20110214_CAHF_MUHKA_BOOK by CAHF

Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kanevsky

Vadim Konstantin Fishkin & Zvezdochotov Yuri Leiderman

Dmitri Prigov

Victor Alimpiev & Marian Zhunin

Oleg Kulik

Europe at Large

Sergey Maslov

Art from the Former USSR

Vlad Monroe Kerim Ragimov

Viktor Vorobyev & Yelena Vorobyeva

Vahram Aghasyan

Said Atabekov

Sergey Bratkov

Europe at Large Art from the Former USSR

Hamlet Hovsepian, Yawning, 1975

M â&#x20AC;&#x160;HKA

Contents

Introduction Articulating Diversity

Bart De Baere

Alexander Rodchenko & Varvara Stepanova A perspective Total Recall: From Acting Out to Working Through

Viktor Misiano

p. 4 p. 8

p. 12

A collection Andrey Monastyrski Anatoly Osmolovsky Victor Alimpiev & Marian Zhunin Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kanevsky Vadim Fishkin & Yuri Leiderman Konstantin Zvezdochotov Dmitri Prigov Oleg Kulik Sergey Maslov Vlad Monroe Kerim Ragimov Sergey Bratkov Said Atabekov Vahram Aghasyan Yelena Vorobyeva & Viktor Vorobyev Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev Yerbossyn Meldibekov Koka Ramishvilli Hamlet Hovsepian Babi Badalov Azat Sargsyan Vyacheslav Akhunov Rustam Khalfin & Julia Thikonova Almagul Menlibayeva

p. 32 p. 36 p. 40 p. 42 p. 46 p. 48 p. 50 p. 52 p. 54 p. 58 p. 62 p. 66 p. 76 p. 78 p. 82 p. 86 p. 88 p. 90 p. 94 p. 96 p. 100 p. 104 p. 108 p. 112

Works

p. 118

An exhibition A Siren's Song. Notes on The Melancholy of Resistance.

p. 120

Colophon

Daniel Muzyczuk & Agnieszka Pindera

p. 136

Introduction

Articulating Diversity Bart De Baere

Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kanevsky, August 20th, 1968, 2000

The organisation of contemporary art museums in Flanders (Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders) has invited its four partners to each make a book — along with a presentation — dedicated to a specific part of its collection, which also speaks to the possibilities of how to address and develop a collection policy. M HKA decided to further develop the collection driven project we have been working on over the last few years with Italian-Russian curator and theorist Viktor Misiano. Misiano has been highly influential in qualifying the art spaces of the states that until 1991 formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He is a key figure in the Russian art scene but as such decided to engage on behalf of the countries that had been lost in the trans-formation of the USSR into a sovereign state. This research and activism led in 2005 to his widely lauded Central Asian Pavilion for the Biennial of Venice. M HKA decided to engage in dialogue with Misiano for the main artistic positions in these countries. The project was titled Europe at Large, because it was felt that Europe ought to think of itself in as open a way as possible. The reality of the USSR’s past allows us to see the emerging area of Central Asia not as an exotic, vague ‘end of the world’ but as a well articulated border zone of Europe, a centre in its own right and a link between Europe and Asia as we presently perceive it. The USSR reference may likewise strengthen the inclusion of the Caucasian countries into an inclusive image of Europe, as a cradle for European culture — as they were more recently an important cradle for USSR culture — rather than its war torn outskirts. In the lead essay in this book Misiano offers a credo of his intellectual practice. He does so through his vision of the postSoviet space as one which is a re-articulation of a vast diversity that has always been there, with divergent centres and artistic and cultural traditions, yet for several reasons allowing links which enable a positioning of the artistic proposals and their reception more precisely. From this vision onwards — history as a diversity for a future in diversity — he offers a methodological proposal about the relationship between the moment of autonomy of art on the one hand and its relations to its originating setting and its aspiration to be effective in the world. This allows for the multilayered approach of art, which M HKA champions, in which high stakes, viewed as such, lead to wider possibilities. Even if the present project is part of M HKA’s European project, it is first and foremost part of its aspiration as a national museum — 5

Introduction

urged by the government to have an international outreach to develop a methodology that can truly cope with the global state of affairs. It feels that Europe internalises insufficiently the transformation of the international reality into a multi-polar tissue. It challenges itself and the situation to deal with this through in depth engagements for specific situations of high relevance that are very divergent and that each carry their own contextual reference frame as well as the relative autonomy and stating of artistic positions and the links between them. These engagements find a shape in the collection through ensembles that may be layered, as in the case of Europe at Large, in which even singular artistic positions may be represented as ensembles in their own right, as for example in the case of the Bratkov collection or the StarZ presentation by Vladik Monroe from the first Moscow biennial. These are ensembles that M HKA sees as different from closed blocks that are solidified. They are fields of understanding, which do contain works of art but also other information, and which are not so much based upon the notion of the art work — such as the Ghent museum has always advocated — but on that of artistic positions. The ensembles through which these are embodied and situated are often anchored in a geography and even a specific moment in time and space, such as with the Santiniketan ensemble with its major presence of works from the Kerala radicals, or in the Useful life ensemble, which is actually a complete exhibition, a key moment in the opening up of China to international contemporary art. The reflection of M HKA on art in its own region, as formulated for the Story of the Image project in Singapore and Shanghai, is also such an ensemble. The present project was seen by M HKA as a possibility to strengthen the part of the collection presented here. The core part of this book is a survey, edited by Leen de Backer, in the form of a catalogue of the works at M HKA from the former Soviet space, thereby unfolding the initial intellectual question of Misiano. This is the backbone of a web-based survey in which the ensemble is further expanded. The last part of the book gives a perspective on the ensemble by two young curators from Poland, Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera. They made an exhibition for the Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun, the third of a triptych of such collection policy analyses, the first two engaging with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and with the Daros Latinamerica Collection. M HKA is particularly happy with their engagement. It even fits

perfectly into the question of the re-articulation of Europe, in which Central Europe — now firmly considered as ‘part of us’ but still habitually named ‘Eastern Europe’, has a specific expertise to deal with the real Eastern Europe, the former Soviet space. The Melancholy of Resistance initially started with the notion of the kommunalka as a compulsively shared space. The title is derived from the book by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai and even more so from the subsequent film by Béla Tarr, encompassing a question for new principles of harmony and tuning, the old ones having led to a multitude of problems. As such, it opens up a space to reflect on what might be called a ‘reconstructive’ dimension in so many of the works inhabiting this space, in which the hegemonic rhetoric was long that of an ideology with nearly Utopic claims, while the Western European social democracies were in the same epoch deeply impregnated with a deconstructive mode of thinking. The Melancholy of Resistance questions possibilities of continuation, of a ‘new harmony’ not dictated by the system. A second reference that indicates this is the composition The Great Learning, by Cornelius Cardew, the English composer whom M HKA dedicated an exhibition to, a piece which focuses on the tuning necessary for the harmonising of voices. This is what Muzyczuk and Pindera did in the final exhibition, selecting not all of the works of the ensemble that may have been related to their analysis, but more specifically works that might for them develop an aesthetic (yet not formalistic) harmony in a concrete exhibition setting.

Untitled, 1924, printed in the 80s

Varvara Stepanova

Untitled, 1919

The Badge (Sport Parade on the Red Square), 1936

Portrait of a Driver, 1929

Alexander Rodchenko

A perspective

Total Recall: From Acting Out to Working Through Viktor Misiano

1 Viktor Misiano, Russian Reality. The End of Intelligentsia, in Flash Art. International Edition, Summer 1996: p. 104–107.

2 Viktor Misiano, Interpol: The Apology of Defeat, in Eda Cufer and Viktor Misiano, eds., Interpol: The Art Exhibition Which Divided East and West (Ljubljana & Moscow: IRWIN and Moscow Art Magazine, 2000).

‘Art is struggle with reality.’1 This aphorism, which I tossed off in the mid-nineties, was consonant with the mood of many people back then. The sense that the post-Soviet reality of those years — a catastrophic reality that had surrendered itself to elemental forces and irrepressible transformations — was beyond the power of consciousness to control was something shared by many people then, just as many in the art milieu worried that reality, whether experienced personally or viewed on a TV screen, surpassed art’s visual-spectacular resources as well as the resources of the artist’s imagination. So if many people then saw themselves in my aphorism, they could not help but admit that art had lost its fight with reality. Therefore the ‘apology of defeat’2 (if I can be allowed to quote myself once more) became the most widespread artistic strategy. This stance was understood in two ways, however, with the emphasis either on the first or the third word in my second selfquotation. The feeling of doom could be understood as sanction for a desperate gesture or heroic affectation. In other words, social and political catastrophe was subjected to a tautological doubling in the staging of artistic catastrophe. Such was the program (or, rather, the sense of life) that generated the practice of actionism, that spontaneous, provocative, transgressive gesture that came to the forefront in many centres of the post-Soviet world. For Russia in the nineties, the Moscow actionism of Alexander Brener and Anatoly Osmolovsky was so emblematic that the decade that has passed since then has not sufficed to show that the art of that period can hardly be reduced to radical gestures and media provocations. The fitness of performative action for responding to the challenges of the period then seemed so irrefutable that hard on the heels of the Muscovites, Sergey Maslov, Kanat Ibragimov, Yerbossyn Meldibekov, Almagul Menlibayeva, and Almaty actionism made a name for themselves. And it was precisely this idiom that was then chosen by, among others, Gulnara Kasmalieva in neighboring Bishkek, and by Said Atabekov (in his work with the Kyzyl Tractor performance group) in Chimkent. The lack of an alternative to staking one’s claim on dissolving into reality was borne out by an infrastructural catastrophe: generated by the social crisis, the paralysis of professional institutions stripped the notion of art’s autonomy of all social foundations. On the contrary, the claim made for the impulsive, transgressive gesture was then also corroborated by the transitional society’s overriding concern with 13

A perspective

‘survival.’ One can survive in extreme conditions only by making maximal use of the scant opportunities offered by the present moment. In an emergency, the past is irrelevant — it teaches us little — and there is no time to think about the future. What counts is surviving ‘here and now.’ Moreover, the transitional reality of the post-Soviet nineties also saw the crystallisation of new elites: it was a period when social instability was fraught with the possibility of personal (at times, dizzying) success. Once again everything was decided here and now: success depended on being able to get one’s bearings in the current moment. The future hung on the capacity for making split-second decisions in which intuition and boldness appeared more important than established systems of analysis and the common sense born of experience. This was a groundless assumption: the period ended with the 1998 economic crisis, whose inevitable arrival had seemed obvious to everyone except those who had lived only for the here and now. And yet the poetics of many artists in the nineties were generated not so much by the spirit of confrontation as by the attempt to make maximal use of the resource of defeat. The inability of consciousness to control reality and art’s impotence in the face of the spectacle offered by this reality at hand were recognised by many as an experience that was not so much subject to conversion into action as to detached observation and embodiment. One programmatic work that expressed this specific experience of estrangement from reality is War from My Window, a piece produced by Koka Ramishvili at the very outset of the first postSoviet decade, during its most dramatic period. The work consists of a series of photographs in which the artist pedantically recorded a view of the Tbilisi cityscape during the days of the 1991 civil war. Incapable of emotional contact with reality, Ramishvili impassively clicked the shutter on a camera set up in front of his window once a day over the course of the entire twelve days of the national drama. In this work, the very principle of detached recording and registration sublates the aestheticising, contemplative element. This specific view of reality, a gaze replete with inward horror in the face of one’s own inability to establish contact with it, was once upon a time detected by Walter Benjamin in the German Trauerspiel, which ‘is taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition’ (The Origin of German Tragic Drama).

Born of this ‘hopelessness,’ the language of art is defined by Benjamin as allegorical insofar as ‘in the process of recreating reality it represented the nonexistence of what was recreated.’ Analogously, in War from My Window, the absence of a coherent narrative and clear emotion on Ramishvili’s part toward the object of representation generates a characteristic effect: the artistic means themselves show through the image. That is, the medium of photography itself appears via a sequence of photographs taken from a single viewpoint at various time intervals. Ramishvili thus presents us with autonomous artistic means while at the same acknowledging the impossibility of using them for their intended purpose. Thus, whereas the poetics of actionism attempted to sublate art’s capacity for autonomy via a transgressive breakthrough into reality, the very impossibility of artistic autonomy is thematised in the work of artists wholly immersed in the ‘hopelessness of the earthly condition.’ Something similar happens in Ramishvili’s Change, which he produced four years later, during the next coup d’état in Georgia, when President Eduard Shevardnadze was replaced by Mikheil Saakashvili. The piece is based on documentary footage that embodies the quintessence of political confrontation and the seizure of power: the usurper (Saakashvili) is shown entering the chamber of parliament accompanied by his supporters as the ousted president is led out. Ramishvili has slowed down and re-edited this footage so that its documentary quality vanishes: this authentic historical event is almost made to resemble an abstract formal exercise estranged from the viewer. At the end of this video piece, the documentary footage gradually gives way to excerpts from Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss — that is, to a purely artistic rather than documentary video sequence. As a result, both dimensions of the image prove to be conventional, fictional, thus revealing in pure form the medium of video itself. By representing certain real events, both works inevitably invoke the principle of temporality. In the first case, War from My Window, temporality is measured by the even, abstractly predetermined rhythm of days succeeding one another, marked by Ramishvili’s shooting one photo a day. In the second case, the video film Change, in which a real event and its characters are reduced (as the artist himself has put it) to a ‘male ballet,’ temporal organisation is determined by the abstract logic of a formal arabesque. Consequently, by disclosing the conventional way in which his works

