Yuri Shabelnikov Coat of Arms, taxidermy natural birds, 2011
Motherland brings together about 30 artists who engage in rhetoric of Soviet Russia. If during the 2000s the artists mocked and condemn the Russian symbolic as a symbol of the past, now they apparently came back to the patriotic feelings. According to Marat Guelman, its curator “the artists became interested in the concept of state, but without compulsion by the authorities. Now authorities have to respond to the new trend, presenting even the most intransigent state award the creators of its mythology.” more to come
Yulia Tikhonova: Interview with Todd Lester, August 22, 2011
What is fD’s mission?
To support art spaces hosting activism, and strengthening community engagement. fD is tactically a 501c3, nonprofit organization; it is a ten-year initiative that seeks to build a movement whereby art spaces perceive the legitimacy of being a first responder and critical hoster when concerned citizens (often artists doing the work of activists) are in trouble … and artists understanding and knowing about resources that professional activists already have access to when those artists use creativity to fight injustice.
Anne Dunning, Organizational & Professional Development Consultant
FreeDimentional, Ecomonic Migration, courtesy of FD
What is your institutional status?
fD is a US 501c3 non-profit, this was created to help with raising money. In our actions we don’t fit into a concept of institution. When we have an artist or an activist in a particular region in distress we use the urgency of the situation to activate our network, and to instigate action by a member-sensitive set of contacts. Networks are not non-profits and non-profits are not networks. Basically non-profits and civil society systems in the West can’t accommodate the radical potentiality of a network. You have to be a bit schizophrenic.
We act as if we are US non-profit but we are in fact a bigger organization which does not fit into a common institutional structure.
FreeDimentional, Critical People, Spaces, Critical Issues, image courtesy of FD
How do you measure risk-factors for artists and activists?
Artist residency programs are exclusive – often there is a jury, which makes a decision. We start with a basic idea that artists in distress will never be selected into a residency in a timely fashion. Our position is that we need to be reputable, global and international and non-nationalistic because what we want to do with our residents is to move ahead without the jury panels—as their activist work is very time-sensitive. We see each case as being outside of the art word; as a case of the life and a death. On the other hand, there is a latent activism in the art world that you can activate; there is a hunger by art spaces for doing something less abstract and more engaged with communities.There is a demand for what we do by the art spaces. When we receive a case we typically ask several art spaces simultaneously, so we can receive their answers more quickly. We have an Advocacy committee, and a Services committee. If there is a cartoonist from Iran in a situation of danger, we are going to ask someone we know from Iran, but we are also going to ask someone from a field of cartooning. We bring each case to the art spaces really quickly; we are trying to act really fast.
FreeDimentional, Issa Nyaphaga, Artist-in-Community (Cameroon)
Who do you collaborate with? (ie other sectors, other organizations, etc)
Where do you position yourself, i.e. as: artists / social workers / activists etc?
I am a knowledge worker and a systems thinker. I created a system of Safe Haven that addressed a need within the human rights sector and used a surplus value/resource (apartments / hosting) within the arts sector.
What is your relationship to the art market? Do you have a relationship to commercial art and the gallery system?
Well, many of the artist-stakeholders, who face danger due to their use of creativity to fight injustice, do engage/participate in the art market, but usually not at the same time as their distress.
How do you engage with the political system?
Artists are smart, innovative; actually they reflect society and when they do it well they capture the heart of the community. Usually the artists don’t move people to action by their conscious decisions. Usually they create an art work so strong that it moves people for actions. To quote Art and Upheavalby William Cleveland, I would say that the totalitarian regimes always make it their first business to eliminate the intellectuals and free-thinkers. We don’t need to question that there is a fear by politicians of the artists who can bring precision and clarity into politics. The artists are different from the professional activists; artists don’t know how to be political, but they reflect life so well—and this is political art on its own. When we learn about an artist in danger we only consider danger from the political side, we don’t take up this political issue, and we do everything to tone down his or her specific political situation. We use an effective space to invite an activist but we don’t take sides. We want to take pressure away from the political side and to give time to heal. When artists do the work of activists, they face the same (political) dangers as professional activists challenging the same political systems/regimes.
How do your practices negotiate between self-reflectivity and serving the needs of the artists that you are engaged with?
We invite artists to every level of our decision making: steering committee, annual meetings, program design. For the first five years we were a direct service, intermediary provider, reactive when artist-activists were in danger. Now, in our next phase, we are using what we learned then in order to be proactive: to inform, co-learn and reduce the number of assaults on artist-activists by strengthening the field (art spaces, community arts practitioners) and working with regional networks who can help us to tailor our model(s) to specific regional conditions and cultural specificity.
