became a reality. In Nostalghia (1983) an exiled poet, Andrei Gortchakov (Oleg Jankovsky), travels to Italy to research the life of the eighteenth-century Russian composer Pavel Sosnovsky, who lived there and, despite achieving international recognition away from his homeland, eschewed fame and returned to the humble life of a serf, only to sink further into despair and commit suicide. Andrei and his interpreter Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) have traveled to a convent in the Tuscan countryside, to look at frescoes by Piero della Francesca. Andrei decides at the last minute that he does not want to enter the convent. Their visit to the therapeutic hot springs pool of St. Catherine in Bagno Vignoni proves to be the catalyst that spurs Andrei into action. Historically, the hot springs were constructed to alleviate the suffering of the ill. Furthermore, St. Catherine of Siena, after whom the pool was named, was an advocate for the reunification of the Eastern (Orthodox) Church

3 Cited in Stas Tyrkin, ‘Stalker, Tarkovsky foretold Chernobyl,’ Komsomolskaya Pravda, 23 March 2001.

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and the Western (Roman Papal) Church during the Great Schism of the Ecumenical Church. Figuratively, Andrei too, is a supplicant to the pool of St. Catherine seeking to heal the sickness within his divided soul. In essence, Andrei’s uneventful biographic research trip has developed into a personal pilgrimage to find his own personal unity. Eugenia attempts to engage him in a conversation over Arseni Tarkovsky’s (Tarkovsky’s father) poetry but, Andrei dismisses his father’s work, reasoning that the simple act of translation loses the nuances of the native language. Eugenia then argues, “How can we get to know each other?” He replies, “By abolishing frontiers between states.” Eugenia is attracted to Andrei and is offended that he will not sleep with her. Andrei feels displaced and longs to go back to Russia. He is haunted by memories of his wife waiting for him. Instilled with a pervasive sense of melancholy, Andrei becomes profoundly alienated from his beautiful companion, his family, his country, and even himself. And yet, during this visit, Andrei becomes intrigued by the presence of an eccentric old man named Domenico (Erland Josephson), who once imprisoned his family for seven years in an apocalyptic delusion. After asking Eugenia to translate some of the descriptive words used by the villagers to characterize the inscrutable Domenico, Andrei rationalizes, “He’s not mad. He has faith” and asks Eugenia to act as an intermediary. Unable to convince Domenico to grant an interview to Andrei, Eugenia leaves in frustration. Domenico ultimately accepts the company of the attentive Andrei, and invites him to the abandoned house where he had kept his family in captivity. Domenico reflects on the folly of his actions as a desperate and selfish attempt to spare his family from a self-destructive and dying world. He implores Andrei to perform a seemingly innocuous task, to cross the pool of St. Catherine with a lighted candle. This is part of a greater redemptive design, Domenico claiming that when it is finally achieved, he will save the world. Andrei is reluctant to undertake Domenico’s illogical request. Yet he is intrigued and cannot not refuse him. Andrei immerses himself in the solitude of his memories and vague conversations with Domenico. Separated from his family, far from his homeland, and now alone, Andrei slips further into a state of profound isolation and unrequited longing, his own spiritual nostalghia. The two men both share a feeling of alienation from their surroundings. He learns that Domenico had a family and was obsessed with keeping them inside his house in order to save them from the end of the world. They were