A perspective

are temporally organised, Ramishvili gives us to understand that genuine reality, over which consciousness has lost control, abides in a state of inescapable formlessness or (to paraphrase Deleuze) irrepressible becoming. Whereas for the actionists, who abided in the dimension of the here and now, temporality resonated with the catastrophism of the period and was thus discrete and convulsive, for the poets of the ‘hopelessness of the earthly condition,’ temporality is measured, decelerated, forward moving, and inexorable. In the end, this leads to the effect of suspense — that is, to the anxious expectation of an impossible resolution. The new, second post-Soviet decade programmatically declared itself a period of stabilisation throughout the former Soviet space. And this declaration has been justified both for Russia, what with its attempt to revive its bygone great-power glory via oil wells and gas pipelines, and for the Baltic states, whose stability is sanctioned by Brussels. It has also been justified for countries such as Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine, where stabilisation is implemented via the routinisation of instability, and for countries such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, where stability rests on the stale dominance of the ruling clan. And however conventional and fictitious this stability might be, one important thing is clear: current consciousness has begun to cease to recognise itself in the dimension of the here and now. The shape of events has lost its previous unpredictability: orientation within reality now requires not blind intuition, but the analytical gaze. Thus, at the turn of the first post-Soviet decade, the task of mapping the horizons of reality became the focus of artists. An exhibition of Russian artists in 2003 at Antwerp’s M KHA that presented the entire spectrum of individual reactions to this problem, the key problem at that crucial moment, was thus appropriately titled Horizons of Reality. The hopelessness of interventions in life on the part of artists was declared here precisely by those artists who had earlier been among this program’s most brilliant proclaimers and defenders. Anatoly Osmolovsky, an actionist during the nineties, affirmed his new program, the return to art’s autonomy, in the exhibition catalogue: ‘The central task of art doesn’t lie in […] the search for communication with the society, not even within reflection upon this subject. The central task of art lies in the permanent rejuvenation of art itself, the renewal of the possibility of doing art.’ 3 At the same time, it became apparent that the discovery of art’s

mediatic nature is not identical to its defeat at the hands of reality, for reality is now inseparable from the media — the media is reality, after all. Therefore, art’s analysis of its own mediatic means is a form for analysing reality. ‘The new visuality is a triumphant mediality, which all of sudden has discovered the possibility of being visual, of being a possibility,’ Moscow video artist Victor Alimpiev declared then along with his comrades in arms. 4 This is precisely art’s mission in our day and age: to be the only medium capable of restoring the individual’s link with reality, having exposed its own mediatic conventionality. From the viewpoint of St. Petersburg artist Kerim Ragimov, such is ‘the human project’ of the contemporary artist. The human, however, involves liberating not only the gaze but liberating the emotions as well. Whereas earlier the only feeling available to the artist had been horror over his own incapacity for emotional experience, now connection with the world comes about through love, as in the work of Konstantin Zvezdochotov, or suppressed spiritual anguish, as in the work of Sergey Bratkov. The roster of artists at that 2003 exhibition also included Andrey Monastyrski, a fact that was programmatic and almost provocative in character. Founder of the Collective Actions group (Kollektivnye deystviya) and a key figure in the Moscow conceptualist movement during the seventies and eighties, his status during the nineties had been that of an undisputed classic, which simultaneously meant that he was supremely irrelevant to the leaders of the new, post-Soviet scene. His return from honorable nonexistence happened precisely at the turn of the decade, when the problematic of the mediatic and the visible, the real and the reflexive that he had elaborated, proved extraordinarily consonant with the new moods. The work he presented in Antwerp, The Circle of CA, appeared as a programmatic counterpoint to the very spirit and real experience of the previous decade. In this work, he succeeded in reducing the entire, numerous corpus of Collective Actions (Kollektivnye deystviya [CA]) to an impeccable mathematical law. What had once seemed spontaneous and contextual, discrete and open to emergence, proved to be predetermined and confined to a logical circle. It was precisely this worldview that was required in Moscow at a time when, in response to social stabilisation, artists were beginning to outline the contours of a new, post-actionist poetics. Analogous processes were also under way at that moment in other post-Soviet countries. In Armenia, young artists were beginning to trace their own genealogy to the work of Hamlet Hovsepian,

4 Horizons of Reality, p. 107.

3 Anatoly Osmolovsky [sic], The Seductive Power of Reality, in Horizons of Reality (exhibition catalogue) (Antwerp: M KHA, 2003), p. 18.

A perspective

a conceptualist and age mate of Monastyrski. In Hovsepian’s work, the artists found a similar image of the world, in which immutable, constantly self-reproducing structures show through superficial inconstancy. If Monastyrski had managed to reduce the decadeslong experience of his conceptual actions to an exhaustive and laconic mathematical formula, his alter ego in Tashkent, Vyacheslav Akhunov, founder of the contemporary Uzbek scene, succeeded in presenting the archive of his many years of work on a one-squaremeter podium (1m 2 ). Finally, yet another living classic, the Almaty artist Rustam Khalfin, produced the installation Clay Man in a small, specially equipped space. In this stationary work, which survived for several years, Khalfin condensed his longstanding research into the phenomenology of vision. Thus, the desire to reduce duration to repetition, to confine one’s worldview to easily observable horizons, an aspiration so consonant with the times, once again made itself felt.

And in fact the enormous work with returned memory that began almost simultaneously in the culture of nearly all post-Soviet countries during its first phase produced texts of memory rather than texts about memory. This type of post-traumatic text is customarily termed ‘acting out’: this refers to cases when trauma is transferred into discourse, thus producing endless reproductions and rehashings of haunting images. 5 Neomythologism became the most natural form for organising such artistic texts. The model of the mythopoetic imagination, which is built on the ‘eternal return of the similar,’ has been understood by contemporary artists as the free manipulation of a stable system of leitmotifs, thus enabling them to ‘package’ persistent haunting images into certain abstract narrative constructions. Moreover, the role of the mythmaking artist — the creator of a unique and universal authorial world — has proven to be the most natural form of realising the post-traumatic urge to situate the self at the centre of the universe. Tellingly, this type of art production has been most fully elaborated in the Central Asian countries, whose history itself seemingly sanctions this turn to the mythopoetic imagination, for modern history in these countries coincides with the Soviet period. Therefore, the rejection of this period during the post-Soviet decades immediately induces current consciousness in these countries to rehabilitate pre-modern traditional culture. Said Atabekov’s mythmaking is thus inspired by the ambitious mission to ecumenically unite all the main confessions: the mythologemes of the cross, the crescent, and the Star of David are leitmotifs in his work. Alongside them we find archaic idols, the tomb of Genghis Khan, a nomad horseman, a Kalashnikov rifle, and a red star: harkening back to various periods in world history, these and other motifs in Atabekov’s work reduce this history to a selfenclosed, cyclical myth. Similarly, in Almagul Menlibayeva’s work, the realia of the present day and the primordial past — totems, minarets, and high-voltage electrical towers — are woven into an ornamental universalist narrative. This poetics has been dubbed ‘magical historicism’ in studies of post-Soviet culture. 6 What is meant is the specific experience of contemporaneity being at odds with the historical past. Therefore, any attempt to describe the reality of the present cannot help but intersect with the questioning of the past. Moreover, it is precisely the recent Soviet past that is the focus of particular interest and,

The period of stabilisation has proven to be fraught with one other telling symptom. Having overcome the dimension of the here and now, consciousness has begun to examine the facts of reality within the context of a protracted temporal duration — in other words, within the context of History. However, having returned after a decade of amnesia, history has hardly manifested itself in a coherent linear narrative. Destroyed by the social catastrophe of the late eighties, the integral picture of the past has been lost: the images of bygone days returned by memory have appeared in ruptured form, bereft of causal connections. What is more, especially in the beginning, the past returned after the period of oblivion or exile as unsolicited as an apparition. Just like the on-the-ground reality of the nineties, the picture of the past in the new decade at first appeared to be formless, incapable of being grasped by consciousness, caught in a state of permanent becoming, and fraught with suspense. In his famous work on the ‘uncanny’ Freud writes that the repressed returns in perverted, monstrous forms. In another of his essays, Mourning and Melancholia, he argues that mourning is a kind of work, which (like any form of work) can be completed and successful or, on the contrary, uncompleted and unsuccessful. Failure to complete the work of mourning leads to melancholia, which is defined as the inability to separate oneself from one’s loss and the assertion of oneself and one’s loss as the centre of the universe. 18

5 See Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

6 This term was coined by Alexander Etkind; see Mark Lipovetsky and Alexander Etkind, Vozvrashchenie tritona: Sovetskaia katastrofa i postsovetskii roman, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie p. 94 (2008).

A perspective

simultaneously, the object of traumatic displacement, for the restoration of a natural connection with this past has existential significance insofar it would guarantee the restoration of integrity to the lives of the greater part of the generations alive today. However, this past — personally experienced, but subsequently forfeited and forgotten for a decade — returns again as something utterly alien, mysterious, and almost exotic. Consequently, the effect of overkill, typical of post-catastrophic temporality, comes into play: striving to diagnose the present from a historical perspective, consciousness attempts to overleap the immediate, trauma-ridden past and retreats into a more and more distant past. Hence, in his desire to critically diagnose the advent of globalisation in Central Asia, Said Atabekov turns to the image of the ancient ritual feast known as the ‘Battle for the Square,’ in which hundreds of horsemen vie one another for a trophy in direct physical combat on the open steppe. The post-Soviet market ideology with its apology for competition thus appears as the return of a brutal antiquity. Analogously, entering into dialogue with the feminist discourse, new to Central Asia, Almagul Menlibayeva represents it in the somewhat terrifying image of a priestess and through visceral tribal rituals. Symptomatic in the practice of the mythmaking artists is something that follows from the eclecticism of the images they use as leitmotivs — the assertion of the complexity or (as the postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha would put it) the hybridity of postSoviet subjectivity. Returned memory dispelled the ideologeme dominant in all post-Soviet countries in the nineties, which imputed that the Soviet past in their national histories was a ‘black hole’, a kind of misunderstanding that would be easily forgotten once it was fixed. Returning as trauma or ‘phantom pain,’ memory entered into an insurmountable counterpoint with the new, official versions of national history based on this ideologeme. Postcolonial theorist Leela Ghandi has dubbed this phenomenon of ignoring periods of the past fraught with trauma the ‘will to forget.’ Consequently, what has been required is a creative stance capable of presenting post-Soviet hybridity without caesuras and censorship, in all its plenitude, while at the same time proving that it is precisely this uncensored fullness that leads to overcoming the trauma. This is the first stage of the ‘work of mourning,’ to use Freud’s term, or ‘working through,’ to borrow the term used by scholars 20

A perspective 7 LaCapra, op. cit.

8 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure (Chicago: Aldine Publishers, 1969), p. 95.

of post-traumatic texts. 7 It is not a matter of forgetting, which inevitably brings back what has been displaced and forgotten in the form of monsters and nightmares, but of a delicate balance between acceptance of memory and the capacity to construct new ties with life. Consequently, the return of memory leads to the emergence of another figure typical of post-Soviet culture, a figure that has no less ancient roots than the mythmaking artist and, along with him, has made a name for himself in contemporary art — the figure of the artist-as-trickster. The Azeri artist Babi Badalov thus bases his work on the ancient practice of dodagdeymez — improvised vocal poetry that is recited without the lips touching one another. Its subject is available experience: the poet-narrator describes the things that enter the field of his daily life, the entire wealth of associations contained within it; it transports him into the past and into the present that is right before his eyes. By reviving this histrionic practice, Babi equates everyday life and performativity. At the same time, to the degree that he works with everyday life, he programmatically presents us with the hybridity of the post-Soviet subject, for despite all the ideologemes generated by the new authorities, such is the experience of former Soviet citizens. Hence the poetic multilingualism of Badalov’s dodagdeymez: he writes in Russian and Azeri, interlarding them with English phrases and expressions. He thus scans post-Soviet consciousness, in which the not-yet-forgotten language of the former hegemony encounters the language of the new hegemony. The traumatic nature of the past’s return is sublated in Babi’s work by virtue of the fact that he is in no hurry to identify himself with any finished identity. He neutralises potential conflicts among the heterogeneous components of his hybrid personality not in the permanent here and now or in the uncanny timelessness of myth, but in liminality — that is, in a state of intermediacy and incompletion. ‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.’ 8 In Babi’s autobiographical oeuvre, this status is presented literally: he is a man of the road, a refugee, and as he moves from one country to the next, more and more new realia enter his poetry, as well as more and more new words and expressions from an ever-greater number of languages. The only stable thing the trickster artist possesses is his artistic role. The drama of personal existence is felt to be justified and 21

A perspective

bearable if it acquires the status of art itself. Unlike the artists of the nineties, Babi does not sacrifice the artwork to reality or present his artistic means disassembled: his artwork is he himself, and only the application of art’s toolkit to his own life enables him to survive and reconcile within himself the contradictions of the age. As the great scholar of carnival culture Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, the estrangement generated by the trickster’s stance itself generates a particular chronotope (in other words, an aesthetic space) around this character: ‘The rogue, the clown and the fool create around themselves their own special little world, their own chronotope. […] They are life’s maskers; their being coincides with their role, and outside this role they simply do not exist.’ 9 Not only is Babi’s macaronic dodagdeymez impossible outside this role and this space, but so too is his visual practice, which consists of convulsive, spontaneous drawings on whatever comes to hand (notebooks, restaurant menus, official forms, etc.) and the collecting of mundane objects from material culture, which he buys at markets and picks out of trash bins. Lovingly collected during the course of his wanderings and his companions during these journeys, it is precisely this material that he employs in his works. Babi generously gives away his memory fetishes by inserting them into his installations, just as he bestows on listeners his poetic improvisations, which are essentially a way of giving away his own time, his own life. Georges Bataille saw in this ritual liberation from an attachment to things and one’s own person the key to reestablishing an intimate link with the world and with the sacred: ‘Hence giving must become acquiring a power. […] [The subject] enriches himself with a contempt for riches.’ 10 Thus, once more the path of the postSoviet artist to contemporaneity passes through the discovery of archaic experience. In the audio work VOAIZOVA (War is Over), for example, Babi recites the title phrase as a tongue twister, constantly quickening the tempo and pronouncing it with a strong Azeri accent to the point where it becomes utter gibberish, such that we might imagine it to be a comic ur-phrase from ancient ritual practice. For this Azeri artist, however, the work might contain another allusion — to the millions of still-homeless refugees who flooded into Azerbaijan after it lost the war in Nagorno-Karabakh to the Armenians. And therefore Babi, whose ‘being coincides with [his] role’ as a refugee and who ‘outside this role […] simply [does] not exist,’ in essence aesthetically actualises in his work the experience of millions of post-Soviet

homeless people, the vast majority of whom would never consider identifying their own miseries with an artwork. The liminality of the trickster artist is no less recognisable in the neoliberal cult of flexibility, with its constant openness to change and managerial ability to deftly combine the uncombinable. Moreover, on this point — the understanding of life as a work of art — the postSoviet creative class, which lives for these cosmopolitan directives, is in solidarity with Babi. There is, however, something that makes Babi irreconcilable with them: they would never agree with his artistic potlatch rituals. They cannot accept the idea that the subject ‘enriches himself with a contempt for riches.’