There is a legalistic approach that complicates free expression and continues to wedge artists and professional activists further and further apart. So, basically, artists will find it increasingly harder to locate distress resources and to ‘locate’ their work in the definition of a ‘human rights defender’ than in the broader frame of ‘activist’.
What are your relationships with grass-roots organizations?
FD is a horizontal network, and will last 10 years: we will disband. In justifying this 10 year span we attempted to create an intersection of arts and human rights movements; whilst artists are granted a studio space, the human-rights defenders have places to stay. There are older examples such as SFAI which has a history of making large investments in the situations at risks, and goes back to hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the housing market crash, etc. The reason why I am saying this is that this practice existed before, that the avant-garde intellectuals were hosted in exile, but what I would argue is that the new emerging grass-roots institutions will be more adaptive to an idea of hosting. Because, the new art spaces will see themselves as doing emergency programs like this on their own, and our mission will not be needed any longer. I would point to spaces such as Caravansarai in Turkey, and the Center for International Art in Community (CIAC) in Guapamacataro, Mexico.
FreeDimentional Off the Wall’ Festival of Art and Human Rights, 2008, Casa Frela Gallery ,Harlem, NY brochure
How do you measure your success?
We have helped to provide safety to over 200 artists, citizens, journalists, cultural workers. Half of them were placed through providing a housing solution, and others were helped by finding solutions such as lawyers or social workers who were able to help the artists to deal with the trauma. If we don’t have money we can nominate them to the rapid response agencies, simply make a helpful introduction. The nature of the horizontal network is that we measure this success by practical and concrete examples.
What is your mega goal?
My mega goal is that the art spaces will receive their legitimacy to be active members of their communities; that they can unleash their innovative energy and allow their legitimacy to be experienced. Art spaces can do what we have been doing. If our first 5 years of our work were to build the program and teach the art spaces about rescuing measures of the artists and activists in danger, the next 5 years will be stepping back and supporting the spaces which are doing this already. We see the critical hosting as a something positive, as encouraging the art spaces to take up an important role in community, and cease their two- dimensional existence.
The Russian art-activist group Voina (War) has been appointed to co-curate the 7th Berlin Biennale that will be held from April 27 to July 1, 2012. Artur Żmijewski who is the curator in charge, Voina, and Joanna Warsza from Warsaw, will work together to develop the concept and program of the 7th Berlin Biennale. This will be an unusual collaboration mainly because of the police trial, Voina ( Oleg Vorotnikov, Natasha Sokol and Leonid Nikolaev ) are unable to travel abroad.
Zmijewki has said that it is not expected that Voina will engage in conventional curatorial practice. Instead the group has been given a fee-hand to propose their contribution to the Biennale whether curatorial or artistic.
The decision to include Voina in the Biennale curatorial team is a gesture in support of Voina’s practice but by and large it will be art that examines social and political agendas. Zmijewski stated that he is aware that political art had been eclipsed under the pressures of market forces and the lure of neo-liberal funding. In September this year Zmijewki took part in the Auditorium Moscow, A Sketch for a Public Space”-a curatorial project which tried to map the challenges of contemporary artists as experienced in the very center of two cities: Moscow and Warsaw, and at the heart of it was the contradictions that these megapolicies posit.
During one of the roundtable discussions Zmijewski offered a sharp critique of the Chto Delat ( What it to be Done?) group and its deviation from a political agenda into the realm of art making, abandoning real actions for the practice of endless debates. With their recent high-budget film production the group has been admitted into a circle of well-wishers, curators and project managers. Previously, I myself have been critical of the work of Chto Delat group, questioning their artfulness and increasing exhibition success.’
Although their name What is to be Done ? is borrowed from Nikolay Chernyshevsky 1862 novel, the first answer I had is – ‘nothing is to be done’ at least not with the elaborate and cinematic ambitions that the group adopted as their political agenda. I argued with the WHW collective and their total approval of the group’s work during their curating of the 11th Istanbul Biennale.
In contrast, Zmijewski places a lot of hope on Voina as the last surviving outlet of political activism in Russia, which has not been included in mainstream art . Although these attempts have been made already by offering Voina an Innovation prize, Voina refuses to participate in institutional practices imposed from above. (The audio record of Zmijewski’s critical remarks has now been removed from the Auditorium Moscow website)
Zmijewski articulates his support of art as a service to the public and art that is an influential element of public opinion, in the pages of the leftist magazine Krytyka Polityczna, which he founded in 2008, and still edits.