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freed by the local police after seven years. Before leaving, Domenico gives Andrei his candle and asks him if he will cross the waters for him with the flame. During a dreamlike sequence, Andrei sees himself as Domenico and has visions of his wife, Eugenia, and the Madonna as being one and the same. Andrei thinks of cutting short his research to leave for Russia. But then, he gets a call from Eugenia, who wishes to say goodbye. She tells him that she has met Domenico in Rome by chance who had asked if Andrei has walked across the pool as he promised. Andrei says he has, although it’s not, in fact, true. Later, Domenico delivers a speech in the city about the need for mankind of being true brothers and sisters and to return to a simpler way of life. Finally, he plays the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony and immolates himself. The artist and the madman understand each other because they are part of the same person. Andrei, after learning from Domenico about the supposedly spiritually fulfilling task of walking a lit candle across a hot mineral pool, returns to the mineral pool to fulfill his promise, only to find that the pool has been drained. Nevertheless, he enters the empty pool and repeatedly attempts to walk from one end to the other without letting the candle extinguish. These attempts take in real time over nearly 10 minutes. As he finally achieves his goal, he collapses. The powerful last and long shot shows Andrei in the foreground of an ethereal coexistence between the two worlds, as the Russian farmhouse becomes encapsulated within the arching walls of a Roman cathedral. It is both an idealized and an ominous closure, as the muted colors of the Russian landscape now suffuse the Italian streets—a tenuous reunification of the spiritual schism within Andrei’s soul. It is through long durational scenarios that Tarkovsky manages to elucidate something resembling spirituality. An allegory, Tarkovsky presents the two disparate worlds—the spare, monochromatic landscape of the Russian countryside and the lush, idyllic meadows of rural Italy, that collide within the soul of the Russian author, Andrei. Through the melancholic Andrei, Tarkovsky attempts to reconcile his own feelings of emotional abandonment, loss of cultural identity, alienation, and artistic need. The abolition of frontiers is a subject explored in Tarkovsky’s earlier films, Solaris (1972) and The Stalker (1979). However, while the principal figures in both films coexist in a metaphysical realm between reality and the subconscious, Andrei in Nostalghia (1983) is profoundly aware

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of his physical separation from his beloved, his distant homeland and it is his innate longing to find unity within himself that unconsciously guides him. Ironically, his actions become antithetical to his own thoughts on the abolition of frontiers, as he creates artificial barriers to isolate himself from his physical reality. Are not dreams in some manner already fictive? Or does the word “fictive” together with “dreams” refocus our attention on the work of art, be it art, poetry, novel, or film. Nevertheless, these forms are not involuntary nor the direct result of the unconscious as of dreams. Rather, they are conscious, deliberate acts of creation, the makings of the imagination. This is their great value precisely because they can draw upon history, events, life as much as the imagination. As such, the significance of these artistic forms is to be found in their capacity to create a space for hope, desire, and belief. They are the stuff of dreams. The films of Andre Tarkovsky did just that. By the time Tarkovsky started work on his next and final film, The Sacrifice (1986), he knew he was seriously ill with cancer. A Swedish production, The Sacrifice is an allegory of self-sacrifice in which Alexander the principle figure, played by Erland Josephson again, gives up everything he holds dear to avert a nuclear catastrophe. The film opens on the birthday of Alexander. He lives in a beautiful house on a remote island, with his actress wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), stepdaughter Marta (Filippa Franzén), and young son, “Little Man,” who is temporarily mute due to a throat operation. Alexander and Little Man plant a tree by the seaside, when Alexander’s friend Otto, a part-time postman, delivers a birthday card to him. When Otto asks, Alexander mentions that his relationship with God is “nonexistent.” After Otto leaves, Adelaide and Victor, a medical doctor and a close family friend who performed Little Man’s operation, arrive at the scene and offer to take Alexander and Little Man home in Victor’s car. However, Alexander prefers to stay behind and talk to his son. In his monologue, Alexander first recounts how he and Adelaide found this lovely house near the sea by accident, and how they fell in love with the house and surroundings, but then enters a bitter tirade against the state of modern man. The family, as well as Victor and Otto, have gathered at Alexander’s house for the celebration. The family maid Maria leaves, while the nursemaid Julia stays to help with the dinner. People comment on Maria’s odd appearances and behavior. The guests chat inside the house, where