9 Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of Chronotope in the Novel, in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 59.

10 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 32.

Culture’s entry into the second post-Soviet decade has another vector, however. For many artists, it has become a priority to work with reality itself and its resource rather than with individual or collective consciousness. One consequence of social stabilisation has been the freeing of art from its inferiority complex vis-à-vis reality: artists have stopped looking for a way out via forays into reality and acquired the capacity to look at it from the outside. Moreover, whereas for the artists of the nineties (for example, Koka Ramishvili) this gaze was most often inward — directed not at reality but at a self paralysed by its incapacity to establish links with visible reality — in the new poetics the gaze is directed outwards, towards the spectacle of life that has opened itself to the artist’s eyes. Consequently, at the turn of the decade many artists in the most far-flung corners of the post-Soviet world grabbed a camera, whether it was a photographic or video camera. Moreover, just as post-Soviet consciousness has exposed its own hybrid nature in the new decade, the spectacle of life has appeared in all its complexity and rhizomaticity. In the nineties, the reductionist gesture of the actionist was essentially adequate to the image of society that had then been established. For all the dynamism and kaleidoscope-like quality of reality during the ‘transitional period,’ it was all easily reducible to elementary categories — the dialectic of life and death, success and survival, the triumph of power and the stoicism of powerlessness, and so forth. Today, on the contrary, the picture of the world is such that it would be difficult to define it with a single albeit exhaustive definition, with a single albeit brilliant metaphor. The wholeness of the world is experienced through a maximal concentration on the fragment: one moves 23

A perspective

toward the whole via the part. This pensive, attentive gaze is the way to overcome the potential limits in the poetics of magical historicism. The particularities of the incomprehensible whole have the spell taken from them through analytical perusal, the reconstruction of their genesis, and comparison with typologically similar or dissimilar analogues. Artists move towards reestablishing life’s lost integrity by moving from fragment to fragment. Fragment by fragment, they restore a panoramic vision of the world. Kazakhstan. Blue Period, a photographic investigation by Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev, is a monumental classification of such particularities. Its informative finding is that the post-Soviet brave new world is an inalienable part of the Soviet past, a slightly corrected version of it. There is nothing mysterious about the Soviet legacy nor can there be, for selling it off is our only means of existence: such is the finding of yet another informative research piece by the Vorobyevs, Bazar. The Soviet past ‘is our antiquity’ for it was the only ‘modernity’ we were given to live through. Such is the conclusion one draws from Vahram Aghasyan’s archaeology of modernity in the work Ruins of Our Time. Finally, a personal archive can also become an object of archaeological research, for historical continuity can be restored by returning integrity to an individual or family biography. Such is the conclusion drawn from the archaeology of the self on display in Vyacheslav Akhunov’s 1m 2 and Yerbossyn Meldibekov’s Family Album. Analytical perception has no monopoly on cognition, however. Particularities are also contemplated and mutually connected in storytelling, which is a no less effective means for restoring life’s forfeited wholeness. Therefore, while for some artists ‘working through’ involves passing from one observation to another, from one document to the next, for other artists this same process means going from one encounter to another, from one story to the next. Muratbek Djumaliev and Gulnar Kasmalieva’s Trans Siberian Amazons was thus inspired by a real meeting in a long-distance train in 2004. The story they told in that piece helped them to appreciate the value of another encounter, which gave life to their new work, S/he (2010). There is a certain common outcome in the work of all these artists, however: they share their gaze with us — that is, they share what they took away personally. In exactly the same way they tell us their stories, stories in which their own lives are naturally implicated.

We can detect in this personalist dimension on which post-Soviet artists so insist yet another symptom of the unhealed trauma — the persistent fear of any wholeness that surpasses one’s personal horizons. We should add that in the post-nineties period it has not only been artists who have begun telling stories: the powers that be also have begun to restore life’s integrity. And so demonstrating the right to one’s own view and one’s own story has proved to be a task not only for art, but also for ethics and politics.

When, however, artists began telling their own stories, the identification of art and life typical for the ideology of the nineties was finally overcome. For these stories belonged to the artists not only because they were facts of their own biographies, but also because they were told in the language of art. Once displayed as signs of themselves, artistic media have now become an active toolkit that guarantees artists control over their own vision. However, this shift has been not only aesthetic, but also political. For earlier, in the nineties, the refusal to recognise art’s own status as art and the recognition of reality’s aesthetic status were tantamount to a refusal to judge reality in political and ethical terms. And so the revival of the discussion about art’s autonomy in the new decade has been accompanied in the art world by a rejection of compulsory political and moral conformism. The rupture of the equation between art and life in artistic consciousness has coincided with the collapse in social consciousness of the former equation between the market and democracy, individualism and universal prosperity, the fullness of human life and consumption, the dismantling of the state and the flowering of culture. The critical gaze has brought back the understanding that democracy is identical to human solidarity, the meaning of existence to spiritual searching, culture to utopia. And this has been precisely a return insofar as these values formed the foundation for the order of things to which society bid farewell with relief in the previous decade. So whether consciously or not, the majority of stances that today situate themselves in counterpoint to the previous decade restore the connection with the age that preceded that decade. Azat Sargsyan’s video installation Schizo-Reality is one of the first directly political works in the post-Soviet space. Like Koka Ramishvili’s War from My Window, it was inspired by a real political 25

A perspective

event, the 2003 Armenian elections, whose outcome was regarded by the greater public as a fraud. However, unlike Ramishvili’s 1991 work, Schizo-Reality, which was produced more than a decade later, leaves no doubt as to the artist’s emotional and political involvement in the events that took place. In his own written commentary on the work, Sargsyan cites Deleuze and Guattari, but beyond the scope of that text there remains a newly relevant question posed once upon a time by Maxim Gorky, the creator of socialist realism: ‘Whose side are you on, masters of culture?’ As he revives the stance of the committed artist, which was canonical for Soviet culture, Sargsyan simultaneously also revives the visual regime of Soviet art. The rhetorics of the stark video montage, the cuts between close-ups and long shots, the motifs of the revolutionary crowds and frontal portraits of corrupt politicians — all this is an appeal to the visuality of Soviet art from the twenties, from the films of Eisenstein to agitprop posters. This rehabilitation of the revolutionary Soviet legacy in the work of artists who have been mobilised by political confrontation with the post-Soviet authorities is completely logical. Recognising the scale and significance of the past means questioning the legitimacy of a politics that has justified its mistakes and crimes with its mission to lead us out of the past, which was declared a ‘black hole that lasted seventy years.’ Once we have recognised that everything created in the past was paid for with drama and utopia, it becomes impossible to explain why this was all sold off for pennies. Moreover, the more authoritarian the ideology of stabilisation has become in the current decade, the more the practices of cynicism and ironic deconstruction (which were already strategies of resistance during the Soviet years) have been filled with an emancipatory significance. As in Sargsyan’s work Don’t Worry, once again (as in the underground art of the seventies and eighties) the element of laughter — from carnivalesque guffawing to intellectual irony — has begun to confront all the forms and manifestations of power. And whereas any dominant order insists on language’s communicative function, on the semantic legibility of the message, art defies this by beginning to cultivate nontransparent utterances and unmotivated actions, to elude obvious interpretations, and so forth. The encounter of political will with emancipatory laughter in the work of contemporary artists is eloquent testimony to the fact that the ‘work of mourning’ has been completed; the patient has been

cured of his melancholy. Constructing a dialogue with the past makes it possible to free ourselves of its traumatic burden while simultaneously recognising its universal significance. This recognition has required the experience of the past twenty years — moreover, not only for the citizens of the former Soviet Union. As Susan Buck-Morss recently declared, ‘We are all post-Soviet.’ 11

11 Susan Buck-Morss, The PostSoviet Condition, in IRWIN, eds., East Art Map: Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe (London: Afterall, 2006).

Viktor Misiano, Ceglie Messapica, September 2010

Europe at Large Art from the Former USSR

Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kanevsky

Vadim Konstantin Fishkin & Zvezdochotov Yuri Leiderman

Oleg Kulik Sergey Maslov Vlad Monroe

Viktor Vorobyev & Yelena Vorobyeva

Kerim Ragimov

Gulnara Kasmalieva & Hamlet Koka Yerbossyn Muratbek Hovsepian Ramishvili Meldibekov Djumaliev

Victor Alimpiev & Marian Zhunin

Dmitri Prigov

Babi Azat Vyacheslav Rustam Almagul Badalov Sargsyan Akhunov Khalfin Menlibayeva & Julia Thikonova

Varvara Alexander Andrey Anatoly Stepanova Rodchenko Monastyrski Osmolovsky

Vahram Aghasyan

Said Atabekov

Sergey Bratkov

Andrey Monastyrski

Lieblich, 1976

The Balloon, 1977

For most of the seventies, eighties and nineties, Andrey Monastyrski (°1949, Petsamo/Murmansk, lives and works in Moscow, Russia) was one of the pioneering spirits and driving forces behind leading Moscow artist association Collective Actions (Kollektivnye deystviya), an informal grouping of avant-garde artists who were primarily active in the broad field of conceptually inflected performance art. These performances are meticulously documented in writing, listing up even every visitor at each of them (Ilya Kabakov often being among those). Participants would meet up at an assigned point to go to the venue. Many of these performances involved aspects of duration and were staged on the outskirts of the Russian capital, often taking place in semi-clandestine locations. Three of these performances were documented on 8 mm film. These are now transferred on video and were acquired by M HKA on the occasion of a survey show of Moscow Conceptualism from the last three decades: Lieblich from 1976, The Balloon from 1977, and The Slogan from 1978. Another and radical representation of the totality of the performances is offered by The Circle of CA from 1996, first presented at the Venice Biennale; it presents a synthetic overview of Monastyrski’s influential career in performance art: on two video monitors installed back to back in the middle of the exhibition space, the visitor can view the remaining documentary video footage from the performances. Central in this presentation, however, stands the absence of their representation, a spatial void. On the surrounding walls, a linear sequence of A3-size paper sheets bearing a series of numbers corresponds to the chronological development of Monastyrski’s performance art trajectory, while also highlighting the artist’s interest in numerical systems and the absolute poetry of mathematics. The numbers the visitor is surrounded by refer to the time that passed between any two performances. Thus this in-between time is represented, expressed in months. The first number and the last number being exactly identical allows time’s straightforward arrow to suddenly become a circle, closing in upon itself — Monastyrski’s work seems almost custom-made for M HKA’s unique circular space.

The Slogan, 1978

Andrey Monastyrski

The Circle of CA, 1996

Anatoly Osmolovsky

Order for Army of the Arms, 2005

Moscow-based artist Anatoly Osmolovsky (°1969, Moscow, Russia, lives and works in Moscow, Russia) is a pivotal figure within the ‘new’ Russian art scene which was so comprehensively covered in the 2003 and 2005 M HKA exhibitions Horizons of Reality and Angels of History. During the opening of the latter, Osmolovsky took position on a little chair crammed behind a table mounted in the corner where museum wall and ceiling meet; sitting in this uncomfortable position, the artist drew up a series of assignments addressed to various protagonists from the international contemporary art scene. He then showered these upon the audience below him. Apart from his more narrowly defined artistic activities, Osmolovsky — in a feat of multitasking that is characteristic of much of the Russian art scene — also acts as a theorist, curator and performance activist: he was a co-founder, among others, of informal collectives such as Ministry of pro USSR, Art Territory Appropriation and Radek. Osmolovsky’s activist bent certainly animates the series of Slogans from 2003 that are now in the M HKA collection: critical or exclamatory statements made from dust that was taken from vacuum cleaner bags and ‘written’ on the wall using a set of cut-out letters and glue. The slogans, oddly, are installed at ankle’s height, and snake around the walls of the museum to form a series of polemical utterances, varying from the outright political to more speculative reflections on the place of art and the position of the artist in contemporary society: ‘each intellectual participates in the revolting pursuit of prestige and cannot but feel pangs of conscience’; ‘terror is not representative (real terrorists who get into conflict with the law always work in illegality; for perfectly understandable reasons, they hide their faces)’. Two other examples suggest that ‘Chaos and lack of motivation could become the basis of a new moral position,’ and that ‘the world of today has arrived at a stage of the overproduction of everything: ideas, fashions, murders, hunger, consumption, products, sex, etc.’ In addition to these works M HKA also acquired a small work in which a food bill is complemented by a demonstration scene, and a series of documentary materials related to some of the artist’s emblematic early performances, such as the one in which Osmolovsky climbed all the way up to sit on the shoulder of one of Moscow’s last standing giants — the iconic statue of Soviet bard Vladimir Mayakovsky.

39 38

SLOGANS, 2003; documentation of the performances Mayakovsky-Osmolovsky, 1993 and Communist Putsch, (with E.A.T. Movement), 1991

SLOGANS, 2003

Anatoly Osmolovsky

Victor Alimpiev & Marian Zhunin In 2003, Victor Alimpiev (°1973, Moscow, Russia, lives and works in Moscow, Russia) and Marian Zhunin (°1968, Moscow, Russia, lives and works in Moscow, Russia) participated in the exhibition Horizons of Reality with the collaborative work Ode, 2001. The primary motif of this video is a choreography of uniformed bodies — a powerful evocation of the aesthetics of conformity, duplicated on a soundtrack that consists of the recitation of the ode referred to in the title. The choreography in question charts a sequence of ritual-like acts and actions that mark a critical juncture in time: handing over a bouquet of flowers; startling upon hearing a loud, threatening uproar; the bashful crumpling of a skirt in a moment of unease... Every now and then, the smooth perfection of these various acts is ironically interrupted, both visually and aurally, in order to question the seamless communion of the individual and the group to which he or she seems to belong. Ode, 2001, one of Alimpiev’s key works and the basis for many subsequent developments in his oeuvre (it has since also been shown at the Venice Bienniale) is clearly staged in such a way as to invoke memories of the heroic era of early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde theatre.

