Elena Sorokina

2011-12-14T03:03:00.000-08:00

Zero Gravity Revolt. Exhibition in Progress

Specters of Collectivism

2011-11-29T10:01:00.001-08:00

Specters of Collectivism: A Conversation between Gregory Sholette and Elena Sorokina

(NYC/MOSCOW: 2006)

ES: In your essay Interventionism and the historical uncanny: Or; can there be revolutionary art without the

revolution written for the catalog, "The Interventionists…" * you explicitly quote some examples of the Russian

avantgarde, specifically constructivism, which is one of the founding movements for the theories of modernism. What

were your reasons for basing your reflections on this specific works?

GS: I was literally pulled in this direction Elena. But only after first attempting to apply the standard formula of

generational succession to these artists. You know, the usual approach is to argue that the aesthetic insights of the last

generation, my generation in this case, are challenged or expanded upon by the next. It just did not work in the case of

the interventionists because there had been a historical break of sorts sometime in the 1990s. This is how it seemed to

me: The critical art produced roughly between 1968 and 1989 was focused primarily on the demystification of ideology by making hidden political and economic systems transparent through pedagogical, sometimes didactic means. Think of institutional critique or the deconstruction of representation or even some forms of conceptual, political art such as the work of Hans Haacke or Martha Rosler. By contrast, the so-called interventionist artist today has no allergic reaction to using the tools provided by the mass media or appropriating what Debord classically called “the spectacle.” The interventionist designs and constructs tools and tactics for acting in the world from freeware and web platforms to portable shelters and activist “fashions.” These apparatus enable others to live resistance and to participate in the intervention. And this pragmatic, tool-making sensibility is one of three factors that led me towards the comparison between today’s artists and the Soviet avant-garde, the Constructivists, Productivists and Engineerists in particular. Second, perhaps most strikingly, the Soviet artists of the 1920s and early 1930s operated under increasingly hegemonic conditions of collectivized, socio-economic production, and the same totalizing development is true today, only the economic conditions are those of global capitalism. Finally, both the classical Soviet avant-garde and today’s interventionist reveal a tendency to work together in collectives and groups. Although this last similarity is not unusual in itself for after all many artists’ groups have emerged between 68 and today, there is something about the form that collectivism currently takes that is different from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80s in so far as it reflects not so much an ideological principle, but an emphasis on pragmatic and or tactical modes of production that is like an uncanny inversion of the Russian avant-garde, but also exactly what one would expect to emerge from within a world-culture dominated by deregulated markets and entrepreneurialism.

ES: But how far can we compare the political situation in which the Russian avant-garde worked and today's situation?

The Russian avant-garde, especially at the beginning of the 1917 revolution, fully supported the new political power,

even in it's most problematic expressions, such as the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Today, artists speak instead about resistance, exodus, alternatives and marginality. There is no desire to align with the existing power structures, nor is there any conceivable way for an artist to do so even if it was desired.

GS: The comparison I made is not ideological, but economic and structural. Just as a state-collectivist model came to

dominate production in post-revolutionary Russia, state-sponsored capitalism dominates all forms of production today, but at the global level. This is why I made it a point in my essay to discuss these specific historical similarities under the figure of unheimlich, which I use in the Freudian sense of a phenomenon that is at once strange and familiar, Like the startled terror of catching one’s own Reflection in a semi-dark room and thinking for an instant that it is an intruder. Today's activist art and Constructivism are in other words not a logical extension of one another, but a distorted, inverted image of one other. Let me be more precise. Whereas the Constructivists and other Soviet avant-garde artists developed architectural and design concepts dedicated to rationalized ideas of industrial production that were then spreading to all sectors of post-revolutionary society, today's interventionist artist by contrast creates pragmatic designs and cunning incursions aimed at interfering with the near-global hegemony of irrational, capitalist production. In other words, two practices that are expressively dissimilar, but structurally analogous.

In terms of how artists do or do not align themselves with the established power, or what they say about their

relationship to institutional authority, it is important to acknowledge that historical circumstances shape cultural

practices far more so than desire or good intentions. That is true nowadays just as it was in the years after 1917. In other

words, while I am an unwavering believer in the necessity of artists to struggle and resist repression and injustice I am

also the first to admit that market forces and the culture of entrepreneurship so dominate our social horizon today that

even interventionists cannot fully escape the gravitational pull.

ES: let us expand on the notions of collective work, which obviously relates to diverse interventionist

practices. You describe modes of organization of interventionists using notions such as informal groups, or

cells. These significantly differ from "artists movements", which were flourishing in the beginning of the

century. Modernity was full of "isms", artistic movements or groups: that provided theoretical platforms for

artists and subsequently allowed a categorization of individual artistic practices. Moreover, modernity was

obsessed with the individuality of the artist. However, the Russian avant-garde actually took collectivism

seriously – you might say it created an ideology of collectivity of sorts.

GS: An ideology of collectivity? Nicely put. And perhaps that is what sets the constructivists apart from the

collectivisms of other modernist movements? I mean in so far as Italian Futurism, Surrealism, or even Dadaism sought

liberation through nationalism, or libidinal release, or an antithesis to culture itself? Whereas, by contrast, the Russian

avant-garde self-consciously organized around collective production? Still, doesn’t an ideology of collectivity makes

transparent what lies beneath all constructions of the social, including those we take as axiomatic? I mean by this the

figure of a collective body, be it the tribe, the god, the nation, ‘we the people,’ or even collective labor. And certainly,

collectivism has never been so deeply embedded in daily life as it is now, in the era of homo consumptionist, and yet so

invisibly? Just think of the way corporate marketers anticipate your so-called “individual” lifestyle based on your zip

code, personal statistics, and credit card history. In other words, a certain “blind” collectivization has already become

routine. Perhaps what is called for in response is your ideology of collectivism? Only this time carried out without

treating the state, or The Party, as the absolute regulator? I do think something like that is pre-figured in the work of

certain interventionists. The question now is how to move this model from the cultural to the productive sphere. And

that will never happen just because artists will it so.

ES: Yet, with regard to interventionist practices, it seems to me that the contemporary notion of collectivity,

as well as contemporary art "collectives," are very different from their predecessors.