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Otto reveals that he is a student of paranormal phenomena, a collector of “inexplicable but true incidences.” Just when the dinner is almost ready, the rumbling noise of low-flying jet fighters interrupts them, and soon after, a news program announces the beginning of what appears to be war and threat of nuclear disaster. In despair, Alexander vows to God to sacrifice all he loves, even their Little Man, to avert disaster of nuclear warfare. Otto advises him to slip away and be with Maria, whom Otto convinces him is a benign witch. Alexander takes his gun, leaves a note in his room, escapes the house, and rides his bike to where Maria is staying. She is bewildered when he makes his advances, but when he puts his gun to his temple, at which point the jet fighters’ rumblings return, she soothes him and they make love. When he awakes the next morning, in his own bed, everything seems normal. Having followed the doctor’s instructions, the threat seemingly past. Alexander then sets about destroying all traces of his former life, thus fulfilling his private vow. With members of his family and friends, Alexander goes for a walk. But he sets fire to the house and as the group rushes back, alarmed by the fire, Alexander confesses that he set the fire himself. Maria appears and Alexander tries to approach her, but is restrained by others. Without explanation, an ambulance appears in the area and two paramedics chase Alexander, who appears to have lost control of himself. Maria begins to bicycle away, but stops halfway to observe Little Man watering the tree he and Alexander planted the day before. As Maria leaves the scene, the Little Man, lying at the foot of the tree, speaks his only line, quoting the opening line of the Gospel of St. John “‘In the beginning was the Word’… Why is that, Papa?” Is he a saint whose sacrifice rescued humanity, we are invited to ask, or is he a madman caught up in messianic delusions? As with all of Tarkovsky’s films, reality is caught in a state of flux between present/past, memory/perception, reality/fantasy, dreamtime/real·time. For Tarkovsky, this movement between inner and outer states is more significant than the abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality. It is captured by the duration of long takes and, as the philosopher Henri Bergson proposed, the understanding of reality through immediate experience and intuition rather than rationalism and science. Moreover, this sensation of time, is not only achieved by the duration of the shots or camera movement, but by the entire mise-enscene. All that is seen and heard within the frame is woven together to

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complement and augment the rhythm of the scene or shot and establish the temporal flow of the film. There is a persistent sense in Tarkovsky’s work of an ineffable spirituality within the constant presence of nature, of an ineffable spirituality and the spirit of a fictional real that haunts the present, are constantly threatened to disappear in today’s world.

Conclusion

One of the principal underlying subjects of this book is that of hope. When Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote her memoir of life in Russia she titled it Hope against Hope. In the book she remembers the last four years with her beloved husband Osip, before he was sent to his death in a labour camp in 1938. It is that hope which nourishes the unerring spirit of so many of these artists about whom I write in this book. They make art often in the face of adversity and the prevailing tide of repression, if not control. Perhaps, I could have called this book ‘Postponed Futures,’ the name given to a London exhibition in 2017. It had been opened at the time of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, juxtaposing contemporary Ukrainian art with that of the country’s avant-garde of the 1920s. But rather, I chose the title ‘In the Soviet Sphere,’ because the experience of living in Eastern Europe continues to be informed, if not shaped, by the tremendous legacy and ongoing presence of Russia. For some, this Soviet and Russian legacy has been an inspiration for their practice, while for others, that legacy and model has been rejected, resisted, mimicked or satirized. Throughout this book, I detail how some individual artists through their work and artistic organizations have challenged the imposition of a Soviet model. They have created something new, inspiring yet nevertheless, grounded in the realities of everyday life. In each case the response has been different, informed by the immediate circumstances and needs. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2

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In Chapter 3, I have explored how ‘non-conformist art’ emerged in the period of the 1960–1970s in Moscow, St. Petersburg and in different cities of the Ukraine, especially Kharkiv and Odessa. The struggle of Maidan in the Ukraine from 2014 onwards is, in some sense, a continuation of this issue of sovereignty and is discussed in Chapter 7. This is also most evident in Georgia where the issue of national sovereignty was at stake, leading to the successful gaining of their independence from Russia in 1991. What followed was a flourishing of a new art in the face of a protracted and hard period of living in a post-Soviet space until 2005. This is discussed in Chapter 4. The recent emergence of new independent practices in Georgia is discussed in Chapter 8. Chapter 5 is on monuments in Eastern Europe. Here I seek to make clear the degree to which the legacy of the Soviet Union was imposed throughout Eastern Europe and the effort by artists to move beyond this, to start a new chapter that reflects their own history and not only a Soviet history. Equally, the imposition of the Soviet Union/Russia is nowhere more evident than in Central Asia where it had a catastrophic, if not deadly, consequences on people and local communities. This is addressed in different ways across three Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in Chapter 9. In Chapters 2 and 10 in which I explore different models of analysis used by theoreticians, writers, art historians and curators with which to analyze contemporary art in Eastern Europe. In this regard, the concept of horizontality became a most useful tool with which to try and open up the local to a comparative analysis with other practices across Eastern Europe and the West. The work of these artists has often been inspired, if not supported, by their colleagues in other cities and centers of Eastern Europe, creating transnational ties, alliances and correspondences. The value of the concept of horizontality was strengthened by a number of artists who sought not only to exhibit their work in other countries but, often study if not live elsewhere than the country of their birth. Moreover, the lack of local resources and opportunities made this need even more imperative for many. Chapters 11 and 12 looks beyond the sphere of Eastern Europe to Asia to suggest the far reach and impact that Russian and Soviet art and culture had on artists, in this case China and Philippines. The case of these two countries is quite different, as China and Russia have had a long uneven relationship, while the case of Philippines it has been relatively negligible and has occurred almost serendipitously. Chapter 12 ‘The Interactivity of energies and montage’ returns to the question of the Soviet legacy and in