Ode, 2001

In the Closet, 1998

Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kanevsky Originally hailing from the Krim, Ilya Kabakov (°1933, Dnjepropetrovsk, Ukraine, lives and works in New York, USA) has long been known as one of Russia’s greatest living contemporary artists; he played a leading role in re-establishing the dialogue, however limited at the time, between western contemporary art and a Soviet culture emerging from long decades of isolation and oppression. Since 1987 Kabakov has been living in New York, and during recent decades he has become one of the main proponents of the hybrid genre often referred to as ‘total installation’. His partner Emilia Kanevsky (°1945, Dnjepropetrovsk, Ukraine, lives and works in New York, USA) has become more and more visibly active in the process. They have been producing work as a duo for a number of years now. In 1998 Kabakov’s work was the subject of a large-scale survey show at M HKA, which led to the acquisition of two key works. In the Closet from 1998 consists of a closet built into the fake wall of a reduced exhibition space designed as a hideout for would-be stowaways from history; the door of the closet stands ajar, allowing the passer-by or visitor a casual glance onto this fantastical island of peace outside time and space (a parodic memory of a Russia now long gone?) — an illusion of peace that is of course easily disturbed. The ramshackle, rickety shack in My Grandfather’s Shed from 1998 exudes a similarly rustic, escapist aura: inside the atavistic shed’s utter darkness a solitary light bulb sheds its frugal light over a sentimental miniature landscape: a three-dimensional exercise, as it were, in the ambiguous mystique of artful chiaroscuro. Over it hovers a tiny angel. The 2005 exhibition Angels of History provided the occasion for the acquisition of the sprawling installation August 20th, 1968 from 2000. The title of this work, with its didactic aesthetic, refers to the fateful day the Russian army moved its tanks into the streets of Prague to suppress the first stirrings of its so-called spring. At the centre of Kabakov’s narrative environment we find a mechanical model of a theatre, invoking typological memories of early constructivist theatre maquettes. A button in the front of the maquette suggests a primitive interactivity: pushing the button will bathe the theatrical scene in a dim light while a typically melancholy Russian tune starts playing; movement in the crowd and the troupe of performers is limited, however, to a single figure — a monkey holding a set of cymbals in his hand. Circling this fairytale-like microcosm, a phalanx of wooden reading tables displays a rich panoply of sketches, notes, cuttings and other paper paraphernalia that help reconstruct the artist’s dreamy reconstruction of a time long gone. These reading tables are in turn encircled by a series of upright wooden panels holding up the newspapers that report on the events of August 20, 1968 — in Prague as well as in other parts of the world. In its collection M HKA also has a series of ten books which give a survey of his drawings.

My Grandfather’s Shed, 1998

45 44

10 Characters – Album 1–10: The Flying Komarov

August 20th, 1968, 2000

Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kanevsky

Vadim Fishkin & Yuri Leiderman

Sometime in 2001, Russian-Ukrainian artist duo Vadim Fishkin (°1965, Penza, Russia, lives and works in Ljubliana, Slovenia) and Yuri Leiderman (°1963, Odessa, Ukraine lives and works in Moscow, Russia) joined forces to create Hotelit. Hotelit is a working hotel room installed inside a shipping container, the outside of which is clad with painted wooden panels so as to evoke the visual impression of encountering a five-storey building (or, more precisely, a giant architectural model thereof): when during the evening and night the light inside the container is switched on, a number of lights mounted on the exterior of the container flare up and form the word Hotelit. Fishkin’s and Leiderman’s nomadic structure also doubles as a tiny exhibition venue, reviving the memory of apartment curating and apartment art as one of the most energetic and compelling forms of samizdat art production in the former Soviet Union. Hotelit was in fact first exhibited and used to this effect in Fort Asperen near Utrecht; for much of 2005, it was parked outside the Extra City exhibition space in the old harbor of Antwerp, where it also operated as a hotel room, at some point even put to use by the author of these lines.

Hotelit, 2001

Nadezhda, 2003

Konstantin Zvezdochotov

Muscovite artist Konstantin Zvezdochotov (°1958, Moscow, Russia, lives and works in Moscow, Russia) has long been one of the main representatives of the postperestroika Russian arts scene, and a well-regarded key figure among a generation of artists who came of age in an artistic landscape formerly dominated by the likes of Ilya Kabakov. Like so many of his colleagues and co-generationists, Zvezdochotov cut his teeth on a wide variety of samizdat-style artist initiatives; according to one story that has become increasingly hard to verify, he was even imprisoned for a short time in the mid-eighties because of a laudatory article on his work that was published in a Paris-based arts journal. Nadezhda (2003) was made especially for the exhibition Horizons of Reality, and was designed to cover a sizeable stretch of one of the museum’s largest wall surfaces. Hence the enormous scale of Zvezdochotov’s ‘painting’, depicting a child tucked away underneath a bed cover sprinkled with little golden stars. The title immediately reveals the work’s homage — like conception: both the artist’s mother and daughter are named Nadezhda, which is the Russian word for hope — a sentiment that can be read, without the slightest trace of irony, from the child’s blissfully sleeping countenance. However, whether ‘hope’ exists in the world’s waking state outside Nadezhda’s bedroom is an altogether different question.

Untitled (The Transcendental Descent of a Bear), 1995

Dmitri Prigov

Dmitri Prigov (°1940, Moscow, Russia – †2007, Moscow, Russia) was one of the most influential Russian authors, a writer, poet and an artist, often called ‘the father of Russian conceptualism’. He was a leading member of the Russian artistic avantgarde and of the Moscow conceptualist movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s along with Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid, Erik Bulatov, Andrey Monastyrski and his Collective Actions. Trained as a sculptor, he began writing poetry in the 1950s, and then worked as a municipal architect. In the 1970s he grew close to Soviet underground artists and became one of the founders of the Moscow conceptual art movement. During this period he combined his poetry with performance. His literary work circulated in the Soviet Union as samizdat, government-banned literature that was passed secretly from hand to hand. Only in 1990, during the final phase of the Communist era, was a collection of his poems officially published in Russia. Prigov’s work has been published internationally in émigré publications and Slavic studies journals. Abolishing the border between genres, Prigov combined words and visual actions to create installations as well as performance and video art. Prigov also worked in a genre of so-called Phantom Installations, producing a long undermined series of sketches of installations, which he realised at the first possible opportunity. Untitled (The Transcendental Descent of a Bear) of 1995, was realised at M HKA in 2010. Both the installation sketch and the activation through the realisation of the installation are now part of the M HKA collection. Prigov writes: ‘The genre of installation is itself phantom like. After the exhibiting period of an installation is over, 90 percent of the installations disappear, like phantoms, dismantled and broken into many pieces. All the projects of my installations represent a modeled space recorded on paper as a series of conceptual graphic drawings. This space of phantoms contains numerous environmental objects and inhabitants of the surrounding world, taking various forms and combinations and coloured into three metaphysical colours — black, white and red, also the colours of Russian iconography and the Russian avant-garde of the beginning of 20th century’.

The Gobi Test, or the Unbearable Charm of Mongolia: Gobi Test. Summer, 2004

The Gobi Test, or the Unbearable Charm of Mongolia: Gobi Test. Winter, 2005

Oleg Kulik

The work of Ukrainian artist Oleg Kulik (°1961, Kiev, Ukraine, lives and works in Moscow, Russia) may be said to revolve centrally around the topic of ‘transparency’: according to Kulik, art must be able to become one with central reality, submerge and dissolve in it, become an invisible part of it all the while retaining the autonomy of all good art. Kulik originally started as a Moscow-based gallery curator. In the nineties, he became a boundary-pushing performance artist, gaining world renown as a chained hairless dog prowling through the depressing, shell-shocked streets of mid-nineties Moscow (he would later repeat this signature performance in cities around the world, confronting the art world not only with the poetics of his aspiration to identify mankind with the wider animal world and with art-out-of-control but also with their own prejudice of a ‘wild’ Russia). Since 2000, Kulik’s main focus has been the production of art works which are often shown in custom-made installation contexts; two such works were included in Horizons of Reality and Angels of History, two exhibitions organised at M HKA to foreground the vital Russian (and particularly Muscovite) art scene in which Kulik has played such a vital role. M HKA acquired yet another work, two complementary video’s signaling a quest for deeper meaning and more open space. Both The Gobi Test, or the Unbearable Charm of Mongolia: Gobi Test. Winter from 2005, and The Gobi Test, or the Unbearable Charm of Mongolia: Gobi Test. Summer from 2004, exude the semi-documentary aura of a reality TV show reporting on daily life as it may still be lived on the vast steppes of the Russian Far East. They are empathetic amateur documents in which the artist further develops his programmatic interest in humankind and the animal kingdom in varying states of ‘wilderness’. Both works can be shown either separately or as films projected onto either side of one centrally located projection screen.

Dream Series, 1982–2000

Sergey Maslov

Sergey Maslov (º1952, Samara, Russia – † 2003, Almaty, Kazakhstan) is known as ‘the mythmaker’ of contemporary art in Kazakhstan. He began his work in the late 1980s as an artist and leader of the art group Night Tram, developing variations of oriental mysticism and stylistic eclectics. One of his most legendary myths was his affair with Whitney Houston, which he created with a series of love letter correspondences. Other stories that he translated into his works featured him as an alien, a vampire and a magician. He died unexpectedly in 2003, leaving behind numerous paintings, films, manuscripts, and various projects. Besides being donated twelve paintings out of the Dream series 1982–2000, M HKA committed to engage for one of the artist’s emblematic projects: Baikonur–2, 2001, a yurt in which light traditional music plays, and a computer screen offers a slide show in which traditional Kazakhs visit the moon and are visited by aliens, thus relating to outer space. M HKA also owns a sketch book by the artist and the work Survival Instructions for Citizens of the Former USSR, 1998, in the form in which they were presented by Viktor Vorobyev and Yelena Vorobyeva in the first Central Asian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale.

Sergey Maslov

Survival Instructions for Citizens of the Former USSR, 1998, as presented by Viktor Vorobyev and Yelena Vorobyeva

Baikonur–2, 2001

SURVIVAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR CITIZENS OF THE FORMER USSR

Don’t be in such a hurry to get rid of the brew in your teapot. Once you have had some tea, carefully gather the tea leaves from the teapot, place them into a clean vessel together with a clean napkin, and pour some cold water over them. Then, boil this mixture for two to three hours. Whenever you do not have enough money to buy tea, you will be able to tear pieces off the napkin and to suck on them. 

SURVIVAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR CITIZENS OF THE FORMER USSR

If your salary is withheld for a long period of time, take a good look at your workplace; there's probably something or another lying around that could be sold quite easily at the flea market. Usually those who are inattentive to people aren't very attentive of their property either. Trading with your workplace's equipment could provide you with a far more profitable existence in comparison with what your salary has to offer. 

StarZ, 2005

Vlad Monroe

The performative work of the artist Vlad Monroe (°1969, Leningrad, the former St. Petersburg, Russia, lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia) touches upon the blurred boundaries between reenactment, portraiture and celebrity culture: in his photographs and videos, Monroe acts out today’s celebrities as yesterday’s great historical figures and vice versa. Monroe’s large-scale ensemble StarZ from 2005 consists of ten such gigantic portraits printed on canvas, thirty-odd mid-size portraits on cardboard in photographically rendered golden frames, many more smaller photographs, one video and a number of texts; in the ten large-scale portraits, Monroe dresses up as the grotesque alter ego of a handful of history’s greats: the pope, the patriarch of the orthodox church, Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, the Mona Lisa, La Cicciolina — and Marilyn Monroe herself of course. The materials used in these portraits are mostly (and exceptionally) banal, household goods of little financial value: in his portrait of the pope for instance, the artist appears swathed in see-through kitchen foil. On the longer term, Monroe is planning a quasi-endless portrait gallery of such stars, critically or sentimentally reducing these personages to interchangeable, cloned alter egos and hybrids of the artist himself, resulting in a revised world history whose pathology is only matched by its melancholy.

StarZ, 2005

Vlad Monroe

StarZ, 2005

In 2003 Kerim Ragimov (°1970, Leningrad (the former St. Petersburg), Russia, lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia) was invited to take part in the exhibition Horizons of Reality organised at M HKA to present a perspective from within the Russian contemporary art scene. Ragimov then exhibited most of his works produced as part of his Human Project (a series of paintings inaugurated in 1994). This Human Project consists of virtuosic and attentive copies made by the artist himself of a large variety of symbolically laden group portraits as reprinted in magazines and similarly mundane photographic material; the work’s ambition as a whole is to present a visual anthropology of twentieth-century humanity — an exemplarily humanist undertaking, one might infer. At the same time, however, Ragimov’s play with both technique and pictorial conventions strongly alludes to the history of Soviet representations of history, and to the well-known fact that no such representation can ever be innocent again. Adapting his choice of technique and means of execution to the specific traits or ‘ideological’ content of the medium through which a particular image is depicted, a scene from a Soviet-era magazine, for example, will be rendered in a fitting red glow echoing a bad quality of print. From this expanding body of work, M HKA has acquired numbers 3, 6, 13, 16 and 18; the first work in this series is based on a portrait of Patrice Lumumba, in another work the model is a well-known picture of Frida Kahlo. With each presentation of these fragments from Ragimov’s Human Project, the missing numbers (1, 2, 4 etc.) can be replaced by Polaroid pictures of the corresponding paintings.