GS: Yes and no. The new interventionists do indeed resemble older organizational forms of collectivism. However, the

resemblance is a type of performance. Unlike early 20th century collectives there is no strong ideology grounding them, no unified utopian concept inspiring them. Organizationally speaking these artists groups are in fact plastic, pluralistic and informal. They function every bit as peripatetically as any other 21st Century creative enterprise. This is the second point I tried to bring out in the essay. To put it another way, if we agree that the objective of modernism was always in the last analysis transcendent ––either by invoking grand collective aspirations such as the creation of an entirely new society, or the construction of technological utopias, or by collectively rejecting such goals through the celebration of the unconscious of primitivism ---- then by contrast, contemporary collectivism is unified only by its invocation of collectivism as a type of pragmatic, group activity. Beneath this performance lies a certain healthy skepticism towards group identity itself. The Critical Art Ensemble puts it succinctly when they insist “cellular collective construction” produces “solidarity through difference.” iThat may be why we discover an entire taxonomy of organizational forms amongst interventionist artists today from bogus businesses to pseudo-bureaucracies to mock research centers and institutes including, the Center For Tactical Magic; Bitter Nigger Inc.; The Church Of Stop Shopping; Bureau Of Inverse Technology; Carbon Defense League. The Spanish-based group YoMango is itself a corporate brand or counter-brand that offers a line of clothes, accessories, and life-style tactics designed to liberate private property for collective rather than personal consumption, and The Yes Men have gone so far as to incarnate themselves as business executives and management consultants.

ES: But why this conscious play with institutional signification? The differences between the notion of collective and

institution are very significant, I am thinking of the hierarchical organization typical of any institution, for example.

GS: Fredric Jameson once described post-modernist appropriation as surrealism without the unconscious. Certainly it is fair to say that post-war artistic practice is especially good at impersonation and mimicry. So if we recall Lubov’

Popova words in 1921 that “as a result of the social and political conditions organization has become the objective of

the new synthesis,” then we might respond that the contemporary interventionist artist is similarly focused on the

aesthetics of organizing, except today this takes the form of adaptive mimicry or camouflage. But note that many of

these assorted organizational signifiers have an odd, archaic ring to them. They sound strange, like something left over

from another age before to the advent of neo-liberalism, normalization, and enterprise culture. In other words, they seem like creatures form a prehistoric continent still operating by the rules of what Adorno termed administered culture. I find that interesting, especially in light of the fact that the contemporary interventionist is so at home in the world produced by globalization.

ES: Let us return to the interventionists and talk about a definition of this phenomenon. Since the term has

been coined, and, let's say, popularized in your exhibition, a lot of artists started to call "interventions" what

they otherwise would call "actions in public spaces" or "performances". What is your definition, do you want

to think about it at all, or, rather, would you like to leave it completely open?

GS: Nato Thompson applied the term Interventionists to his exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary

Art (Mass MoCA) in 2004. Naturally the catalog for that exhibition retains the title. That is the short history of how I

come to use the term. As to its logic, of course it has the failings of any constructed category to the extent that it labels a diverse group of practices under one concept or seeks to separate some types of art making from other types. Where I do find it useful however, is the way this term succinctly underscores a tendency that cuts across a range of publicly

situated art practices, including those you mention above. In short, this tendency involves the design and release into

everyday life of an assortment of objects, actions, and information systems that are first and foremost pragmatically

tactical in their social and political intent, while only secondarily concerned with artistic or aesthetic categories if at all. Another term applied to some of this work is of course tactical media. According to the Critical Art Ensemble tactical media is any Do It Yourself, anti-authoritarian intervention that is “situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating.” It may seem a minor distinction, but by focusing on the organizational and historical tendencies of such work, rather than particular procedures, a broader cultural trend comes into view. In other words, all tactical media may be interventionist, but all interventionists are not necessarily using tactical media. For example the interventions of performance artist Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping are situational, but not self-terminating in so far as his public persona, his “church” and choir, are institutions in their own right. This maybe a type of tactical institutionalism if you like, but it nonetheless contrasts strikingly with the cellular form of a group like CAE.

ES: How visible are these practices, according to you, and who historicises them? Usually, institutions are in change of art history, but most of the interventionist projects challenge institutions in an unprecedented manner. Some groups still give the institutional space a chance, trusting it as a “legally protected” alternative platform of free speech and expression, however, they prefer to work in the "real world". Here I would agree with you, the interventionists' desire to intervene into life and change things, as well as their indifference towards definitions of art and appreciation of "use value" does relate these practices to those of Constructivists and other groups of the Russian avant- garde.

GS: It is worth adding there are no proper histories of this type of work because its remnants tend to wind up archived in file cabinets, or today, on internet websites. In that sense we should think of these artists and art groups as constituting an artistic shadow zone, or what I have elsewhere described as a species of creative dark matter: that enormous mass of cultural activity that is only minimally visible within the mainstream art world, but whose gravitational force affects mainstream cultural institutions powerfully, if invisibly, much in the way an unseen cosmic dark matter holds together the known universe. This is why I wrote how odd it is that “current historical circumstances are exactly opposite those surrounding the Soviet Avant-Garde, and yet simultaneously analogous in so far as the private interests of capital permeate the entire fabric of society now to the same degree collective ideals once saturated Soviet culture.” We live in a comparatively smooth-surfaced, socio-economic environment today and I would suggest that critical, interventionist artists are like political structures without politics. That is to say, they perform collective resistance as a type of cultural politics by constituting a facsimile or model of what a radical, political collectivity might look like if one were to become possible. The horizon of what is possible has been drawn in around market interests. Academia is one of the last arenas where the type of administered, socialized public institutions still operate (the art world is already lost inside enterprise culture). Yet even universities are under terrific pressure to privatize learning by turning out commercially useful cultural producers. The battle lines are quite clear. Recent actions in France and the election of left-leaning governments in South America indicate that a better world is both desired as well as worth fighting for. It will be up to artists to decide how they choose to take part in that struggle.

* Thompson, Nato and Gregory Sholette (editors). The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of

Everyday Life. 155 pp., roughly 100 color plates. 4to, cloth. North Adams, MASS MoCA Publications in association with

Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 2004.

Elena Sorokina is a New York-based curator and writer. She received her Masters degree in art history in Germany,

and did the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Recently she curated the shows

Crude Oil Paintings at White Columns and Enemy Image at Momenta Art, both in New York. Her show Contested

Spaces in Post-Soviet Art, took place at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery. Sorokina has been writing for several European

publications and contributed to Artforum and Moscow Art Magazine.

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based sculptor and multi-media artist, a writer, and founding member of two public

art collectives: Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D, 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000). He

is currently co-editing the book Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 with Blake

Stimson for (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and he is co-editor of The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the

Creative Disruption of Everyday Life with Nato Thompson (MASS MoCA & MIT, 2004).