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this case early Soviet cinema, the development of montage theory and its impact on digital media art. Here, I explore the development of Expanded cinema in contributing to the development of digital media art from the 1970s. Stretching back one hundred years, reminds us of the enduring legacy the culture of the Soviet Union has had on us. The postscript of the book is devoted to a brief engagement with the work of the great Russian filmmaker Andre Tarkovsky who first showed his work in the era of Khrushchev, discussed in Chapter 3. Tarkovsky’s impact on me was tremendous, in some ways as strong as that of my first immersion into the world of Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy when young.

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Index

A Akhmediyarov, Askhat (Uralsk, Kazakhstan, 1965), 231 Akhunov, Vyachaslev (Osh, Kyrgyzstan, 1948), 6, 207, 237–243 Anatoly Osmolovsky (Moscow, Russia, 1969), 131 Anufriev, Alexander (Moscow, Russia, 1940), 52, 53 Anufriev, Sergei (Odessa, Ukraine, 1964), 53 Asriev, Vladimir (Odessa, Ukraine 1949), 51

B Backstein, Joseph (Moscow, Russia, 1945), 15, 32, 40–42 Bandzeladze, Alexander (Tulun, Irkutsk region, Georgia, 1927–1992), 60–62 Basquiat, Jean-Michel (Brooklyn, 1960–1988), 59, 300

Belting, Hans (Andernhach, Germany 1935), 3, 5, 23, 84, 305 Bohorov, Konstantin (Moscow, 1961), 117 Boltanski, Christian (Paris, 1944), 56, 103, 266 Bratkov, Sergey (Kharkov, Ukraine, 1960), 42 Bruskin, Grisha (Moscow, Russia, 1945), 54, 55 Bucarest, Romania, 213 Bugadze, Vakho (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1964), 4, 75, 76 Bulatov, Erik (Sverdlovsk, Russia, 1933), 37, 41, 54, 55, 106 Bulgakov Mikhail (Moscow, Russia, 1891–1940), 57 Burri, Alberto (Citta de Castello, Italy, 1915–1995), 79 C Chabashvili,Tamuna (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1978), 6, 169, 189, 191, 193–198

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 C. Merewether, In the Sphere of The Soviets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6574-2

353

354

INDEX

Chabet, Robert (Manila, Philippines, 1937–2013), ix, 7, 285, 290–303 Chachkhiani, Vajiko (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1985), 6, 169, 199–205 Chemiakin, Mikhail (Moscow, 1943), 54 Chernysheva, Olga (Moscow, Russia, 1962), 5, 105, 120, 122–129 Chogoshvili, Levan (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1953), 4, 59, 65–68 Clifford, James (New York, USA, 1945), 254 CoBrA Group, 8, 315 Constant Nieuwenhuys (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1920–2005), 8, 315

D Datukishvili, Malkhaz (Rustavi, Georgia 1956), 73 Djekshenbaev, Shailo (Sailyk, Kyrgyzstan, 1947), 6, 207, 216–219 Djordjadze, Thea (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1971), 6, 169 Djumaliev, Muratbek (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 1965), 6, 207, 231–234 Dodge, (Norton and Nancy), Collection, 32, 36, 53–55 Dubuffet, Jean (Le Havre, France, 1901–1985), 34 Dulfan, Lucien (Frunze, Krygyz, 1942), 50 Dzerzhinsky, Felix (Vilno, Lithuania, 1877–1926), 5, 86–88, 90, 91, 97

E Edzgveradze, Gia (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1953), 4, 59, 62–65