Kerim Ragimov

Human Project n°6, 1993–94

Human Project n°16, 1993–94

Human Project n°13, 1993–94

Human Project n°3, 1993–94

Human Project n°18, 1993–94

Kerim Ragimov 65 64

Fighters without Rules, 2000

Glue Sniffers, 2001

Many of the photo works made by Ukrainian artist Sergey Bratkov (°1960, Kharkiv, Ukraine, lives and works in Moscow, Russia) are conceived in a serial manner; such an aesthetic conception or consideration — all series tell stories, all serialists are narrators — already distances Bratkov’s work from the tradition of straightforward documentary to which it nonetheless seems inclined. Every series takes a specific photographic stance vis à vis a subject matter in which people most often imprisoned within the conditions of their existence. Masterfully arranged and directed, and just as skillfully executed from a technical point of view, Bratkov’s imagery slyly comments upon the double problem of propaganda in contemporary Russian society, both in the residual reflexes of the old Soviet culture and in the cynical celebration of the free market economy. Series such as Glue Sniffers, 2001 (double-exposures made with a 6 × 6-camera in the sun-flooded inner courtyard of a correction facility for underage delinquents) and Fighters without Rules, 2000 (portraits of triumphant boxers made immediately after their fights, in whatever lighting conditions were available at the time) remain relatively close to the traditions of documentary portraiture. The use of the hallucinogenic visual effect of doubling however already hints at Bratkov’s mastery of scenographic conventions. These are further scrutinised in Italian School from 2001 (a series of tableaux loosely referring to Italianate renaissance painting, consisting of Biblical scenes enacted by the inhabitants of a prison for the under aged; the actual Biblical play can be viewed on an accompanying video piece) and Portraits of the Lawyer and his Wife from 2000, which resonates with the echoes of a hallowed art history. Another narrative tradition, that of a specifically Russian heroism, is the central pictorial or scenographic motif in the series Pilots and Stewardesses, also from 2000. Bedtime Stories, 1998 is a series of twelve staged colour photographs in which each scene depicts a child’s nightmare; the hand-written children’s rhymes underneath the photographs ironically capture the content of the image. The title of the series Fayur-Soyuz, 2001 refers to a company based in the tiny Caucasian region of Ossetia known for producing Russia’s cheapest brand of vodka, and the work was conceived in parallel with an actual advertising campaign for the company: in Bratkov’s parodist take on the genre, local vodka distributors pose inside a storage room alongside the campaign’s leading lady, the former clad in military outfits, the latter sporting a glamorous red dress. M HKA also acquired two separate video works by Bratkov, both dating from 2002. The title of Kuzminki refers to a far-flung district in Moscow known for its popular lakeside park; Bratkov asked a number of visitors and passers-by ‘what Kuzminki means to them’ — their idyllic, dreamy answers contrast dramatically with the grim reality of a park with a soil polluted by the mustard gas that used to be tested and stored there. In the dramatically titled video Life is Pain Bratkov filmed an Ukrainian prostitute who also made cash as a street singer: her gut-wrenching repertory, bizarre make-up and trompe-l’oeil skin-coloured shirt unite to exclaim the basic truth of her act — that life is ‘pain’ indeed. This already impressive survey of his oeuvre was recently complemented by two samples of the installations he has been making, originating from his Motherland show in the Kiev Pinchuk Centre. One stages the setting for some of the child related series in the M HKA collection. Colourful children’s drawers are spread over the space, every one of them hiding a little scene of an ‘abused’ toy. The second installation is a living construction made for a football supporter.

Sergey Bratkov

Fayur â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Soyuz, 2002

Eurotel, 2009

Sergey Bratkov

Bed Time Stories, 1998

Sergey Bratkov

Boxes, 2009

Kids (Children), 2000

Sergey Bratkov

Italian School, 2001

Life is Pain, 2002

Sergey Bratkov

Constellation of Chingizkhan/Southern Cross/Battle for the Square 2, 2009

Said Atabekov (°1965, Bes Terek, Uzbekistan, lives and works in Shymkent, Kazakhstan) is an artist from the south of Kazakhstan, a region that has preserved its Asian heritage to a greater extent than the country’s northern regions have. After his studies, Atabekov became a member of the Red Tractor group, the first artists’ collective set up in the area after Perestroika. Through performances, videos and installations, the group questions the archetypes of Central Asian culture: myth, religion, pantheistic rites, nature and shamanism. Atabekov alternately employs video and photography to communicate the postmodern paradox, where the symbols of globalisation insert themselves into locations that are extremely isolated and still firmly anchored in local tradition. Key elements of the artist’s work include national identity and character, the conflict between man and nature, and the conflict between tradition and innovation. In his photo installation of 2009 Constellation of Chingizkhan/Southern Cross and video Battle for the Square 2, the artist refers to archaic tradition and at the same time to the neo-liberal and neo-capitalist emphasis on human competition in economy and in social life. The form of a cross alludes to the interweaving of Christianity and local paganism.

Said Atabekov

The Ruins of Our Time, 2007

‘While traveling outside Yerevan, passing by the deserted landscapes one comes across bus stops. They stand alone and abandoned, solo in the middle of nowhere. Passersby take the time to look at them for a few seconds, being unable to escape their presence, because of their unusual, overdone architecture.’ — Vahram Aghasyan Armenian artist Vahram Aghasyan (°1974, Yerevan, Armenia, lives and works in Yerevan, Armenia) focuses on cultural and historical processes taking place in his homeland. With photos, videos and installations, he predominantly examines architectural structures stemming from the former Soviet Union, which are now relieved of their functionality, in their present socio-political context. His photo series The Ruins of Our Time of 2007 depict deserted bus stops built in the 1960s and 1970s. With their experimental concrete casting they today appear as rudiments of traffic planning in a no-man’s land. Unused, never completed and with no infrastructural purpose, they do possess relevance in regard to the politics of remembrance as monuments of a history not yet overcome. The brief moment of photographic exposure stands in contrast to the monumentality of the stones falling to ruins. The artist’s interest in abandoned suburban landscapes is no accident, since here one can see examples of modernist architecture, which elicits pity, sadness and also sympathy, for the incompletion and absurdity of these non-functional structures bring them closer to art, and thus endow them with functionality.

Vahram Aghasyan

The Ruins of Our Time, 2007

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Vahram Aghasyan

Kazakhstan. Blue Period, 2002

Yelena Vorobyeva (°1959, Nebit-Dag, Turkmenistan, lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan) and Viktor Vorobyev (°1959, Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan) have been working together since the 1990’s. Their usage of different genres and techniques results in stylised, multi-layered works, focusing on post-Soviet circumstances and their effects on everyday life. The artists became interested in ‘socio-colouristic’ relations while traveling in the south of Kazakhstan in 2002. They noticed that the usual colour red, used as the attribute colour of everything Soviet, had been supplanted for the colour blue. Their work Kazakhstan. Blue Period of that year, a series of photographs acquired by M HKA, documents this nationwide colour spree graphically and with warm humor. As Yelena Vorobyeva puts it herself: ‘The canonical state symbols of the communists had been subjected to total desacralisation. The colour of the new independent Kazakhstan is blue; symbolising many things — the heavenly blue sky, the pagan celebration of spring, the blue domes of Islamic mosques, the dream of the inaccessible ocean’s expanses — the colour blue satisfied the majority and entered the mass consciousness as the best colour, the “right” colour. The blue dream of eternal spring, manifest in colour, has spilled across Kazakhstan, adding some optimistic lustre to our dim steppe vistas.’ The work Bazar, 2007 depicts how the collapse of the Soviet system and new sovereignty destroyed existent social relations followed by a privatisation of enterprise and the free market. People had to do something to survive and soon the streets of Almaty became a big trading ground, a ‘bazar’, a still-life of a changing epoch. To conclude, in Vorobyeva’s own words: ‘We took photos of these objects and made a purchase as a sign of gratitude. Little by little, we accumulated a rather sizeable collection of objects. By placing these objects in the exhibition space, we would like to show interrelated realities — the reality of an exhibited object that can be touched, the documented reality of the place where this object was sold, the reality of the existence of each person (the objects’ owners), the reality of time (history), and finally, the reality of direct personal contact.’

Viktor Vorobyev & Yelena Vorobyeva

Bazar, 2007 Bazar, 2007

Viktor Vorobyev & Yelena Vorobyeva

Trans Siberian Amazons, 2005

Trans-Siberian Amazons, 2005

The artists, curators and educators Gulnara Kasmalieva (째1960, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, lives and works in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) and Muratbek Djumaliev (째1965, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, lives and works in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) research in their work the effects of the Soviet past within the current socio-economic situation of Central Asia. In Bishkek they run the art centre Art East, which aims to re-establish and improve the support of contemporary arts, art education and artists in Kyrgyzstan and in the broader Central Asian region. Their work Trans-Siberian Amazons of 2005 was originally shown in the first Central Asian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. The installation, in a space constructed out of transport bags, unveils the reality behind the lasting custom of smuggling Chinese goods along the Trans-Siberian railway. The portrait of two women, who out of economic necessity trade domestic goods, gives the audience an insight into the survival strategies within the unsettled post-Soviet environment. The melancholic songs sung at the end of the space contrast with the endless line of the railroad as presented on the videos in the side walls.

Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev

Mutation, 2009

Yerbossyn Meldibekov (°1964, Tulkubas, Kazakhstan, lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan) refers to himself as a political artist. He produces conceptually conceived multimedia installations that comment on the process of change and reform in Central Asia. Meldibekov’s installation Peak Communism of 2009 is a parody on the utopian aspirations of the former Soviet leaders and the progression of history. A series of enameled metal pots for home use are turned upside-down and reformed into a mountainous landscape. The image alludes to the central mountain peak in the Pamir Mountains; the pot on the left presents the moment it was simply called Garma (‘mountain’), beside that the moment is presented it was named after Stalin, since it was the highest peak in the USSR, in the centre it is looming as ‘Peak Communism’ as it was renamed after 1952, at the right of that there is the remodeling of the present: now it is named after Ismoil Somoni, the ninth century Tajik national hero, and finally, at the far right it is the open end — without any name. By transforming a mundane object into a symbol of state ideology, Meldibekov expresses an ironic view on ideology as being nothing more than an empty mould. In the adjoining documentary photos Meldibekov shows how the numerous ‘heroic’ monuments throughout the region have been effectively remodeled over the past years. The second serial work in the collection, the installation Mutation of 2009, reflects formally on how former communist symbols, monuments and cultural objects are losing their ideological meaning and become part of a non-ideological context. Early on, Meldibekov had already turned the classical Lenin bust into an ‘art-Lenin’ and a ‘central-Asian Lenin’. For his M HKA-exhibition he added to the first three a ‘Lumumba-like Lenin’… It refers to a situation of ethnic conflicts and political incertitude comparable to the recent one in Kyrgyzstan but it obviously also engages the situation in which it is presented; this is a ‘Belgian Lenin’.

Yerbossyn Meldibekov

Peak Communism, 2009

Coffee, 2009

Change, 2005

Koka Ramishvili (°1956, Tbilisi, Georgia, lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland) is one of the many Georgian artists who left their homeland but whose works are profoundly influenced by post-Soviet issues. His use of video and photography enables him to experiment with the codes of documentation and artistic authorship. In Coffee, 2009, he creates a tension between the objective narrative of documentary footage and his own personal interpretation. The video Change, 2005, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2009, is one of his most important works. It starts with documentary footage of the Georgian government coup in which Saakashvili replaced Shevardnadze, presented in slow motion, which then switches to a scene from R.W. Fassbinder’s film Veronika Voss. The work exposes an ironic collision of the masculine choreography of the coup with Fassbinder’s feminine, melodramatic scene of fading vitality and death. Similarly, the series of black and white photographs War from my Window, 1991, is a bold comment on the bloody conflicts in Georgia after the declaration of independence in 1991. Over a period of twelve days, the artist photographed the combat in the centre of his hometown Tbilisi. Displayed as a filmstrip and presented as a story, the smoke of the bombs creates an alienating contrast with the seemingly calm, indifferent neighbourhood.

Koka Ramishvili

War from my Window, 1991

Koka Ramishvili

Earth (three versions), 2001

Yawning, 1975

Hamlet Hovsepian (°1950, Ashnak, Armenia, lives and works in Ashnak, Armenia) is one of the most significant figures of the Armenian contemporary art scene and a pioneer in video art in the Caucasian area. He has been working with film and video since the early 1970s. During his stay in Moscow between 1978 and 1980, Hovsepian was influenced by the city’s avant-garde and continued to incorporate its elements into his work. Since his return to Armenia, the artist has been based in his native village, Ashnak, just outside Yerevan, which for him forms an experimental laboratory ‘as a front against society’s norms and pacified rules of conduct’. There he has created conceptual film works, characterised by an absurd simplicity, abstract space and long duration. In these works Hovsepian emphasises emptiness as a possibility of critique on the passivity of our society. Most of Hovsepian’s films are recordings of simple, ordinary, seemingly meaningless human actions, such as yawning, scratching or thinking. His approach is raw, direct and often humorous. As such, some of the actions verge on the absurd or are presented in an exaggerated way. By focusing on the basic actions of daily life, the artist searches for an estranged identity beyond the sphere of social or political life. M HKA acquired two of the early films which have now been transferred onto video, Yawning, 1975 and Untitled, 1974, in which the artist walks around a huge boulder, and a more recent video, Earth, 2001, in which the artist literally rises out of the earth.

Hamlet Hovsepian

Untitled, 1974

Babi Badalov (°1959, Lerik, Azerbaijan, lives and works in Paris, France) is an Azeri artist and poet. After finishing art college in his native country, he left to St. Petersburg in 1980, where he soon became an influential underground artist and a member of the unofficial Association of Experimental Visual Art (TEII). As a visual artist, he expresses his ideas through art objects, paintings, installations and live performances. He also experiments with words and writes improvisational poetry, mixing languages and images of different cultures. Recently, Badalov’s work has been dedicated to linguistic explorations, researching the limits of language and the borders it imposes upon its users. Badalov’s recent audiovisual project VOAIZOVA (War is Over) of 2010, is based on his personal experience of linguistic inconveniences while travelling. In foreign countries, we often come across words written in the same alphabet as ours, but with different meanings, sound or pronunciation. The nomad life of an artist (or traveler, migrant, or refugee) does not only bring about periods of struggle and adaptation inherent to cultural integration, but can primarily turn him or her into a prisoner of language. Badalov’s projects play with these kinds of linguistic notions in order to emphasise larger geo-political questions.

VOAIZOVA (War is Over), 2010

Babi Badalov

VOAIZOVA (War is Over), 2010

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Babi Badalov VOAIZOVA (War is Over), 2010

Azat Sargsyan

Schizo-Reality, 2003

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Azat Sargsyan (º1965, Yerevan, Armenia lives and works in Yerevan, Armenia and in Stockholm, Sweden). His artistic practice evolves around the question of how history is constructed and deconstructed, and how it relates to our personal and collective memory. The artist has been exhibiting internationally since the 1990s, including at the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Moscow Biennial of 2009. Sargsyan is also the co-founder and artistic director of the Gyumri Biennial, initiated in 1998 in Yerevan. Schizo-Reality, 2003, acquired by M HKA, is an ongoing project motivated by the presidential and parliamentary elections in Armenia in 2003. During those elections, the Armenian people witnessed a blatant and cynical fraud, by which the regime reinstalled its own ruling elite. Due to the avid ambitions of those in power, Armenian society was denied its basic civil right — the right to vote. International observers, who had been following Armenian politics since the early 1990s, commented on the event with the cynical words: ‘Don’t worry, it will happen again.’ A lack of decisive action allowed a climate of suspicion and schizophrenia to install itself in Armenian society. In Schizo-Reality, the artist analyses this event by dividing it into eight video fragments, creating a critical video installation. In the centre two politicians — who came out as competing candidates — talk on video screens at the opposite end of a horizontal column of air. On the sides images of a listening crowd are superimposed by someone pulling at his ear and someone scratching his nose. Only in the centre image of the end wall does an autonomous time seem to be found; the endlessness of prayer beads gliding through fingers.