Uninhabited Spaces of Democracy

2011-11-29T07:06:00.001-08:00

Uninhabited Spaces of Democracy

Moscow/New York, 2006

Ekaterina Degot/Elena Sorokina

Elena Sorokina (ES): Lefebvre argued that a politics of space exists since space is essentially a political category. The actionism of the 90s completely fits this mode: many artists used public spaces both as sites and as political commentary. Anatoly Osmolovsky, for example, often performed his actions in places that came with a certain historical and ideological baggage-on Red Square, or outside the Russian parliament building; his actions thus desacralized both old Soviet and new "democratic" spaces. What kinds of spatial commentaries are being made in contemporary Russian art? What forms of artistic reflection on post-Soviet space can we point to? Thanks to Ilya Kabakov, for example, the communal apartment, which had become a symbol of Soviet claustrophobia, is now a contemporary art icon of Soviet space, while the actions of Osmolovsky I've mentioned delineate an absolutely contrary method of using space and working with it. What's happening nowadays?

Ekaterina Degot (ED): In their work with the communist heritage artists today really have been evolving from recognizing it as a collection of symbols and material artifacts (which, of course, applies to the antiques market as well)-this is how the Sots artists of the 70s and 80s saw the Soviet Union-towards imagining it as a particular type of space. The transitional stage was the period when artists focused on monuments. In the art of the early 90s we find many heroic-comic attempts on the part of artists to erect themselves on the sites of absent or discredited monuments. Osmolovsky climbed onto the shoulders of the enormous monument to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (thus returning, as it were, the revolutionary impulse to this martyr of the avant-garde, who had been illegally "appropriated" by Stalinism); and he secretly made his way onto the roof of the Lenin Mausoleum, where Stalin and Brezhnev had once stood. Alexander Brenner went to the spot where a monument to KGB patron saint Felix Dzherzinsky had been removed from and attempted to yell out to passersby, "Citizens, I'm your new commercial director!" An important detail in this last case was the fact that you can't get close to the place where the monument was without violating traffic rules (and without risking your life-the traffic around the square is usually heavy).

All these actions involved the abandoned "apex" of a space understood hierarchically, as a pyramid of power. This corresponded to the traditional view of the USSR as an antidemocratic tyranny that functioned by means of ideological control. That's how people thought in the early 90s, when it seemed that Russia was headed towards greater democracy than had existed in the USSR.

At the beginning of the new century, however, it became clear that, on the contrary, Russia was moving away from the potential for democracy that had been planted in the Soviet Union. This potential was actualized precisely in the 60s and 70s in the form of a powerful grass-roots activism that was directed not towards the building the state, as Lenin had conceived it, but against this state (samizdat culture, unofficial culture, the dissident movement). Nowadays, artists, thinkers, and, to a great degree, ordinary citizens identify the Soviet past not only with the state, but also with this abandoned social principle. And in art it is space that serves as the symbol of this principle.

ES: It seems to me that the projects in the public space of such young artists as the Novosibirsk group CAT or the Kiev group REP are to a certain degree reactions to the problems you've described. Their interventions in today's "democratic" demonstrations not only appropriate the collective space of such demonstrations in another (non-ideological) way, but they also underscore the carnivalesque spirit of such events and thus respond in some way to the abrupt shift in status of social space. What particular projects did you have in mind?

ED: From the outset communist art was conceived as an art of gigantic public spaces. The specifically communist character of these spaces is recognizable even today, when all you find there is the wind blowing empty plastic Coke bottles between the enormous public buildings from that era-music academies, libraries, palaces of labor and culture. Simultaneously exposed on all sides, this communist space was meant to dialectically unite within itself two vectors: the horizontal dimension of egalitarian social interaction ("brotherhood") and the vertical dimension of a powerful social dynamic ("flight").

In practice, "brotherhood" and "flight"-in other words, friendship and career (upward mobility)-proved incompatible. The extroverted, radically open (international) character of Soviet space also turned out to be a utopia. But it's exactly this utopia that artists are engaging with now. They acutely experience its absence not only in the antidemocratic and closed Russia of today, but also in the globalized world, where democratism and openness often turn out to be their contraries. For example, working with those Soviet spaces of democracy that never were wholly inhabited, the group What Is to Be Done, in Petersburg, the hometown of the "betrayed proletarian revolution," travels to traditional working-class districts, where they hit the streets wearing signboards bearing quotations from Brecht (the performance Angry Sandwich People, or The Praise of Dialectics). The Moscow video artist Liudmila Gorlova (in Happy End) shoots weddings that are celebrated these days right on the street, on an enormous square, near Moscow University, that has stood empty for many years.

Olga Chernysheva's installation Panorama deals with the dramatic collapse of the integral space of human relationships. The pictures incorporated in the installation refer to the Cinepanorama, a well-known Soviet movie theater in which the old "circorama" (cycloramic) multi-projector technology, first employed by Disney in 1957, was technically and conceptually perfected, in 1959. (Themes of brotherhood and friendship were central to the Soviet movies made specially for this cinema.) It's telling that this economically inefficient technology (half the footage is "wasted": people don't have eyes in the backs of their heads) was left undeveloped in the "society of the spectacle," where it was soon ousted by the super-spectacular, single-projector IMAX technology. In "unspectacular" communist society, meanwhile, where art was oriented more towards a integrated, spatialized sense of the collective than towards the individual's line of sight, circorama flourished for quite a long time. Based on the principle "all for one and one for all," this system of human relations, which survived in Soviet movies of the 60s, where we see a cult of disinterested friendship and non-competitive amateur sports, is recreated in Dmitry Gutov's installations-for example, in the volleyball net and shuttlecocks of Smash!

ES: I want to try and outline the terms "post-Soviet" and "post-communist" art. The inflation of national identities on the art market has led to the search for new models of representation. The active generation, development, and marketing of national identities functioned like outsourcing: western technologies for constructing national identities were incorporated at the local level; the cheap labor force of "developing countries" manufactured the identities; and then the finished products were sold on the western art market. As you correctly note in one of your articles, Soviet ideology was universal. That's why the post-Soviet "nationalization" of art and its subdivision into national sub-components is a simplification of an extremely complicated situation.