Egorov, Yuri (Stalingrad, Russia, 1926–2008), 50, 52 Ehrenburg, Ilya, (Kiev, Ukraine, 1891–1967), 31 Eisenstein, Sergei (Riga, Latvia, 1898–1948), 1, 8, 307–309, 314, 323 Ekici, Nezaket (Kirsehir, Turkey, 1970), 7, 269 F Freidin, Aleksandr (Odessa, 1926–1987), 50 G Gleser, Alexander (…), 39 Gogrichiani, Misha (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1967), 80 Groys, Boris (East Berlin, Germany, 1947), x, 3, 12, 17, 24, 25, 63, 92, 257, 266, 267, 326 Guilin, Mikhail, (Minsk, Belarus, 1950), 5 Gutov, Dimitry (Moscow, Russia, 1960), 5, 105, 117–122, 289 I Inspection Medical Hermeneutics group (Moscow), 53 Ismailova, Saodat (Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1981), 6, 207, 243–251 J Japharidze, Mamuka (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1962), 78 Jarkikh, Youri (Tikhoretsk, Krasnador Krai, Russia, 1938), 39 Javakhishvili, Temo (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1961), 65, 79

INDEX

Jincharadze, Kote (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1962), 75, 79, 80

K Kabakov, Ilya (Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 1933), 37–39, 41, 54, 55, 106, 110, 111, 185 Kacharava, Karlo (Samtredia, Georgia, 1964–1994), 4, 65, 66 Kadan, Nikita (Kiev, Ukraine, 1982), 6, 12, 29, 137–141, 151–154, 158, 163–165 Kadyrova, Zhanna (Brovary, Ukraine, 1981), 6, 137, 140, 158–161, 165 Kakabadze, David (Kukhi, near Khoni, Georgia, 1889–1952), 61 Kapanadze, Keti (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1962), 64, 65, 80 Kasmalieva, Gulnara (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 1960), 6, 207, 231–234 Khalfin, Rustam (Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1949–2008), 6, 207, 219 Kholin, Igor (Moscow, Russia, 1920–1999), 36 Khrushchev, Nikita (Kursk, Russia, 1894–1971), 1, 4, 31–34, 36, 50, 120 Khrushch, Valentin (Odessa, Ukraine, 1943–2005), 50, 51 Khumarashvili, Ushangi (Dedoplistskaro, Georgia, 1948), 59, 65, 73, 76 Kiev, Ukraine, 2, 44, 51, 95, 96, 142, 144, 151 Kisevalter, Georgia (Moscow, 1955), 111 Kochetov, Sergey (Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1972), 43, 47

355

Kochetov, Viktor (Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1947), 43, 46–48 Kochubinskaya, Tatiana (Kiev, 1985), 161, 165 Kolodzei, Natalia, 62–64 Komar, Vitaly (Moscow, Russia, 1943), 5, 25, 40, 41, 54, 55, 87, 88, 106 Kosugi, Takehisa (Tokyo, Japan, 1938–2018), 59 Kovylina, Elena (Moscow, Russia, 1971), 5, 105, 130–134 Kropivnitsky, Evgenii (Moscow, Russia, 1893–1979), 36 Kropivnitsky, Valentina (Moscow, Russia, 1924–2008), 36 Kuleshov, Lev (Tambov, Russia, 1899–1970), 8, 307 Kvrivishvili, Nino (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1984), 7, 259, 262–266 Kwade, Alicja (Katowice, Poland, 1979), 7, 259–261 L Lamm, Leonid (Moscow, Russia, 1928–2017), 54 Lasareishvili, Luka (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1957), 4, 59, 62, 65 Leiderman, Yuri (Odessa, Ukraine, 1963), 53, 156 Lianozovo Group, Moscow, Russia, 36, 37, 39 Lviv, Ukraine, 46, 97, 141 M Makhacheva, Taus (Moscow, Russia, 1983), 5, 104, 105, 134–136 Makiyenko, Anatoliy (Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1949), 42 Mali, Natalia (Makhachkala, Dagestan, 1971), 7, 269–272