There are several concerns the least of which is not Zmijewski’s goal to create an exhibition which presents political art from around the world. He issues an open call for art work based on its political focus, asking the artists to identify as, rightist, leftist, liberal, nationalist, anarchist, feminist, masculinist, or whether they are not interested in politics at all. In the discussion at Auditorium Moscow the curator mentioned that he has already approached some of the activists, inviting them to occupy the Berlin Biennale. In the context of the Biennale concept, which has outlived itself as a progressive format, the question may be asked as to whether or not Zmijewski is trying to squeeze political art into an institutional scheme while at the same time he claims that political art has been already corrupted by the institutional lure.
Free Voina, Houston Street, New York
Meantime several art venues including the KW Institute for Contemporary Art are waiting to be filled with political art. One might hope that Zmijewski will scout the art which is sincere, and politically engaged.
The 6th Berlin Biennale was curated in six venues by Kathrin Rhomberg under the title “what is waiting out there”. The exhibition was reviewed as having an over extended theme. Its 7th edition might find a way to biennalize art under more critical umbrella
Eli Kuka, Bad/Good, exhibition Berloga Gallery,Winzavod, Moscow 2011
Eli Kuka, Bad/Good, Berloga gallery, Moscow, June 28- July 22, 2011
If in previous reviews on the current Moscow art scene I have been critical of artists who are playing off either the high-end international art market, or other artists who massage themes of post-Soviet nostalgia, the current exhibition of work by the Moscow based duo Eli Kuka represents another arty trend which has emerged during the last decade. In “Bad/Good” their first show in this gallery Oleg Eliseev (b. 1985), Evgeniy Kukoverov (b. 1984) present a selection of crudely made paintings, sculptures and works on paper which ridicule the everyday routine of a society in transition from a past marked by a hideous Soviet reality to a reckless neo-liberal context.
Eli Kuka, Bad/Good, Berloga gallery, Winzavod, Moscow 2011
There are two recurrent threads throughout the exhibition. One is a cartoon of a character wearing an Indian turban, a suit and tie, called IhnaBTB, which these artists who also play rock music have also used as the logo of their music group I.H.N.A.B.T.B. The other is Eli Kuka’s copying of their faces 80 times onto A4 sheets of paper and layering them as a grid on the wall, as if to brand themselves through this smart-looking mark.
Eli Kuka, Bad/Good, Berloga gallery, Winzavod, Moscow 2011
The centerpiece of the show is an installation of corrugated iron fixed on an angle into a sand sack. Drawn in black marker is an image of a hen, and words written below comment on the process of labor which is dangerous, hard and dirty, and is a pun of the inherited negligence of Soviet reality. The duo has created ad hoc installations and packaged their lack of a formal art education into a pseudo-naïve style.
Eli Kuka, Bad/Good, Berloga gallery, Winzavod, Moscow 2011
Eli Kuka does not shy away from offensive language, which to an extent has been approved by this gallery. Its twenty something year old owner, Mikhail Ovcherenko, whose father owns the prestigious Regina gallery, has a taste for crass wording and obscene imagery. Eli Kuka has pinned a receipt obtained from a sex shop accompanied by a broken dildo, which is placed beneath it, perhaps referring to today’s sexual freedom. The title of the show Bad/Good is a censored version of the Russian obscenity Xyevo-Zaebis, and may be seen as a quintessential facet of the young generation’s brash attitudes. By including vulgar references the group plays off pop-culture, which for the last ten years has been geared toward the taste of the neo-liberal class.
Eli Kuka, Bad/Good, exhibition Berloga Gallery,Winzavod, Moscow 2011
If one of El Kuka’s themes is the design of semi-commercial symbols, a second is the ironic representation of the post-Soviet legacy. The artists fill the second floor of the gallery with large canvases each depicting a single veggie – a potato, cabbage, onion and carrot. Painted in colors of an earthy palette and enlarged to a monstrous size the objects gain a menacingly bloated appearance. On the gallery floor is what appears to be real potatoes. The artists have glued on to round boulders photos of their own faces which show them wearing stockings on their heads.
Eli Kuka, Bad/Good, exhibition Berloga Gallery,Winzavod, Moscow 2011
By including themselves within a vegetable landfill of sorts, the artists mock Russian traditional food, which is now the only choice of the poor. Eli Kuka is not the first to make fun of aspects of an ugly past. This has grown out of the tradition of artist-escapades of the Perestroika generation, that has included Gosha Ostertsov and Zhora Letichevsky who found endless satirical references during the Soviet epoch. Born after Perestroika the artists of Eli Kuka have adopted a neo-liberal visual slang which actively lampoons the Soviet past as something degrading. The artists are by-products of the current generation, where in their urge for total subversion there lies the danger of producing trash.