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Schizo-Reality, 2003

Azat Sargsyan

Schizo-Reality, 2003

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Vyacheslav Akhunov

1m 2, 2007

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Artist, writer and philosopher Vyacheslav Akhunov (º1948, Osh, Kyrgyzstan, lives and works in Tashkent, Uzbekistan). His oeuvre comprises abstract paintings, installation, performance and video art, as well as numerous essays and novels. 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 that existed between the 1970s and 1990s. 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 realist art, created to perpetuate the memory of Lenin. In his collages Leniniana, 1977–82, 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 idolisation with a mixture of irony and fascination. The other work M HKA acquired of Akhunov, 1m 2 , 2007 is what could be called the tiniest large retrospective of an artist’s work. 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 to Western conceptual art of the 1960s, particularly by Marcel Duchamp and his consecrated everyday objects.

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Vyacheslav Akhunov

Lenin-Art, 1977–84

Lenin-Art, 1977– 84

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Rustam Khalfin & Julia Thikonova

Northern Barbarians, Part 2, Love Races, 2000

Rustam Khalfin (º1948, Tashkent, Uzbekistan – †2008, Almaty, Kazahkstan) is considered a pioneer of Kazakhstan’s contemporary art scene. After graduating from the Moscow Architecture Institute, he moved to Leningrad (the former St. Petersburg) in the 1980s where he became involved in the circle surrounding Vladimir Sterligov — a close associate of Kazimir Malevich. Later on he broke off with their formative traditions and moved towards a more contemporary art practice, introducing performance art in Kazakhstan. Khalfin employed a variety of subjects in his work, including the history of Central Asia, the pre-Islamic history of Kazakhstan, nomad traditions, perception and the inner workings of the mind, among others. The conceptual dimension of his oeuvre has always been complimented by an underlying sensuality. This is particularly clear in Northern Barbarians, 2000 which consists of two videos made in collaboration with artist Julia Tikhonova (º1978, Almaty, Kazahkstan, lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan). In Love Races, a couple is making love on top of a horse, re-enacting Chinese imagery, an outsider view on the life of Kazakh nomads. The video Bride and Groom is about two lovers who, according to an old custom, are forbidden to see each other before their wedding day, except through the trellis wall of the yurt. Both videos explore Khalfin’s interest in the physics of the personal perspective related to the notion on Kazakh identity before the subsequent repression of indigenous Central-Asian cultures by the Soviet Union. M HKA also acquired an ensemble of wooden objects of 1990, remade by Viktor Vorobyev and Yelena Vorobyeva based upon the original models. The elementary objects are called pulota, referring to a central concept of the artist meaning ‘a void in a fist’. They represent the hollow space within a fist, a fragmentation of the field of vision, a bodily camera obscura. The word itself is a combination of the Russian words pustota (void) and kulak (fist) and refers to nomadic wanderings through one’s inner space, an exploration which occupied Khalfin throughout his professional and personal life.

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Northern Barbarians, Part 1: Bride and Groom, 2000

Rustam Khalfin & Julia Thikonova

Northern Barbarians, Part 1: Bride and Groom, 2000

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Almagul Menlibayeva

Exodus, 2009

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Headcharge, 2007

Almagul Menlibayeva (º1969, Almaty, Kazakhstan, lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Amsterdam, The Netherlands). She studied at the Academy of Art and Theatre in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and her work has been the subject of numerous international solo and group exhibitions, such as the Sydney Biennial of Contemporary Art and the Venice Biennale. In her work, Menlibayeva combines an interest in regional traditions with a critique of official identity politics. She bases this criticism on the idea of nomadic pastoralism, the traditional way of life that distinguishes the history and culture of the Central Asian peoples. Most of her works are built on encounters and shifts of images that refer to an array of ethnic, historical and cultural layers of meaning, where the single-dimensional and rational meets the festive, orgiastic and poetic. Her narrative videos and accompanying photographs thus offer a romantic and melancholic reflection on the non-synchronicity of her home country’s development. M HKA engaged for nine photographs, all of 2010, Steppen Police, Tengri Boy, Forever Umai, The Observer, all mounted on light boxes, and Dior Salome, Dior and Boss, Portrait of my Daughter I, Portrait of my Daughter 2, My Friends, all Lambda prints, and for two video installations: Headcharge of 2007 and Exodus of 2009. Menlibayeva employs references to her own nomadic heritage and the widespread Shamanistic traditions of Central Asia, exploring the emotional, spiritual and habitual residues of an ancient belief system/philosophy while simultaneously addressing the post-Soviet realities of present day Kazakhstan by imparting her indigenous culture’s legacy to a globalised technological society.

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Steppen Police, 2010

Forever Umai, 2010

Almagul Menlibayeva

The Observer, 2010

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Portrait of my Daughter I, 2010

Portrait of my Daughter 2, 2010

Dior and Boss, 2010

Almagul Menlibayeva

My Friends, 2010

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Dior Salome, 2010

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Works

Works Andrey Monastyrski The Circle of CA, 1996, installation containing 63 papers, 42 × 29.5 cm, Two video’s on monitor: Displacement of the viewers, 00:19:27 and Means of the row, 00:17:09; three 8 mm films transferred on video + documentation of the actions: Lieblich, 1976, 00:01:17, The Balloon, 1977, 00:02:49, The Slogan, 1978, 00:04:43

Vadim Fishkin & Yuri Leiderman Hotelit, 2001: container which functions as a hotel room and exhibition space, 3309 × 9125 × 3309 cm

Konstantin Zvezdochotov Nadezhda, 2003, installation painting, oil on panel, silk, 160 × 500 cm

Vlad Monroe StarZ, 2005, 10 colour photographs on canvas (320 × 237 cm); three colour photographs on paper (75 × 75 cm) each; 20 colour photographs on paper in photographed golden frame, (76 × 60 cm); 20 pages text handwritten, A2 + 5 pages text handwritten, A3; photo of Hitler, 244 colour photographs (55) × A4, (54) × A3 and (135) × 15 × 20 cm; one video: Pirate TV, 1990, 00:32:00, monitor with photographed frame

Anatoly Osmolovsky SLOGANS, 2003, 21 slogans to be written in dust on the wall; two photographs of the performances Travel to the Brobdingneg Land (MayakovskyOsmolovsky), Mayakovskysquare, Moscow, 1993; one photograph of the performance Communist Putsch, out of series of street performances-provocations (with E.A.T. Movement), 1991, Moscow; video recording the re-enactment of the performance Order for Army of the Arms, M HKA, 2005; How Much Costs the Russian Mind, framed receipt

Victor Alimpiev Ode, 2001: B/W video with sound, 00:34:30

Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kanevsky In the Closet, 1998, installation, 190 × 60 × 60 cm; My Grandfather’s Shed, 1998, installation, 210 × 240 × 325 cm; August 20th, 1968, installation; 10 Characters – Album 1–10: The Flying, The Joker Gorokhov, The Generous Barmin, Agonising Surikov, Anna Petrovna Has a Dream, Sitting-in-theCloset Primakov, Mathematical Gorsky, The Decorator Maligin, The Released Gavrilov, The Looking-out-the-Window Arkhipov, 1994, books, 52.5 × 37 cm, each includes an offset, ed. 1/28, 51.5 × 35 cm

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Dmitri Prigov Untitled (the transcendental descent of a bear), 1995, installation sketch, 21 × 29.5 cm and the realisation of the installation in 2010

Oleg Kulik The Gobi Test, or the Unbearable Charm of Mongolia: Gobi Test. Winter, 2005, video, 00:22:00; The Gobi Test, or the Unbearable Charm of Mongolia: Gobi Test. Summer, 2004, video, 00:31:00

Sergey Maslov Selection out of Dream series, oil paintings on canvas 1982–2000, Declaration of Love, Dream–2, Dream–3, Dream–4, Dream–5, Dream–6, Dream–11, Dream–14, Dream–19, Dream–20, Dream–29, 100 × 80, and Dream–15, 1991, 102 × 122 cm; Baikonur–2, 2001, installation with yurt, music and slideshow on computer; Survival Instructions for Citizens of the Former USSR, 1998, as presented by Viktor Vorobyev and Yelena Vorobyeva in 2005; sketchbook, 1998

Kerim Ragimov Five paintings out of the series Human Project: Portrait n°13, 1994, 50 × 61 cm; Portrait n°3, 1994, 60 × 90 cm, Portrait n°6, 1994, 60 × 140 cm; Portrait n°16, 1994, 121 × 170 cm; Portrait n°18, 1993, 141 × 210 cm, series to be completed by Polaroid’s of the other works in the series

Said Atabekov Constellation of Chingizkhan/Southern Cross/Battle for the Square 2, 2009, installation with photographs mounted on di-bond forming one coloured and one B/W cross, 21 panels, each 50 × 50 cm; and one B/W video projection, 00:05:33 Vahram Aghasyan The Ruins of Our Time, 2007, 12 photographs mounted on di-bond, 70 × 100 cm each

Yelena Vorobyeva & Viktor Vorobyev Bazar, 2007, installation of twenty-four displays, 15 × 100 × 67 cm, photos, 40 × 60 cm on di-bond and objects; Kazakhstan. Blue Period, 2002, installation of 105 photos, 40 × 60 cm

Sergey Bratkov Kuzminki, 2002, video, 00:04:30; Life is pain, 2002, video, 00:05:51; Fayur – Soyuz, 2002, five photographs, 90 × 60 cm each; Portraits of the lawyer and his wife, 2000, two photographs, 70 × 52 cm each; Army Girls, 2000, ten photographs, 90 × 60 cm each; Fighters without rules, 2000, six photos on aluminum, 90 × 60 cm each; Glue Sniffers, 2001, seven photos on aluminum, 90 × 90 cm each; Polina, 2003: photo, 150 × 100 cm; Kids (Children), 2000, six photos, 40 × 30 cm each; Pilots and stewardesses, 2003, seven photos on aluminum, 40 × 30 cm each; Bed Time Stories, 1998, 12 photos, 50 × 60 cm; Italian School, 2001, video, 00:25:09; Italian School, 2001, nine photos; Eurotel, 2009, installation, space on wheels for a football fan; Boxes, 2009, installation with wooden drawers, toys, drawings

Gulnara Kasmalieva en Muratbek Djumaliev Trans Siberian Amazons, 2005, installation of 150 Chinese bags and three videos, 0:02:03

Yerbossyn Meldibekov Mutation, 2009, four portraits mutating from Lenin over Giacometti, over Genghis Khan to Lumumba, (24 × 29 × 15 cm); Peak Communism, 2009, five Russian chairs and five enameled pots, reforming the central peak of the Pamir Mountains, ed. 4/5; documentary photos about the transformation of former Soviet monuments

Koka Ramishvilli Change, 2005, video, 00:04:20; Coffee, 2009: video, 00:01:20; War from my Window, 1991, installation of 12 of B/W photographs, 30 × 40 cm each Hamlet Hovsepian Earth (three versions), 2001, 00:00:11, 00:00:21, 00:00; Yawning, 1975, 00:02:20; Untitled, 1974, 00:05:00

Babi Badalov VOAIZOVA (War is Over), 2010, installation with glasses, pens, drawings and sketchbook, 20 × 20 × 3 cm

Azat Sargsyan Schizo-Reality, 2003, installation with eight projections and balloon, 00:05:07, 00:05:06, 00:05:08, 00:10:16, 00:10:27, 00:10:28, 00:38:36, 00:38:36 Vyacheslav Akhunov

Rustam Khalfin & Julia Thikonova Northern Barbarians, Part 1: Bride and Groom, 2000, video, 00:11:00; Northern Barbarians, Part 2, Love Races, 2000, video, 00:07:00; Pulota, 1990, Seven forms representing the hollow space within a fist, 125 × 20 × 2.7 cm, 64 × 74 × 2.7 cm, 24 × 500 × 2.7 cm, 81 × 78 × 2.7 cm, 24 × 20 × 2.7 cm, 60 × 117 × 2.7 cm, 197 × 68 × 2.7 cm, remake by Viktor Vorobyev and Yelena Vorobyeva based on original models, 2010 Almagul Menlibayeva Steppen Police, 2010, cibachrome, lightbox, 127 × 183 × 8.5 cm; Tengri Boy, 2010, cibachrome, lightbox, 96.5 × 127 × 5.5 cm; Forever Umai, 2010, cibachrome, lightbox, 96.5 × 127 × 5.5 cm; The Observer, 2010, cibachrome, lightbox, 96.5 × 127 × 5.5 cm; My Friends, 2010, Lambda print mounted on alu-dibond, 53.5 × 80.2 × 2.3 cm; Dior Salome, 2010, Lambda print mounted on aludibond, 53.5 × 80.2 × 2.3 cm; Dior and Boss, 2010, Lambda print mounted on alu-dibond, 53.5 × 80.2 × 2.3 cm; Portrait of my Daughter I, 2010, Lambda print mounted on alu-dibond, 80.2 × 53.5 × 2.3 cm; Portrait of my Daughter 2, 2010, Lambda print mounted on alu-dibond, 80.2 × 53.5 × 2.3 cm; Headcharge Installation, 2007, 3 channel video, 00:12:00; Exodus, 2009, one channel video, 00:11:00

1m 2 , 2007, matchboxes on a base of 1m 2; Lenin-Art, 1977 until 1984, six collages on paper, 30 × 42 cm each

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Overview of the exhibition The Melancholy of Resistance, CoCa; Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kanevsky

A Sirenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Song. Notes on The Melancholy of Resistance. Daniel Muzyczuk Agnieszka Pindera 121