356

INDEX

Maliovany, Oleg (Rubtsovsk, Altai Krai, Russia, 1945), 42, 44 Mariniuk, Viktor (Kirovograd, Ukraine, 1939), 52 Marin, Louis (La Tronche, France, 1931–1992), 5, 84, 85, 92 Marjanishvili theater, Tbilisi, Georgia, 65, 69 Martynyuk, Olena, 54, 55 Masaki, Fujiko (Japan), 8, 323 Masterkova, Lidiya (Moscow, Russia, 1927–2008), 36, 40, 54 Melamid, Alexander (Moscow, Russia, 1945), 5, 25, 40, 41, 54, 55, 88, 106, 286 Meldibekov, Erbossyn (Shymkent, Kazakhstan, 1964), 6, 207, 225–228 Menlibaeva, Almagul (Almaty, Kazakhastan, 1969), 6, 207, 219, 220 Mikhailov, Boris (Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1938), 4, 42–44, 47, 49, 124 Misiano, Viktor (Moscow, Russia, 1957), x, 3, 11, 21, 25, 26, 31, 58, 78, 119, 120, 123, 124, 126, 127, 208 Monastyrski, Andrei (Sumnin in Pechenga, Murmansk Oblast, Russia, 1949), 41 Morozov, N., 52 Moscow, Russia, v, 2, 5, 10, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 50, 51, 53–55, 58, 59, 62, 65, 68, 70, 71, 85–90, 95, 102, 104–106, 110–113, 116, 117, 121–123, 128, 130–132, 134, 135, 150, 158, 216, 227, 237–239, 286, 291, 307, 309, 326

N Nakhova, Irina (Moscow, Russia, 1955), 5, 41, 55, 105, 110–116, 185 Nakonechna, Lada (Kiev, Ukraine, 1981), 6, 137, 141–149, 151–158, 164 Narymbetov, Moldakul (1948–2012), 210 Naveriani, Maia (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1966), 6, 169–171 Nekrasov, Vsevolod (Moscow, Russia, 1934–2009), 36 Nemukhin, Vladimir (Priluki, Kaluga Oblast, Russia, 1925–2016), 36, 39 Nikonorova, Katya (Almaty, Kazakhstan, 1981), 231 Nonconformism, 32, 44, 53 O Odessa, Ukraine, 4, 36, 50–56, 96, 97, 104, 223, 266 Ostwald, Wilhelm (Riga, 1853–1932), 305, 310, 312, 313 P Pavlova, Tatiana, 45, 46 Pavlov, Evegniy (Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1949), 42 Pedan, Misha (Kharkiv, Russia, 1957), 42 Pepperstein, Pavel (Moscow, Russia, 1966), 53, 114 Perestroika, 5, 15, 41, 42, 49, 54, 59, 85, 105, 107, 120, 123, 210, 218, 238 Pimenov, Yuri (Moscow, Russia, 1903–1977), 31, 119, 289 Piotrowski, Piotr (Poznan, Poland, 1952–2015), 3, 4, 6, 12, 16, 18,

INDEX

19, 21, 23, 24, 26–29, 98, 169, 253, 258, 259 Pivovarov, Viktor (Moscow, Russia, 1937), 37, 41, 110 Plavinsky, Dmitry (Moscow, Russia, 1937–2012), 34, 35 Potapova, Olga (Moscow, Russia, 1892–1971), 36 Prigov, Dmitri (Moscow, Russia, 1940–2007), 41, 42, 111 Pyatkovka, Roman (Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1955), 42

R Rabin, Alexander (1952–1994), 40 Rabin, Oscar (Moscow, Russia, 1928–2018), 36, 39–41, 54 Ramishvili, Koka (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1956), 4, 58, 65, 69, 70, 77, 78 Repin, Ilya (Chuguyev, Ukraine, 1844–1914), 58 Ridnyi, Mykola (Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1985), 6, 137, 150–153, 156, 163, 165 Rigvava, Guia (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1956), 4, 5, 65, 71, 78, 105–110 Romer, Witold (Lviv, Ukraine, 1900–1967), 46 Ruhkin, Evgeny (Saratov, Russia, 1943–1976), 39 Rupin, Yuriy (Krasnyi Lyman, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 1946–2008), 42, 43, 45–48

S Sapgir, Genrikh, (Biysk, Altai Krai, Russia, 1928–1999), 36 Schnabel, Julian (Brooklyn, New York, 1951), 59, 71, 300 Sell-Ryananoff, Vera (1951), 40