ED: In fact, artists who grew up in a country that had declared an end to ethnic divisions (even if this declaration was only partly fulfilled) experience the politics of national identity as forcible ethnicization. In this sense, the category of space, of place, is opposed to the category of "roots," of "ethnic traditions"-you might say that space doesn't have a fatherland. This, in part, is the meaning of the outer space motif in Soviet art and of the work by Kabakov you've alluded to, The Man Who Flew into Space. But while Soviet unofficial art worked with space as a profoundly personal, intimate category (even if the space in question was outer space), post-Soviet artists see space as social. This is exactly why the privatization of social space-former Soviet space-no longer elicits a positive reaction from contemporary Russian artists. They no longer identify with the process the way they did in the early 90s, when you subjectively staked your personal claim on a monument by climbing onto it. Olga Chernysheva's photo series Plots can be read as gloomy prophecy of the social apartheid that's come into being right before our very eyes: only the sky resists this regression and remains common property.

ES: In Chernysheva's Plots I'm intrigued as well by the image of the border, which is what marks the transformation of space into territory. The artist's meditation on the theme of "guarding the borders" of plots of bare land takes on an especially interesting overtone when we relate it to the law on private ownership of land, passed in 2001. This law violated one of the central taboos of the Soviet age: "Land to the peasants!" was one of the main slogans of the Revolution, and the abolition of private ownership of land was Lenin's first decree after victory in 1917. The reintroduction of private ownership after a hiatus of eighty years means that the problem of guarding property-one of the main problems of any capitalist society-becomes quite acute. In Russia, this takes on rather extravagant forms: the paratrooper toting a machine gun at the entrance to a supermarket, or the metal detector at the front door of a gallery. The ornate fences of barbed wire, tin sheeting, and other makeshift material that Chernysheva has photographed visualize just these attempts to draw boundaries around private property and to protect that property with all one's might-even though the height of the fences and their homemade look are no guarantee of real effectiveness, but rather are meant to scare people away.

At the same time that Chernysheva turns to the image of former state land which has been subdivided into plots, the artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djoumaliev discuss post-Soviet territory, whose new borders create the potential for conflict between the former "brother republics." In their work Shadows, the artists draw on the facts of a real armed clash on the Kyrgyzstan border in order to comment on the tense atmosphere along the artificial national frontiers of post-Soviet Central Asia, which the Soviet authorities drew up without any consideration of cultural or ethnic realities. Continuing your metaphor, we can say that here as well it is only the sky, which looks down on the shadows and bodies of the dead, remains outside the logic of territorial redistribution and conflict.

Ekaterina Degot is an art critic and curator, based in Moscow

Elena Sorokina is independent writer and curator, based in New York

ZERO GRAVITY REVOLT

2011-11-29T06:57:00.001-08:00

ZERO GRAVITY REVOLT

--------------------------

Nikolay Oleynikov (Chto Delat and more)

in collaboration with Belgium-based artists and dancers

a learning mural curated by Elena Sorokina

--------------------------

Invited guests: choreographer ULA SICKLE, artists Rossella Biscotti, Adela Jusic and Lana Cmajcanin, philosopher Oxana Timofeeva, film-programme curator Ils Huygens and more (TBA)

=============

In early Soviet science fiction, revolutions happened all over the Solar system - on Mars, on the moon, and of course on Earth. Full of vivid social imagination, its authors described cosmic class struggles and social upheavals booming in space - forceful and impetuous. The labor of revolution was, however, supposed to as the building blocks to create the new future conditions of labor. And here the revolutionary dynamics often got stuck on a single question: How will future humanity work? Should it work at all? The visionary writer Andrey Platonov proposed several contradictory options. In his novel Foundation Pit, the protagonists work to point of total exhaustion. In Chevengur, on the contrary, they stop working altogether as a programmatic and radical gesture. Finally, in Juvenile Sea, they become ceaselessly inventive, displaying an exuberant working creativity. Many writers of the 1920-30s hesitated between the abolition of labor, its extreme technologization, and its hyper-acceleration or a total creativisation. The text "In one thousand years," written in 1927, opts for a creative non-labor and describes the inhabitants of the future as dancing, singing, painting creatures, who also regularly engage in unassisted flight. Like art, levitation and flight are considered a creative pastime that keeps the new humanity busy. All these activities - more or less virtuosic but decidedly unalienated - can be read as pure self-expression or cultural dissemination. What they don't accommodate - and the author is absolutely certain about it - is labor. Neither painting, nor dance, nor levitation contain any "work". This opinion was disputed by some: levitation as labor was most prominently theorized by Tsiolkovsky, a great scientist but also a sci-fi writer. In his novels, people can very well enjoy the low gravity on the moon while working on their research assignments. For Tsiolkovsky, occupation of space by means of levitation is result of engineering labor and scientific work. All these observations bring us to the central question of our project: How can we see the relation between work and levitation today, in the times of our precarious present and the prevailing conditions of groundlessness? Analyzing different types of labor as they were depicted in early Soviet sci-fi, we will investigate possible links between the levitating proletariat and today's groundless precariat, which is trying to gain some leverage in occupying space and spaces. Keeping in mind Google Earth and surveillance technologies, we will try to imagine ourselves levitating while working. Finally, we will take this as opportunity to look back to at the role-models of the "working artist", "managing artist" and the "artist trying not to work" and ultimately, we will ask how artistic labour today resonates with these ideas.

Method

About three years ago Oleynikov initiated a series of projects grounded in collective creative living. Since then, bringing together practitioners from different fields and organizing temporary communities in constant dialogue has become one of the essential elements of his artistic practice. This initiative was elaborated and developed in activities of the group Chto Delat? and supported by several other collectives and realized in a forms of experimental non-stop seminars, congresses-communes or learning plays which have been recently presented at the ICA in London, Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, at SMART and SCOR in Amsterdam, among others.

For "Zero Gravity Revolt" the artist and curator will conceive a specific temporality for the upcoming learning mural. The process will take 15 days, from the first brainstorming sessions to its actual "visible" result. This period of time will be filled with testing the ground, enacting the characters to be featured (flying proletariat as much as levitating bankers), training in levitation, screenings, talks, and informal exchanges. All this will result in collective writing of a program for the mural, which might take a fictional form, and its ultimate completion.

Expected results of the project

On December 15th 2011, at the opening of the show, the spectator can discover the following. There is a high degree of probability, that a mural, executed by all the participants of the project, will stand. It is not impossible that a performative action will be presented. A curatorial opening speech has a serious potential to take place. And depending on the outcome of discussions, there might be a screening of a film, introduced by an artist. Finally, it is almost certain, that a guided tour will be given by the artists and/or curator and the final press-release written for the occasion.