An exhibition

1 Fetishism in both the psychological and the economical understanding.

The Melancholy of Resistance, CoCa; Ilya Kabakov

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Collecting is a process of narration, which actualises itself into a new structure each time it is newly presented to the public eye. The story told by an exhibition can be a declaration of one’s beliefs or a voicing of one’s concerns. The potentiality residing in a collection can bring out voices that astonish not only the authors of particular works, but also the collector. In its two previous editions the Europe at Large project emphasised art from Central Asia and the Caucasus with the goal of situating it within a broader idea of Europe. The key to understanding the present is unearthing the past. It thus seems that a contemporary rethinking of the legacy of communism, which remains an unknown subject in spite of many attempts to grant it a voice, is unavoidable. The mythical Odysseus, a monarch roaming towards the future, ordered the sailors navigating his ship to cover their ears, so that the voice of the Sirens, the voice of the past, wouldn’t force them into a melancholic state of fatalism. For Odysseus, who by his own command is tied to a mast, the voice of the sirens contains the knowledge of all past events and is the sublimation of all experience, to which Odysseus no longer has any access. This situation can serve as a metaphor for the functioning of bourgeois art. Knowledge, to which the worker has been denied access, is granted through a song. This song can also serve as a call to join to the ranks. In Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting, Mieke Bal analyses the act of collecting as an act of forming a narrative. Bal employs the concept of the fetish1 and draws from the methodological dictionary of narratology. These critical discursive terms make it possible to regard a collection as a particular representation of power structures, which can be analysed through categories of everyday life critique. They also uncover the process of commodification, which is inherent to the capitalist system and originates in the structure of the narration and fetishism. While these observations are unquestionably important and fitting, they seem to describe only one model of collecting — an imperialist and universalist activity based on domination. On a different note Gilles Deleuze, while considering two ways of thinking about the past introduced by Charles Péguy in Clio (1931), describes ‘two ways of considering events, one being to follow the course of the event, gathering how it comes about historically, how it’s prepared and then decomposes in history, while the other way is to go back into the event, to take one’s place in it as in a becoming, to grow both young and old in it at once, going through all 123

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its components or singularities. ‘Becoming isn’t part of history; history 2 only amounts to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations leaves behind in order to “become”, that is, to create something new.’ 2 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia The juxtaposition of the two models of collecting confronts the University Press, 1995), purely negative and historical vision of Mieke Bal with the explosion p. 170–171 of a single event in Deleuze’s concept. Where Bal focuses on the issue of capitalistic fetishism and its alienation effects, Deleuze proposes the concept of an event in its becoming, which can substitute narrative and thus open new affirmative possibilities. The field spanning these two notions indicates a complex process of the construction and later deconstruction of an identity through accumulation. Taking into account solely Bal’s perspective, one could say that a project prepared by two Polish curators born during a period of Martial law in Poland, a project built around works accumulated by a Belgian museum, can only construct an illusive idea of art from post-Soviet countries. After all, the politics of collecting is based on subjective choices and unavoidable omissions. Nevertheless the interpretation considering the process of becoming, which one can borrow from Deleuze, offers a rich spectrum of interpretation possibilities and allows The Melancholy of Resistance, one to listen to different voices, which are called upon CoCa; Sergey Maslov, Anatoly to articulate their own narrative within the collection. Osmolovsky An artwork binding a number of issues considered in The Melancholy of Resistance is Sergey Maslov’s performance which took place in April 1998 in a business club in Almaty, where Maslov organised a mixed gathering of representatives of the nouveau riche and homeless people. Sheets of paper with Survival Instructions for Citizens of the Former USSR were scattered around the room to the sounds of Italian opera arias. The artist, who proudly pronounced

himself a visitor from outer space and the last avant-gardist, decided to recreate sites and ideas, which everyone had seemed to have forgotten about — such as a rally or a community — and to address the urgent needs of everyday life. The USSR, of which Kazakhstan had been a part, had collapsed seven years earlier. The progressing social stratification caused by processes of transformation had already become clearly visible. The crowd that gathered to take part in Maslov’s performance witnessed an ambiguous statement — the idyllic vocal music was at odds with the peculiar instructions concerning topics ranging from protection against the effects of rape to methods of saving tea. The survival set was conceived for the whole territory of the former empire and contained instructions for individuals, who needed to learn how to answer urgent questions on their own. The dismantling of the USSR is commonly associated with chaos and a bloodthirsty privatisation process. If it weren’t for the fact that access to the public sphere was highly rationed under socialism, one could speak of the fall of the public man. According to Boris Buden our viewing of the Soviet period is distorted by the proceedings of the 1989 revolution and its outcome. It seemed that through the modernising transformations implemented in the mantras of the emancipation of nations from the domination of communist bureaucrats, the belated bourgeois revolution would finally materialise. These events influenced the contemporary perception of a socialist past shared by the whole European continent. It is difficult to diagnose the whole spectre of communism, which seems to present itself differently to different communities. Instead, in its modalities, we try to search for its distinct features and not the correlations between them. Yet it is not only the experience of socialism and the memories

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associated with it, which became disintegrated. This process is perhaps most visible in the economical changes, particularly in privatisation. The difficult conversion towards a capitalist economy initially based on the domestic model of the perestroika drifted later towards neoliberal ideology, which led to a deep stratification of the society and to the accumulation of the means of production in the hands of a narrow elite. These processes had an impact on culture as well. Take for example the Gini coefficient, which is the measure of the inequality of distribution, which when applied to diagnosing culture, grows inversely proportional to its quality in a given country. It thus can be said that a high coefficient leads to a cultural colonisation of the weaker structures. As a correlative of late capitalism, postmodernism supports an illusion of diversity, which is antagonistic to the unifying tendencies of a non-commercial character. As Boris Groys has written, this postmodern logic forces post-Soviet nations to search for their own identities, which were devoured by the Soviet Union or which never even existed. 3 The current state of politics in Russia seems to be the best exemplification of the process of surrendering to a neoliberal economy and the victory of individual egoist cravings over communal needs. This culturally dominant and most stable player of the former USSR is now searching for its own identity. It thus seems appropriate to take Russia as the example of general tendencies. Alexei Penzin, a member of the Chto Delat?/What is to be done? group, describes attempts at finding a ‘Russian factor’ as follows: ‘These ideological statements, which indeed adopt and appropriate all external stereotypical views of Russia, or saturated by traumatic feeling of split between global concepts and local reality must be challenged by evoking a concrete and immediate intellectual and political prehistory. We treat this problem dialectically, reformulating it and reserving some theoretical ‘singularity’ for the post-Soviet situation, but in terms of resistance to dominant conformist right-wing politics and ideology. On the other hand, this singularity produces a lot of difficulties when they try to inscribe post-Soviet space immediately in the discursive field of contemporary theory.’ 4 These circumstances may also be behind the discussion of Russia in postcolonial terms, indicated by Ekaterina Degot in her text Does Russia Qualify for Postcolonial Discourse? Perhaps the legitimisation of the claim of Russia to Otherness and to its subjugation by countries of the former first world is indeed tempting and easy to prove. One just needs to

call into mind all of the stories and anecdotes reinforcing the notion of exotic savages or to refer to works of Sergey Bratkov, which can be interpreted as screens for Western viewers subconscious desire, 5 but one must also remember that not so long ago Soviet Russia was a colonial empire, although in a peculiar meaning of the term. Degot and Penzin address the problem of translating the post-Soviet situation into the language of western critical discourse from a slightly different angle. A lack of understanding of one’s own identity triggers confusion in outside observers. Alain Badiou expressed this most radically: ‘I do not understand contemporary Russia at all. [...] We knew the USSR and understood it, we had time to investigate it, and I’d even say we needed the USSR. Everything that happened there helped Western leftist thinkers even if they were not in agreement with its ideology. Just the fact of the Soviet Union’s existence was extremely important for us. And now that it has collapsed, Russia has turned into an extremely mysterious country.’ 6 In her text Degot points to an interesting solution, which applies to the conclusions of Penzin, Buden and Groys. Instead of focusing on the differences, one should attempt to destroy the exclusiveness that the Western world exercises over critical discourses and look for new grounds. While this task may seem difficult, especially in the light of Bal’s theory of fetishisation and exoticism, we believe that drawing on the politics of becoming makes it possible to propose a politics of translation. The main obstruction is the restriction of the experience of communism to a limited territory of countries of the former ‘second world’. Drawing attention to collective practices — a frequent feature of unofficial art made before 1991 — but also the analysis of discursive artistic strategies after the collapse of the USSR, should become the base for a contemporary reassessment of communism. Living in a forcefully designated communal space could be considered as a metaphor for the Soviet Union, a fictionally constructed space of co-existence between different republics and nations. One could actually view the whole Eastern block from this perspective. It is also crucial to consider the context produced by everyday life in this type of space and the peculiar community it produced. Victor Tupitsyn pointed to the communal speech typical for residents of communal apartments. The uncomfortable and strained living conditions of communal apartment residents could have resulted in two opposite archetypical outcomes: chaos or order. The first results in a discord, the latter in a harmony of voices.

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5 ‘Mikhail Ryklin: I think the Western European viewer finds something in your photos that goes back to the idea of displacement. Do you think your art perhaps brings the Western person closer to his own unconscious, helping him realise his voyeuristic desire? Sergey Bratkov: Yes, I think it’s like that.’ Anna Alchuk and Mikhail Ryklin, The Picture Hunter. A conversation with Sergey Bratkov, in Sergey Bratkov. Glory Days. Works 1995–2007, ed. by Thomas Seelig, (Fotomuseum Winterthur: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2008), p. 59.

3 Boris Groys, Beyond Diversity, in Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 156.

4 Alexei Penzin, Post-Soviet Singularity and Codes of Cultural Translation. Some stories, preliminary theses and variations around one enormous problem.

6 Marusia Klimova, Abroad #16: Alain Badiou, Topos, http://topos.ru/article/4113.

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These two oppositional images constitute two terminal points, between which one can discover a whole mythology of countries of the former USSR, of which the principal voice belongs to Russia. Art created in the circle of Moscow Conceptualism is often interpreted through concepts related to communal apartments. These are the surroundings of the most famous artist of the former USSR, Ilya Kabakov, the pioneer of Soviet installation, who at the Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992 presented a complete reconstruction of a Soviet toilet. The sordid space, devoid of intimacy and privacy, caused an immense scandal. The installation was a shock to Kabakov’s compatriots, who accused him of betrayal, but also to the viewers, who stumbled upon the artistic installation while looking for ‘real’ toilets in the Fridericianum building. The interior design of the installation resembled a standard two-room flat. Inside, one could find a set table, dresser, bed and a black hole meant to serve as a toilet, situated in the centre of the room. Kabakov’s In the Closet presented at The Melancholy of Resistance is based on a similar premise — the figure of the homo sovieticus described by Tupitsyn: ‘His installations can be interpreted as acoustic structures through which one may listen to the author’s inner voice (which in Bakhtin’s opinion, acts as a surrogate of the unconscious). This ‘voice’ is possessed by a passion for telling stories of an autobiographical nature, impersonating, through these narrations, legions of characters and populating a labyrinth of both personal and communal memory.7 In 1978 Federico Fellini directed a film that tells the story of an orchestra rehearsal taking place in a renaissance chapel. The orchestra is accompanied by a television crew, who constantly disturb the work of the musicians, preventing them from finding the harmony so essential to their work. During the interviews conducted by the television crew, conflicts and repressed antagonisms become apparent and hostility towards the conductor grows. Anarchy sneaks into the disciplined ranks of the orchestra. A coup d’état takes place, accompanied by unexplainable throbs and a slow collapse of the edifice. Through an extremely powerful image Fellini was able to construct his most political film. Enclosed in a common space the musicians form a metaphorical nation and different social groups, which are forced to negotiate their own interests. There are more examples of the relationship between music and social order, such as the destruction of Luigi Russolo’s ‘noise machine’ by the audience of Buñuel, Dali’s The Golden Age or the political activities of the

creators of the Tropicália movement in Brazil. But perhaps the most famous example of this is the reaction to the arrest of the members of an avant-garde musical group called Plastic People of the Universe in 1977 in Czechoslovakia. The noise-like music and alternative life style of the band members had long been a source of interest for the Czechoslovakian regime police. It was this event among others that provoked Vaclav Havel to write the famous Charter 77, which rapidly became a foundation for the oppositional movement of people, who had been up until that moment active only in the art sphere. An inquiry into participation models in music must also acknowledge the year 1968, when politically involved composers ventured to achieve change through music in order to inspire social revolution. And so in Paragraph 7, part of the composition titled The Great Learning by Cornelius Cardew and intended for amateur performance, we receive an enactment of the procedure of tuning, leading to the harmonious consonance of voices. In the beginning each of the performers sings in his or her own rhythm and pitch, regulated by the pace of breathing. However each next word of the score has to be intoned in accordance with the pitch of a neighbouring singer of the ‘orchestra’. The initial chaotic vocal multiplicity is transformed gradually over the one and a half hour of the performance into a splendid unison. The musical score becomes an image of utopian social relations, which are based on the harmonious coexistence of all members of the social organism. Writing about the process of improvisation, Cardew remarked: ‘Two things running concurrently in haphazard fashion suddenly synchronise autonomously and sling you forcibly into a new phase. Rather like in the 6 day cycle race when you sling your partner into the next lap with a forcible handclasp. [...] the subtlest interplay on the physical level can throw into high relief some of the mystery of being alive. 8 .’ Cardew’s personal devotion to ‘the social’ certainly facilitates the transcription of his words into a field of political relations. The model described by Cardew can be easily applied to tusovka, a typical practice of the Russian art scene. According to Viktor Misiano: ‘Tusovka brings together the totality of people originally consolidated not by means of concrete structures — institutional or ideological — but through the prospect of their gaining. Tusovka is a type of artistic association, which considers itself as pure potentiality. Tusovka is an artistic social project.’ 9 A spontaneous arrangement becomes a platform for exchange and for creating common politics. Yet the bonds, which hold the project together, are considerably loose for

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7 Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious. Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia (Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 2009), p. 58.

8 Cornelis Cardew, Towards an Ethic of Improvisation, in Cornelis Cardew. A Reader, ed. Eddie Prevost (Copula, 2006), p. 126.