Eli Kuka, Bad/Good, Berloga Gallery,Winzavod, Moscow 2011, performance
Eli Kuka, Bad/Good, Berloga gallery, Winzavod, Moscow 2011
Eli Kuka, MOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, Arthouse Squat Forum, Мoscow 2011
Eli Kuka, MOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, Arthouse Squat Forum, Мoscow 2011
Eli Kuka, MOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, Arthouse Squat Forum, Мoscow 2011
Arseniy Zhilyaev, paper plant October, Moscow, 2011, site-specific sound installation
Moscow -based young generation conceptual artist Arseniy Zhilyaev talks about his most recent participatory art project, which took place in the paper plant “October ” Moscow, over a period of four months. The artist applied for a work permit as a machine operator at the factory, have gotten friendly with the workers to learn about their popular songs, which sustain their spirits during long work days. After four months of sharing work duties, Zhilyaev who is in his mid-thirties, slim and nerdy looking recorded a collection of popular 1970s songs, dialogs with the workers, including excerpts from the poem Radio October by Mayakovsky (1929). He collated sound bites from their working machinery and radio noise and an audio installation titled Radio “October” was set up in the workers’ changing room.
In the hours after work, the artist learned from the seasoned workers who were in their late 50s about their resentment of the current market and about their longing for the past. Although, the workers’ response was rather reserved,as they were in their late 50th and have been formed by the Soviet work practices, for Zhyliaev it was a pilot project. He is planning to engage the younger workers at the Autozavod (Moscow automobile production plant) in another art project and he is hoping to achieve a better response.
Purposefully, the exhibition was open only after working hours, but one of the workers enjoyed a steady stream of the visitors who have been asked to play domino with him. Zhilyaev said that it was rewarding for him that during the “Radio October” exhibition opening people drank tea and talked to the worker for several hours.
Today artistic production is often linked to labor conditions, and its immaterial value is questioned on a par with its material worth. Current redefinition of artistic labor is central within economic instability and Zyilayev’s project brings parallels between the two on another level. Radio October coincides with the actions of the Precarious Workers Brigade that condemns free artistic labor and pleads for all education debts to be cancelled, through e-flux’s readers Are You Working Too Much?, Ross Perlin’s book Intern Nation, and an exhibition Workers, currently on view at MASSMoCA. But it is still rare when artists really work alongside industrial workers. The curators of “The Workers” claim that the exhibition narrows the gap between artists and workers who would otherwise eye each other suspiciously across a chasm of privilege, complicity, or purity of purpose. “ I can not see it this way.
Moscow subway, 2011, bronz monuments to Soviet workers image Katerina Beloglazova
Below Zyilayev explains what made him work alongside workers and engage in conversations about conditions of unemployment and exploitation that are evident now in as much as they were latent during the Soviet past.
My first encounter with the workers at the paper factory “October” took place in 2008. I participated in the exhibition “Politics in the Street”. Over the following years, I often went back to the factory with exhibition projects. During one of those return visits, while collecting materials for the exhibition “The Machine and Natasha”, I found out that during the Soviet era the factory used to have a radio station. In order to keep the workers’ spirits up and their energy level high, for dozens of years, from that room were broadcast the workers’ favorite Soviet pop songs by pop-singers such as Josif Kobzon, and Alla Pugacheva, etc.
Arseniy Zhilyaev, October factory, Moscow 2011, site-specific sound installation, detail
That story stayed in my memory. I really wanted to bring back that radio for the workers who were still there. I decided to create a temporary radio station to become a radio show about the everyday of the factory workers!
Being an artist I have been thinking about how contemporary art is irrevocably acquiring the characteristics of a collective industrial production. The quality of the artistic teams with a clear division of labor is often clearly higher than the quality of one-man works. The only way to participate in such a system is to be on the side of the workers and turn their everyday routine into an artistic act. I figured out that I actually need to feature a criticism of contemporary art as a particular means of capitalist production.
Arseniy Zhilyaev, paper plant October, Moscow, 2011, interior
Meantime I learned about the existence of a small play called “Radio ‘October’“, written by the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926. The play is about a celebration of the ninth anniversary of the October Revolution at a time when the bankers and the government decide to enslave the workers all over again.
Radio “October” is a radio show recorded on several vinyl records and created from collated sound bites from workers of the paper factory “October” as they’re assembling special projects for the 4th Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moscow. The audio installation was mounted in the workers’ changing room. The access of viewers to the room will be approved by the workers and will be granted only with their permission.
Arseniy Zhilyaev paper plant October, 2011 site-specific sound installation
Arseniy Zhilyaev, paper plant October, Moscow, 2011