Artist

Nikolay Oleynikov (1976) is a Moscow based artist and activist, member of Chto Delat?, editor for Chto Delat? newspaper, member of editorial board of Moscow Art Magazine, co-founder of the Learning Film Group, and May Congress of Creative Workers. Known for his didactic murals and graphic works within the tradition of the Soviet monumental school, comics, surrealist-like imaginary and punk culture. Represented worldwide by his solo projects as well as with number of collective activities, Oleynikov has had numerous international shows including Welling School, London, State Tretyakov Gallery and Paperworks Gallery, Moscow. His work has also been shown at the Fargfabriken, Stockholm; Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – MAM/ARC, Paris; Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella; X BALTIC TRIENNALE in Vilnius

Text by curator Elena Sorokina

Starring Abramovic, Playing Herself

2011-11-29T06:48:00.001-08:00

Manifesta Journal, N11

Starring Abramovic, Playing Herself

Marina Abramović: The Artist is present

Organizes by Klaus Biesenbach

MoMA, New York

March 14 – May 31, 2010

Text by Elena Sorokina

Reading the press releases of exhibitions today, one is struck by a certain shift of language: the PR jargon seems to be quite contaminated by theatrical vocabulary. Instead of “investigating” or “reflecting” on something, exhibitions today “stage” or “orchestrate” several “acts” while being installed in sets or mise en scènes, where curtains replace partition walls. The exhibitions employing this vogue terminology sometimes do try to enact issues in a more or less theatrical fashion, but very often this vocabulary doesn’t translate into any kind of “theatricality” in the presentation of works. Today’s proliferation of “live art” in exhibitions has been duly acknowledged in regard to the production, but what happens to the expositional logic when “live art” is integrated into the exhibition spaces?

The logic of display and the terms and conditions of including “live art” in exhibitions are shifting, and the diverse ways of intertwining the spatial and the temporal are being tested. Sometimes the live-art additions simply take on a festival model, with a schedule of events taking place consecutively. Other models combine some installation work on display—which may or may not stand for art, “contain” art or be art—and live events. But the main field of experimentation is the hybrid model, meaning the intertwining of “live” elements and components with the exhibition’s own temporality and experience of time. In such hybrid cases, the objects in space either stand for themselves, sometimes referring to some spirit of performance, or need to be “activated” by performances. In this context, Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at the MoMA in New York, “The Artist is Present,” practically catalogued the possibilities for performances’ display and enactment, with photo and video documentation, installations, archival texts, live performances by herself and “re-performances,” as Abramovic calls them, by the young interpreters she trained, all co-existing in the space of the museum exhibition.

“Life” was included, or displayed, on the MoMA’s 6th floor through the motionless bodies of performers placed alongside videos and objects. The five live works, ephemeral and temporary by initial conception, occupied the space in a permanent manner, installation-like. The fact that other people were re-performing Abramovic’s work makes the discussions turn around the degree of authenticity of these performances and their art-historical correctness. Moreover, however, we could also ask what model of an “exhibition” is created by this specific display. Of course, the artist is present—Marina Abramovic herself sat through an epic endurance piece in the MoMA’s atrium—but who is exhibited? And what kind of “presence” does the entire show generate? In the first place, it insists on a permanent presence. In addition to the performers, who made five live works available for contemplation non-stop during the museum’s opening hours, Abramovic performed her piece The Artist is Present (2010)—every day, during museum hours, for the run of her show—her longest performance to date. The spectators were invited to sit across from the artist and look into her eyes, thus acknowledging her and their own “presence.” Some stayed just for a couple of minutes; others remained for long hours.

The permanent presence of the human body in the exhibition space has a number of historical precedents, one of them performed by Abramovic herself. In The House with the Ocean View (2002–2003), she lived in the Sean Kelley Gallery for twelve days on permanent display. This piece is included in the MoMA retrospective, but only as an installation, while Abramovic herself is “permanently present” in her new piece. Among younger artists, the most obvious example of permanent presence would be Tino Sehgal, whose pieces roll continuously during the opening times of his shows. Different in nature and structure from Abramovic’s work, Sehgal’s pieces guarantee the permanent presence without any pain, or extreme endurance, involved: his interpreters work in shifts and there is no specific content related to pain or endurance—at least not yet articulated by Sehgal. We could say that the retrospective of Abramovic at the MoMA used the idea of permanent presence “à la Sehgal,” with performers working in shifts to guarantee the continuous run of the live pieces. The specific subjective temporality related to endurance—one of the constitutive elements of the five live pieces re-performed in the show—evidently got lost, replaced by “endurance on schedule” and generating a potentially endless loop of performances.

The main principle of the organization of this permanent presence was, notably, the complete immobility of the performer. Of all performances made by Abramovic during the years of her career, only those entailing immobility were re-performed at the MoMA. They were all static—quite literally motionless and speechless. This was an obvious choice the museum and the artist made to facilitate the permanence and simultaneity of several re-performances in the show: the immobility of interpreters makes the space between the re-performing bodies and the public clearly defined, excluding any possibilities of accidental interactions. In addition, all re-performances happened—or were put on display—in a specific exhibition architecture: a cabin or display case, a structure on the wall or a wall shelf, on which the bodies of interpreters were posed. Imponderabilia (1977/2010)—two nude performers facing each other in a doorway, obliging viewers to squeeze between them to pass through—underwent perhaps the most notable modifications caused by display. The bodies were safely inscribed into the exhibition architecture between two partition walls in the back of the first space, building a passage between two different spaces of the show. Unlike in the original performance in which the “fleshy” doorway blocked the museum’s main entrance, MOMA's "Imponderabilia" represented just an additional alternative passage. The spectator’s choice was therefore not the original “who to face when passing” but actually “to pass or not to pass.”

All of the re-performed pieces were lit like exhibition objects and the light was adapted to the surrounding space: spotlights on the bodies in a dim video-saturated environment, such as Nude with Skeleton (2002/2005/2010), or high-contrast light inside the cabin-like structure for Relation in Time (1977/2010) and Point of Contact (1980). This display inside of the cabin-like structures objectified the performances on view, and we can rightfully doubt whether the actual role of interpreters was one of a performing subject or an animated object. A certain playful confusion was (perhaps purposefully) created between what was live and what was not: walking out of the relatively dark space where Nude with Skeleton was displayed, one was immediately stuck by Luminosity (1997/2010) in bright light—a nude young woman, her arms outstretched, sitting on a bicycle seat mounted high on the wall. Casting deep shadows on the wall in front of which the performer appeared to be floating, the illusion of a suspended sculpture was very strong, even if it lasted for just a second.