357

Shaw, Jeffrey (Melbourne, Australia, 1944), 7, 8, 314, 315, 317–322 Shengelaia, Giorgi (Moscow, Russia, 1937–2020), 74 Shestakov, Viktor (Oryol, Russia, 1898–1957), 34 Shvelidze, Lia (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1962), 69, 70 Sinyavin, Igor (1937–2000), 40 Sitnichenko, Oleksandr (Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1948–2018), 42 Sitnikov, Vasilij (Novo-Rakitino, Tambov Governorate, Russia, 1915–1987), 40 Smith, Terry (Geelong, Australia, 1944), 21, 26 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (Kislovodsk/Stavropol Krai, Russia, 1918–2008), 33, 34, 91 Sooster, Ulo (Uhtri, Kaina Parish, Estonia, 1924–1970), 37 Steinberg, Borukh (…), 40 Steinberg, Eduard (Moscow, 1937–2012), 37 Stepanova, Varvara, 1884 (Kaunas, Lithuania)–1958 (Moscow), 295 St. Petersburg, 36, 50, 51, 117, 119, 133, 281, 309, 310 Stranadko, Eduard (Ukraine, 1958), 44 Strelnikov, Vladimir (Odessa, Ukraine, 1939), 51, 52 Sulaberidze, Kote (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1968), 80 Suprun, Oleksandr (Berezivka, Kharkiv Oblast, 1946), 42, 44 Sychov, Stanislav (Odessa, 1937–2003), 50

358

INDEX

T Tabatadze, Sophia (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1977), 6, 169, 174, 177, 182–188 Tapies, Antonio (Barcelona, Spain, 1923–2012), 59 Tarkovsky, Andrei (Zavrazhye, Yuryevetsky District of Ivanovo Industrial Oblast, Russia, 1932– 1986), 8, 35, 268, 325–329, 331–334 Tbilisi, Georgia, vi, ix, 3, 22, 45, 57, 58, 60–63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71–73, 75–78, 80, 81, 106, 172, 176, 178–181, 186, 197–199, 202, 204, 259, 265, 270 Tikhonova, Yulia (Almaty, Kazakhstan, 1978), 6, 207, 219 Timchenko, Oleg (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1957), 65, 69, 70, 72, 76 Tryakin-Bukharov, Georgy (Nizhneudinsk, Irkutsk region, Kazakhstan, 1943), 207, 228, 229 Tsetskhladze, Maia (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1967), 65 Tsetskhladze, Mamuka (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1960), 4, 65, 68, 69 Tsetskhladze, Niko (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1959), 4, 65, 69–71, 77, 79 Tsibakhashvili, Guram (Tbilisi, Georgia,1960), 4, 65, 72, 73, 77, 80 Tsulukidze, Nadia (Tbilisi, Georgia,1976), 6, 169, 176–182 Tubalev, Gennadiy (1944–2006), 42 Tulovsky, Julia (Moscow, 1953), 54 Tupitsyn, Victor (Moscow, 1945), 36, 123 Tursunov, Furgat (…), 237

U Ugay, Alexander (Kyzylorda, Kazakhstan, 1978), 207–209

V Varazi, Avto (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1926–1977), 4, 73, 74 Vassileva, Mariana (Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, 1964), 7, 269, 273–283 Vassiliev, Oleg (Moscow, 1931–2013), 37, 55 Vechtomov, Nikolai (Moscow, 1923–2007), 36 Vertov, Dziga (Bialystok, Poland, 1896–1954), 8, 124, 125, 307, 308, 310–312, 314, 323 Vorobyov, Valentin (1938), 39 Vremia Group, Kharkiv, 43, 48, 49, 124

W Williams, Raymond (Lianvihangel Crucorney, UK, 1921–1988), 253 Wodiczko, Krzysztof (Warsaw, Poland, 1943), 5, 29, 85, 86, 89, 97–101

X Xiaodong, Liu (Jincheng, China, 1963), 287–290

Y Yankilevsky, Vladimir (Moscow, 1938–2018), 37 Yastreb, Ludmila (Kvasnikovka, Saratov region, Russia, 1945–1980), 52

INDEX

Z Zautashvili, IIiko (Tbilisi, Georgia 1952), 61, 65 Zedong, Mao (Changsha Fu, China 1893–1976), 7, 285, 286, 289 Zharkova, Margarita (Odessa), 53

359

Zimmerli Collection, Rutgers University, 53, 54 Zverev, Anatoly (Moscow, 1931–1986), 34 Zvyagintseva, Anna (Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 1986), 6, 137, 162–167