9 Viktor Misiano, The Cultural Contradictions of the Tusovka, in Moscow Art Magazine, http://xz.gif.ru/numbers/ moscow-art-magazine/ cultural-contradictions/

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facilitating an easy disentanglement when the agreed upon goals had been achieved or when the enterprise runs into insurmountable obstacles. Andrey Monastyrski’s everchanging Collective Actions group or Sergey Bratkov and Boris Mikhailov’s Fast Reaction Group functioned similarly. A day-to-day communal practice led also to the establishment of organisations based on stricter regulations such as Radek Community, Chto Delat?/What is to be done? as well as communities set up only for achieving specific goals, such as projects like the Hamburg Project or the Visual Anthropology Workshop by Viktor Misiano. In one of his Slogans Anatoly Osmolovsky describes the importance of reviving the idea of the community in defiance of the value of the individual promoted by the capitalist and postmodern logic. This is what Osmolovsky wrote on the wall of a gallery using only dust: ‘In contemporary art, there is no place for the private and the personal, to the contrary, it is an elaboration process of the impersonal.’ The Melancholy of Resistance. Works from the M KHA Collection constitutes an attempt to acknowledge the voice of various private mythologies. The exhibition presents a number of works of artists whom one might think of as parts of a social orchestra, but who The Melancholy of Resistance, adopt a strategy of individual CoCa; Victor Alimpiev & expression rather than carry out an enforced order that envisions Marian Zhunin history after the fall of totalising narratives. Through its distinct construction and dimensions the main space of the show became the author of the exhibition. The construction of the immense squareshaped room with a cubic capacity of over eight thousand meters slightly resembles that of a temple. Four massive pillars situated in the centre of the room support both the roof and the suspended ceiling,

which conceals a lamp imitating an oculus. The gigantic windows make it impossible to isolate the works from the outside world. Quite on the contrary, the view of the housing projects situated close by, allows one to contextualise the artworks. Needless to say the selected space becomes a site of communal experience and gathering. The displayed exhibition provides the collection with a space, through which its potentiality comes into play revealing the differences between presented artistic strategies and attitudes. An excellent example of a tactic undertaken by at least a few of the displayed artists is the work titled 1 m 2 by Vyacheslav Akhunov. The artist subtly intervenes in a material, which is the source of both inspiration and comment. Let us demonstrate this through analysing a series of water-colour paintings titled The Doubt — a collection of miniature replicas of propaganda posters, which differ from the originals only by a question mark added at the end of each slogan. Akhunov’s overuse of the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda is a subversive gesture, one which challenges the power of the propaganda and deconstructs the language of political rhetoric. Also Sergey Bratkov takes up the topic of a particular type of language — the communal speech. His Kuzminki visualises the social body in a very literal sense. Bratkov conducts short interviews with locals about a park in Moscow, showing the local cultural life of people, who had spent most of their lives in collectives and councils. An affirmative understanding of the phenomenon of the collective is put forward by the Russian neo-avant-garde group Collective Actions (Kollektivnye deystviya), which was founded in 1979 by Andrey Monastyrski, Nikolai Panitkov, Nikita Alekseev and Georgy Kisewalter.

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Since the start of their activity, till the present day, the group organises collective performances under the common title — Trips Out of Town. The participants are invited to follow specific instructions. The goal of these performances is to provide participants with the experience of an empty action in space, a state which, because it was frequently filled with snow, resembled a white unwritten sheet of paper. The dislocation from socialist Moscow reality was supposed to result in the abandonment of perceptual habits, and a focus on new spontaneous conditions of artistic exchange, as well as experiencing one’s subjectivity both through a collective and on its peripheries. Trips Out of Town constitute a radical attempt at creating a site of exchange and dialogue outside of a metropolis. An entirely contrasting attitude, that of a glorification of individual practice can be found in the work of Hamlet Hovsepian, an artist briefly associated with the Moscow avant-garde movement (1978–80), who returned to the town of Ashnak in Armenia with an The Melancholy of Resistance, abundance of collected experiences and where he currently lives Vyacheslav Akhunov, Rustam and works constantly drawing inspiration from his home town. Khalfin, Anatoly Osmolovsky, When still in school, Hovsepian came to hear about the films of Koka Ramishvili Andy Warhol. Soon afterwards he created a series of works showing the activities of everyday life and practices, which weren’t particularly meaningful, pleasant or even obscene. According to Susanna Gyulamiryan, the films Thinker (1975–76), Yawning (1975), Itch (1975), Head (1975) and Untitled (1976) celebrate anti-heroism and commonness. The title of the exhibition was adopted from the title of László Krasznahorkai’s novel. The Melancholy of Resistance tells the story of a small Hungarian town, visited by a travelling circus. A massive container enclosing the world’s biggest stuffed whale is placed in the middle of the town’s main square. The protagonist of the novel, a postman named János Valuska whom the townspeople consider

to be a half witted klutz, becomes fascinated by the whale, which is seemingly the main attraction of the circus. The key figure is that of the so-called Prince, a part of the circus freak show. He speaks an unintelligible language and exercises an inexplicable power over people, who follow him from town to town. An obtuse and vicious crowd travels with the circus vandalising the neighbourhood and terrorising the townspeople. The words of the rambling mob, (which tramples over and destroys everything that it encounters, as if in a state of madness) are terrifying: ‘we had nothing to lose, everything was horrible, insufferable, unbearable, houses, gardens, bill-posts, electric tractions, shops, post offices and the bland smell of bakeries, the neatness and orderliness were unbearable.’ Another key character of the novel is a man named György Eszter, a retired music teacher, who renounces social life and never leaves his house. He gives a monologue propounding a theory that Andreas Werckmeister’s harmonic principles are responsible for all aesthetic and philosophical problems in music, which need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony. Immersed in melancholy, Eszter searches for new ways of mending the dislodged time by changing the rules of harmony. It was Julia Kristeva who attempted to recount the mysterious paradox and terminological confusion, which can be observed in writings on the concepts of melancholy and depression. She writes: ‘if loss, bereavement, and absence trigger the work of the imagination and nourish it permanently as much as they threaten it and spoil it, it is also noteworthy that the work of art as fetish emerges when the activating sorrow has been repudiated.’ 10 Her main thesis in Black Sun is that both melancholy and depression are results of a disturbance in symbolical relations with the world and that only a return to the rules of symbolisation can save a subject from the abyss of silence. Kristeva describes the strange, alienated, sedate

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10 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 9.

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or scattered speech of the melancholic, which places the person in an unstructured time. As Kristeva writes: ‘Riveted to the past, regressing to the paradise or inferno of an unsurpassable experience, melancholy persons manifest a strange memory: everything has gone by, they seem to say, but I am faithful to those bygone days, I am nailed down to them, no revolution is possible, there is no future...11.’ The difference between melancholy and nostalgia or mourning lies in the type of loss. It is the feeling of losing something one is not yet aware of. Kristeva also points to the fact that times when either religious or political gods are toppled are times in which one is especially prone to dark spirits. Periods of transformation with their state of insecurity result in a type of social aphasia, in which no coherent norms and values necessary for individuals to function can be produced. This may lead to the emergence of such behaviours as rebellion or withdrawal. Resistance is born when an individual, terrified by the unpredictable character of reality, creates his/her own space according to new rules. The individual trains his/her voice to provide testimony for the possibility of the existence of a different world. Just like Eszter, when he locked himself in his own house to search for a new social and musical order within the confines of his space, who believed that discovering new rules of harmony, different from those of Werckmeister would lead to the birth of a new community. In the preface to the German edition of Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art we read: ‘According to Marxists the cause of melancholy lies in the inability of the bourgeois to bear the contradiction between the sphere of possibility and the merciless historical reality. That is why the first congress of Soviet writers decided that the goal of literature is to influence social relations in order to diminish the cause of melancholy.’ The exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun proposes its own, original ‘method of music-therapy’. As Dmitri Gutov writes in a text accompanying his Revolution Opera: ‘when you are singing your thoughts are improvising, it is not quite the same as talking. The idea is formulated in a different way. Its rhythm is based on the outside logic. Thus, sometimes a thing that would never come out in a prosaic statement slips past lips spontaneously.’

Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun, Poland 6.11.2010–3.01.2011

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Works in the Exhibition: 11 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 60.

Vycheslav Akhunov, 1m 2 , installation, 2007 Victor Alimpiev and Marian Zhunin, Ode, video, 2001 Sergey Bratkov, Kuzminki, video, 2002 Collective Actions, video documentation of Lieblich, 1976; The Balloon, 1977; The Slogan, 1978 Hamlet Hovsepian, Yawning, video, 1975; Untitled, video, 1976 Ilya Kabakov, In the Closet, installation, 1998 Ilya Kabakov and Emilia Kanevsky, August 20th, 1968, installation, 2000 Rustam Khalfin, Pulota (reconstruction by Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev in 2010) Sergey Maslov, Survival Instruction for Citizens of the Former USSR, 1998 (reconstruction by Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev in 2005) Andrey Monastyrski, The Circle of CA, installation, 1996 Anatoly Osmolovsky, Slogans, installation, 2003 Koka Ramishvili, Change, video, 2005; War from my Window, photographs, 1991

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colophon This book is published on the initiative of Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders (CAHF) and it is published on the occasion of the series of exhibitions Europe at Large, which the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) undertook together with Viktor Misiano and of the exhibition The Melancholy of Resistance in Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Torun, with artworks from the collection of M HKA

Photography Ulan Djaparov, Yelena Vorobyeva & Viktor Vorobyev (p. 58–59), Koka Ramishvili (p. 94–95), Wojciech Olech (p. 123–124, 126–127, 132–135), Almagul Menlibayeva (p. 116–119), Sergey Bratkov (p. 71, 74), A4A vzw (p. 41, 50, 60, 64–67, 68), Syb’l. S. – Pictures (p. 44), Andrey Monastyrski (p. 35), Christine Lambrechts (p. 40) all other photos by Christine Clinckx

Exhibition

Design Sara De Bondt studio

Exhibition curators Europe at Large Viktor Misiano and Bart De Baere assisted by Maja Lozic

Printed by Cassochrome

Exhibition curators The Melancholy of Resistance Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera

Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp M HKA

Publication

Managing director Eric Krols

Concept Bart De Baere Authors Bart De Baere, Viktor Misiano, Daniel Muzyczuk, Agnieszka Pindera, Dieter Roelstraete, Leen De Backer, Maja Lozic Editor Leen De Backer Copy editors Leen De Backer, Bart De Baere, Sophie Gregoir, Angela Johnston, Dieter Roelstraete, Marnix Rummens, Steven Tallon Translations Thomas Campbell, Kate Mayne, Steven Tallon, Dieter Roelstraete Image editor Leen De Backer

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General director Bart De Baere

Team Jurgen Addiers, Raoul Amelinckx, Katrien Batens, Maya Beyns, Carine Bocklandt, Lahbib Boumedmed, Leen Bosch, Els Brans, Myriam Caals, Cecilia Casariego, Tom Ceelen, Ann Ceulemans, Celina Claeys, Christine Clinckx, Ingeborg Coeck, Jerina Colyn, Rita Compère, Leen De Backer, Martine Delzenne, Jasper De Pagie, Jolinde Deprez, Jan De Vree, Liliane Dewachter, Gustaaf Dierckx, Sophie Gregoir, Sabine Herrygers, Ria Hermans, Marianne Hommersom, Joris Kestens, Nico Coppe, Anders Kreuger, Renild Krols, Christine Lambrechts, Hughe Lanoote, Sarah Lauwers, Ben Lecock, Viviane Liekens, Maja Lozic, Kristof Michiels, Lisa Patoor, Ghislaine Peeters, Joost Peeters, Anne-Marie Poels, Aïcha Rafik, Ruth Renders, Eline Rodiers, Dieter Roelstraete, Gustaaf Rombouts, Marnix Rummens, Rita Scheppers, Katleen Schueremans, Leen Thielemans, Georges Uittenhout, Jos Van Den Bergh, Chris Van den Broeck, Ria Van den Broeck, Frank Van der Kinderen, Annelies Van de Vyver, Willy Van Gils, Lut Van Nooten, Roel Van Nunen, Gerda Van Paemele, Lutgarde Van Renterghem, Annemie Van Roey, Kris Van Treeck, Sofie Vermeiren, Nine Verschueren, Thomas Weynants, Magda Weyns, Kathleen Weyts, Hans Willemse, Yolande Wintmolders, Abdel Ziani

Special thanks to Het Agentschap Beeldende kunst en Erfgoed, Jos Van Rillaer, Vladimir Berschader, Vladimir Ovcharenko (Regina Art Gallery), Teresa Mavica, Laura Bulian (Impronte Contemporary Art), Arnold Katzen (Priska C. Juschka Fine Art), Anrey Prigov and Nadezhda Bourova, Alexander Lavrentiev, Yelena Vorobyeva en Viktor Vorobyev, Andrey Monastyrski, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Victor Alimpiev & Marian Zhunin, Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kanevsky, Vadim Fishkin & Yuri Leiderman, Konstantin Zvezdochotov, Oleg Kulik, Vlad Monroe, Kerim Ragimov, Sergey Bratkov, Said Atabekov, Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev, Yerbossin Meldibekov, Koka Ramishvili, Hamlet Hovsepian, Vyacheslav Akhunov, Azat Sargasyan, Babi Badalov, Julia Thikonova, Almagul Menlibayeva M HKA is an initiative of the Flemish Community and supported by the Province of Antwerp, the City of Antwerp, The National Lottery, Klara, Akzo Nobel, and Decorative Coatings-Levis

Yerbossyn Meldibekov, Mutation, 2009

Babi Azat Vyacheslav Rustam Almagul Badalov Sargsyan Akhunov Khalfin Menlibayeva & Julia Thikonova

Anatoly Varvara Alexander Andrey Stepanova Rodchenko Monastyrski Osmolovsky

During the past decade the M HKA has paid enduring attention to that part of Europe that was excluded from the reconstruction of Europe after 1989; the former Soviet Union. This attention was recently spread up to its boundaries, with a focus on the artistic key positions from Central Asia and the Caucasus, now ‘somewhere behind Russia’. Both for the exhibition Werkelijkheidshorizonten (Horizons of Reality) — the first major project in the M HKA regarding this ‘greater Europe’ that includes the former SovietUnion — and for the recent projects, Europe at Large, the museum collaborated with the Russian-Italian curator and theoretician Viktor Misiano. The collection that resulted from this focus is presented in this publication. It is contextualised by two innovative essays. Misiano concentrates on recent developments and analyses how they process the historical trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera, two young Polish curators, in the second essay argue for their selection out of the collection for The Melancholy of Resistance at the Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Torun, Poland, the third exhibition at CoCA in a series on collection policies, after Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and Daros Latinamerica The CoCA — project was initiated from the idea of ‘kommunalka’, in which, at the time of the USSR, several families lived together. The Melancholy of Resistance is the title of the book on which the film Werckmeister Harmóniák by Béla Tarr is based. It led Muzyczuk and Pindera to their key focus: cohesion of and within diversity. M HKA made this book on invitation by Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders (CAHF), the organisation of museums of contemporary art in Flanders, which, along with the M HKA, includes the Middelheimmuseum, S.M.A.K. and Mu.ZEE.

Gulnara Kasmalieva & Hamlet Koka Yerbossyn Muratbek Hovsepian Ramishvili Meldibekov Djumaliev