But what did this rather lifeless presence of life add to the MoMA retrospective? Strangely enough, this specific mise en scène of “life” in a museum didn’t bring together multiple temporalities; rather, it firmly inscribed “life” into a traditional regime of contemplation [with two participatory exceptions: Imponderabilia (1977/2010) and The Artist is Present (2010)]. In spatial terms, the retrospective pursued a classical formula: an immobile “art” and a moving spectator, which could be seen as reproducing the situation of a video installation. The multiple Abramovic interpreters present for the entire duration of the exhibition were working in shifts, as if on a loop. As a result, spectators faced the same choice as if they were watching videos: to go after a glimpse or to continue watching. For some viewers not familiar with Abramovic’s performances, it was not clear what was going to happen next and whether the “living sculptures” would suddenly start moving or doing something. A certain hesitation occurred: is the show some kind of display for a possible “action” of the bodies, or are these bodies part of a tableau vivant? Trying to negotiate between performance in its various manifestations and the models of its display, the retrospective inevitably ends up in a certain regime of theatricality, creating a mise en scène in which the bodies of performers seriously contributed to the dramatization of display. Space as practice for performance art—as defined in the seminal text by Roselee Goldberg—becomes here the spatial mise en scène of performing bodies, deliberately staged.

Lately, since her Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in 2005, it has been clear that Abramovic—outspokenly anti-theatrical at the beginning of her career—theatricalizes performance’s new embodiments, but to what degree? When Chris Burden refused to let Abramovic re-perform his piece as part of Seven Easy Pieces, in which Abramovic reenacted five performances by her peers dating from the 1960s and 1970s, he made circulate the following statement written by Tom Marioni: “The performance art of the early 1970s was concrete. We made one-time sculpture actions. If Mr. Burden’s work were recreated by another artist, it would be turned into theater, one artist playing the role of another.” Although degrees of theatricality could be detected in re-performances at the MoMA, we can’t say that the youth, who were especially trained by the artist to re-perform her works, “played Abramovic.” Rather, lacking Abramovic’s experience and personal history, which provided a psychological and historical “sense” to her pieces, what these young people “performed” was a repertoire of endurance-mediation-concentration for the sake of being on view, exposed and immobile. The spontaneity, immediacy and interaction, a specific and fleeting moment in time, a certain non-repeatable urgency and sense of primary experience—all that was gone, but what remained?

Trying to negotiate multiple temporalities, the retrospective gaze of the MoMA exhibition created a present through re-performing the past—and generating an epic, meticulously constructed present. Under Abramovic’s attentive eye, the show kept this present in full control: no improvisation or uncertainty was allowed and the specific temporality of performance was given a solid, museum-like permanence. If we assume that the present moment stands for the immediacy of the performance, the “retrospective present” of the show, which insisted so much on the idea of permanence, dramatized rather than simply conserved history. Solidifying the ephemeral and theatricalizing the modes of display, the show resurrected the performances into a second life in art history. According to Abramovic’s own statements, the re-performances were made for the sake of saving them for history, and the show clearly demonstrated that theatricalized display has become her strategy for the historicization of performance. Theatricality of display in the exhibition had yet another aspect: the artist’s own presence as a splendid mise en scène. Her epic endurance piece The Artist is Present was played in MoMA’s atrium, where Abramovic, the only “art” in the cathedral-like verticality of the huge space, sat surrounded by an elaborate light-rig and encircled by a line of spectators (among which Sharon Stone and Isabelle Huppert made appearance), waiting for their “moment of presence.” Wearing diva gowns, simultaneously reminiscent of clerical garb, Abramovic’s performance evoked in the critics and commentators of her show the metaphors of self-enshrinement, alluding to a saint and a star at once. It was Abramovic’s theatrical and spectacular official entrance into history and, quite literally, her model of the historicization of the present.

MAPQUEST

2011-11-28T06:45:00.001-08:00

MAPQUEST

September 16 – October 9, 2006

Opening: Saturday, September 16, 5- 7pm

*PS122 Gallery* and *artwurl.org* are pleased to present MAPQUEST, an exhibition of works by Lize Mogel and Dario Azzellini, Daniel Blochwitz, Cartographic Perspectives: Map Art, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Ewen Chardronnet, The Friends of William Blake, Elise Gardella, Ryan

Griffis/Temporary Travel Office, Ashley Hunt, Lasse Lau, Nadxieli Mannello, Sarah Ross, and Gregory Sholette organized by guest curator

Elena Sorokina.

Mapquest brings together work by artists, activists, writers and organizers, involved in experimentation with critical and dissident cartography. The exhibition examines various mapping strategies employed as response to specific social and political issues. Working not unlike investigative journalists, some participants conduct and map in-depth research of themes such as the functioning of private military contractors or recruitment centers. Others design maps as tools, featuring information that can be used to support for social action. In a similar vein they employ mapping strategies to produce alternative knowledge about networks of power and control in urban spaces.

The exhibition will run from September 16 through October 9, 2006. PS122 Gallery is located at 150 1st Avenue, New York.

This is the third annual exhibition to be held at PS122 Gallery organized by artwurl.org, an online cultural quarterly specialized in showcasing conversations between contemporary artists engaged in critical-art production.

This exhibition is made possible through support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Friends of PS122 Gallery and Art in General, New York.

Acknowledgements to Benj Gerdes and Daniel Tucker.

LAWS OF RELATIVITY

2011-11-28T06:43:00.001-08:00

LA LEGGE É RELATIVA PER TUTTI (LAWS OF RELATIVITY)

Curated by Anna Colin and Elena Sorokina

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

23 May - 30 September 2007

Laws of Relativity brings together work that reflects on the tensions between legal and illegal in Italy and abroad. The project sheds light on practices which query the way constitutional laws as well as unwritten rules function, their stability and rightfulness both on the short- and long-term. The relativity -- ensuing from cultural, historical, economical, political and geographical difference -- of the very notions of legality and legitimacy are being put forward for thought and comment in this exhibition. Using film, video, documentary, audio recording, photography, drawing and archival solutions, the works and projects presented -- whether existing or produced specifically for this exhibition -- provide different takes and strategies to address this topic and to navigate the spaces in between legal and illegal.

Some artists opt for a journalistic or sociological approach, such as Elena Nemkova, the silent interviewer of a Russian art dealer who recounts his involvement in crooked businesses up until becoming a full-time gallerist. And while Mario Spada has localised and photographed the delirious villas of detained gangsters which, following their instructions, have been burnt to prevent access, Eugenio Tibaldi has spent some seven years mapping the illegal architecture of Naples' suburbs through primary research. Paolo Pennuti, like the aforementioned artists, approaches his topic -- New Orleans only four months after being hit by Hurricane Katrina -- through the documentary and act of mapping, which he then takes the freedom to reinterpret.

Detachment from the subject under scrutiny is not a rule; some artists contribute their own experience or one they have chosen to make theirs. goldiechiari have made visible some documents related to the two public prosecutor's seizures they have been the subject of. And through their work Legal Support, Alterazioni Video have brought attention to another legal case: one resulting from the material damage demonstrators have caused during their protest in Genova in 2004. Also contesting a governmental decision deemed arbitrary, namely evicting sans-papiers squatters from a building in Rome in 2004, Formazero have been providing support of a structural and diplomatic kind to the group of people affected by this very decision. In all three cases, what is known as legal action is presented as defendable by the artists who dispute its applications.

While operating according to similar incentives -- weighing the juridical against the human - some collective initiatives such as Isola Art Center or Orpheo TV-Telestreet go one step further in their attempt to bring citizens more rights than they think they have. Instituted in Milan in 2002 by critics, curators and artists, Isola Art Center is a project which acts against speculation by developers over the public space, demanding the groups' legitimacy to co-decide on it. And following the 1970's tradition of free radio in Italy, Orpheo TV-Telestreet exercises the Brechtian claim over media as a two-way communication apparatus. For Laws of Relativity, Isola Art Center like Orpheo TV-Telestreet presents works that characterize their approach to artistic action.

Favouring critique to action, Claire Fontaine brings light, literally, to an excess of power: that by which the plaque commemorating Giuseppe Pinelli's death and reading "killed innocent" (written. 'ucciso innocente' in the original text) was replaced for a new one saying "died accidentally", following the order of the Mayor in Milan in 2006. In Flessibilita' Negativa (2006), Annapaula Passarini also approaches questionable decisions and rules. The artist examines the precariousness of current working conditions, as observed in European industries increasingly threatened by outsourcing.

And between all the abovementioned strategies remain less tangible modes of address. Equivocal such as Italo Zuffi's film Rural Faith (2006) (original title. Fede Rustica), whose portrayed interactions suggest uncertainty; metaphorical as in Ana Maria Bresciani's transparent drawings alluding to surveillance, Andrea Salvinos collection of icons of protest and power from political and cinematographic sources, or Armando Lulaj's choice of imagery to represent the porous notions of illegal and legal in a post-communist state like Albania; finally ironical, with Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio's Dreams and Conflicts (2003), a fake pass to access the Venice Biennale, which contests the legitimacies of the artworld or Paolo Chiasera's myth, the Young Dictators' Village, where aspirant but idle "famous dictators", from Idi Amin to Mao, cohabite.

Laws of Relativity will be designed by Lupo&Burtscher, also responsible for the design of the archive compiled by the curators together with Jimena Acosta during their research throughout Italy this spring.

SCENES CENTRALES

2011-11-28T06:24:00.001-08:00

SCENES CENTRALES

TriPostal, Lille, FRANCE

March 14th - June 12th 2009

Abilsait Atabekov, Chto Delat, Danica Dakic, Igor Eskinja, Igor Grubic, Sejla Kameric, Jamshed Kholikov, Elena Kovylina, Gulnara Kasmalieva/Muratbek Djumaliev, David Maljkovic, Erbossyn Meldibekov, Marjetica Potrc, Stealth. UNLIMITED, Sophia Tabatadze, Milica Tomic, Alexander Ugay, Christoph Weber

curated by Elena Sorokina

The multiple meanings of the notion "scene" provide a pattern for this exhibition. “Scene” spans from a general view - something seen - to more a formal theatrical sense, whereby a scene is a structural unit of a play or a film. The term can become altogether dramatic when used in real life, as in “the scene of a crime” or “scene of an accident”. But first and foremost, “scene” relates to a constructed experience; it is essentially incomplete, partial, unfinished. The works of the exhibition can be considered scenes related to different stories or plays, which may be part of larger narratives, yet explicitly tied to specific geographical or historical contexts.

The exhibition gathers projects which insist on their own constructedness and artifice, playing with and abundantly using theatrical and cinematic conventions. All the projects featured mobilize devices of artifice as critical and deconstructive tools. The exhibition further analyzes several different degrees of distancing introduced by the artists in their videos, which pay close attention to both the actors’ performances and to camera work. Although using theatrical and cinematic conventions, the works selected are far from such traditional theatrical concerns as crisis or climax, intrigue or character development, and the actual narrations are more interested in politics than in magic. For some projects of “Scénes Centrales”, the connection between the works’ narratives and historically charged architecture, sometimes used as a stage or a set, is particularly important.

Scénes Centrales is accompanied by a catalog as part of the entire presentation entitled “Frontières Invisibles” at the TriPostal exhibition space. Essays included in the section of Scénes Centrales relate to the exhibition’s concerns on two different levels. The essay by Rastko Mocnik, “Will the East’s Past be the West’s Future?”, provides crucial insights into recent European history. Challenging the traditional insistence upon “immanent features of historical socialisms,” he analyzes the dramas of the social state, setting aside standard assumptions about the differences of East and West and creating an integrated historical account. In “Politics of Theatre,” Keti Chukhrov discusses the difference between theatre and performance art, ascribing the former a political potential often used as a model by the latter.

Tri Postal
Avenue Willy Brandt
Tel: + 33 (0)3.20.49.52.81 (Direction de la Culture de la Ville de Lille)
Access: Metro Gare Lille Flandres & Lille Europe

On Traders’ Dilemmas

2011-11-15T10:22:00.001-08:00

On Traders’ Dilemmas
(Tracing Roads Through Central Asia)

Curator: Elena Sorokina
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San-Francisco
April 18 - June 29 2008

With Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev, Elena Vorobyeva & Viktor Vorobyev, Erbossyn Meldibekov, Said Atabekov, Alexander Ugay , Alexander Nikolaev, Vyacheslav Akhunov, Oksana Shatalova

"On Traders' Dillemas", guest curated by Elena Sorokina, features works that explore the intricate relationship between travel and trade in Central Asia and other post-Soviet territories as it has developed since the 1990's. Artists comment on the modes, strategies and effects of free trade in this region since its introduction. Some toy with the stereotypes of "oriental bazaars" where everyday commodities used to be sold alongside communist symbols. Other artists deconstruct popular trade and travel myths, including the Silk Road and the Trans-Siberian Railway, by comparing their complex symbolism with its physical realities. Artists also capture the region's current "normalization" as recent socioeconomic changes have led it to become increasingly dependent on raw materials trade. Through the works' emphatic or critical interpretations, the clichés of exotic travel and exchange of luxury goods between East and West become seen as another myth - that of "free trade."

Central Asia is a region in transition, remaking itself following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and struggling to define itself amidst its influential neighbors including China, Russia and the oil-rich nations of the Middle East. Artists from the region often focus on social and geo-economics issues facing these countries and their people. They analyze ethnic identities currently en vogue, the representation of political power and the rise of ethno nationalist heroes, showing how societies change and individuals survive.

Tracing Roads Through Central Asia is part of YBCA’s Identity Shifts series, one of the three Big Ideas that guide this season’s programming. The Identity Shifts series features artists who explore the ideas of race, gender, nationality. Once concrete identifiers, these terms are now, to some degree, open to interpretation. The rise of religious extremism, the conflict between cultural identity and national borders, the rejection by many of traditional gender roles and labels, has plunged the world into a clash between embracing strict boundaries or celebrating fluidity and complexity. By disrupting the status quo and exploring deeply their sense of self, the artists in this series ask us to rethink how we know who we are, and what we think we can be.

Contested Spaces in Post-Soviet Art

2011-11-15T10:02:00.001-08:00

City University of New York
Sidney Mishkin Gallery

March 24 - April 26, 2006

REP Group, Olga Chernysheva, Elena Kovylina, Chto Delat, Said Atabekov, Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, Yevgeniy Fiks, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Dmitry Gutov, Alina and Jeff Blumis.

Curated by Elena Sorokina

The socialized public spaces and the communalized private spaces of the Soviet era have largely disappeared, but the private spaces of the current regime are necessarily formed from the remnants of the communist state whose dominion over space has been replaced by new cultural uses, and, in some instances, by newly contested territory. Anatoly Osmolovksy’s Moscow performances, here presented in a series of prints, comment on modifications of the symbolic meanings of historically and ideologically charged sites, including Red Square and the Russian parliament.

Post-Soviet capitalism has dramatically altered the relationship between public and private spaces. While the Soviet landscape was full of unclaimed vacant spaces, abandoned construction sites and unprotected front doors, today’s urban Russian landscape bears witness to many different projects evincing control. In these photographs and videos we see several different forms of control. They range from private spaces guarded by the paramilitary units to sophisticated video surveillance to the dilapidated garden sites with make-shift barriers photographed by Olga Chernysheva. Many of these images are ironic or mocking of both the Soviet regime and the brave new world of post-Soviet capitalism. Elena Kovylina’s Medal, which transforms a Soviet icon into punk jewelry, is but one example.

A more sinister image of space in the post-Soviet era is presented in Encounter with the Shadow, a series of prints by Muratbek Djoumaliev and Gulnara Kasmalieva that shows what appear to be bodies, wrapped in white sheeting, laid out in a disputed Central Asian field.

Curated by Elena Sorokina, this exhibition will be at the Mishkin Gallery from March 24 to April 26, 2006. A gallery talk will be given by Ms. Sorokina on March 23 at 5 pm, immediately preceding the opening reception.Two other events will be held in conjunction with this exhibition.

March 21 --A Video Screening will take place at Art In General, 79 Walker Street at 7 pm.              March 29 --A Panel Discussion "Terrorist Naturalism and Other Methods" will be held at Location

One, 26 Greene Street, also at 7 pm.   With Katerina Degot, David Riff, Anatoly Osmolovsky and Dmitry Gutov

Travel for the artists to New York has been generously funded by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

ETATS de L'ARTIFICE

2011-11-15T09:57:00.001-08:00

Victor Alimpiev, Olga Chernysheva, Chto Delat, FFC, Nikolay Oleynikov

Curated by Elena Sorokina

Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris 8 october 2010 - 2 January 2011

This exhibition presents four artists and collectives who regularly employ theatrical situations in their videos and films. Some works explicitly revive filmed theater or dance, while others utilize the technique of "performance trouvé" — scenes discovered by the camera in a documentary situation and used as a constitutive element of the film. A blend of theatrical devices and formal reflexivity carried out in diverse ways characterizes the work of the show, all produced from mid 2000 on. If the 90s celebrated violent self-expression in radical performances reacting to new freedoms and their illusions, today many artists employ reflective strategies marked by formal experimentation, often incorporating references to the styles or events of the Soviet past.

In her videos, Olga Chernysheva frames accidental performances filmed in documentary situations with a reflective/poetic structure, often reminiscent of genre films. The artist reflects on the archetypical imagery of collective performances from the Soviet visual canon, such as demonstrations or popular public celebrations. Her camera, however, is interested in the failures of their artifices today, registering and revealing the mutations of the new and old symbolic orders.

In Victor Alimpliev's elaborate films play on a tension between their titles and the rigorously constructed visual scenes, always meticulously directed and acted by professional performers. Carrying subtle allusions to classical iconography, these titles, such as "To Trample Down an Arable Land" or "Weak Rot Front", are translated into a drama of the collective movements of the performers' bodies. Made in constant interaction with the camera, the slightest movement or gesture of the performers has a dramatized appeal based on a persistent tension of collaboration and coordination.

In their films, the FFC Group stages improbable encounters and impossible dialogues — between ballet dancers and unemployed people or between two generations debating the use of the communist heritage today. Very often the origin of their videos are workshops whose participants become actors and performers. These forms of staging for the camera allows the group to inquiry into the contemporary resonance of certain Soviet myths.

The Chto Delat Group creates pieces of theater for the camera, emphasizing the artifice of play production. Their theatrical videos follow quite faithfully the Brechtian model of epic plays, while the camera reveals details of the stage construction. The choice of Brechtian aesthetics isn't accidental, but is dictated by the Group's artistic position. In their interpretation, the past or present events they evoke in their films are neither dramas nor tragedies, but rather "Lehrstücke" — didactic pieces to be analyzed and learned from.

Rather then following a specific theme, this exhibition unfolds along two broadly defined leitmotivs. One focuses on the artists' self-conscious engagement with the specific elements — stories, films, imagery — from the Soviet realist canon, exploring its conflicts and correspondences and making the spectator experience old debates and events as new encounters. The other takes up art’s current fascination with theater's transformative power and its ability to speak about the present, sometimes described as "the present as fiction" or "l'artifice du present ".

The exhibition will change over time following a specific timeline and involves the projection of different groupings of films selected.

Nikolay Oleynikov, 2010