"Cleaning apartments in exchange for lectures
on philosophy," yeah, okay, I get it about that...
From: julia malher
Post-Diasporas:Voyages and Missions, special project
in frameworks of 1
Moscow Biennale of contemporary art
January 29th - February 26th 2005
Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, ul. Petrovka, 25
opening January 28th, from 3PM
Exhibition Post-Diasporas: Voyages and Missions is dedicated
to strategies of cultural identification in the works of the artists
who have had experience of living in emigration and diaspora
(ordiaporas), with its characteristic contradictions between a
voluntary assimilation and cultural self-isolation. The artists, most of whom moved to the West in the beginning of the 90s - Alina and Jeff Bliumis(USA), Daniel Bozhkov (USA), Pavel Braila (Moldovia - Holland), Yuriy Gavrilenko (USA), Anton Ginzburg (USA), Olga Kisseleva (France), Anna Kowalska (Poland - Austria), Joanna Malinowska (USA), Yaroslav Mogutin (Russia - USA), Sviatoslav Solgannik (USA), Yevgeniy Fiks (USA) - have an experience of navigation between various cultures as well as
understanding of the differences between "foreign" and "one's
own" cultures.
The issue of the relations of diasporic subject to her/ his national
culture and history is refracted in peculiar way in practices of those
artists, who undertake a journey to the country of departure, combining both Gulliver's encounter with "strange" societies and Ulysses' anticipation of "cultural shock" in his comeback home. It occurs in Postcards from Warsaw, a work by Anna Kowalska. Kowalska juxtaposes the postcards, made during her trip to the native Warsaw, that depict, with the effect of "døjø vu," realia of Warsaw ghetto of the 1940s, which turn
out to be the setting built for Roman Polanski's film "The Pianist,"
with the photographs that Kowalska took two years after Polanski film on the site of the former ghetto, in which the economic utopia of the contemporary post-Soviet metropolis is presented.
The theme of return, undoubtedly, is present in the three-chanelled video Barons' Hills by Pavel Braila, which looks intomodern Moldova, artist's motherland. The work shows thehouses of gypsy "barons," Moldavian Noveau Riche: eclectic, abundantly decorated facades and interiors of the gigantic mansions embody the essence of a diasporic subject-nomad which builds its own culture from the elements of "others'."
In Olga Kisseleva's work Border, the artist points out to a "border" as a symbol of contemporary disintegration and alienation occurred inside the post-Soviet world which is opposed to the infinite freedom of an individual represented in the video by the sprint-dance of Keity Anjoure.
Alina and Jeff Blumis, in their pictorial series entitled geometric
geography, generalize their experience of emigration associated with dramatic transition from the socialist -above-the-individual - reality into the context of other cultural and national identifications. In the creation of this series, the artists used the industrial materials and production processes, whereby provoking the conflict with work's highly personal content.
In her work Untitled, Joanna Malinowska cleans New York residents'
apartments in exchanges for lectures on philosophy - an image of Polish ømigrø utilizing the stereotype of a Polish woman in the Western consciousness. Another work of Malinowska, 22.56 square meters of "Karamazov Brothers." Dedicated to Anna Grigorievna Dostoyevska a manual copying of Dostoyevski's novel, is revisiting a national (in this case, Russian) culture in format of tedious, time-consuming action that is associated with the self-discipline and exercise in "faith" of what art is.
Daniel Bozhkov, in work "The Station of New Productivists," explores
mutations of Western culture (including consumer culture) on the
Eastern-European soil: Swedish furniturestore IKEA appears as a
"Western" bacillus the presence of which in Russian context is analyzed through the juxtaposition of Swedish names for IKEA items and their description in Russian. Another part of Bozhkov's project - documentation of the action of cutting of Bozhkov's own beard realized in front of the statue Peter the Great in Moscow - an artist's reaction on the historical perverseness of Russian reality, its harsh transition from the appropriation of the foreign to the hostility towards it (if to assume that the possessor of the beard is a foreigner for whom beard is a unalterable and comfortable part of his look.)
National references can be recognized in Maxim Vakhmin - a
Russian immigrant, artist and master of survival, living at the streets
of New York - the protagonist of film 20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup by Yuri Gavrilenko and Sviatoslav Solgannik. Vakhmin's troubles, his
self-destructiveness and self-negation, put him in line with the famous characters of the literature of social realism.
Yaroslav Mogutin, in his photographic works, united under the same title "No Love," Yaroslav Mogutin confronts his own media image of "Russian Slava," made by the Western mass media, with a narrative based on the real experience of extensive travels and intimate encounters, where the author persuasively avoids dealing with the fixed national identifications and appealing to the cultural clichøs.
Dilemma assimilation/ isolation is present in Anton Ginzburg's work
totemdoppelganger. Ginzburg, using (and reproducing) totems and signs of "other" diasporas (like Raiders, Latin-American football team from Oakland, California) (((!?))) as well as mass-produced goods of the 2000s (in totemdoppelganger, it is an"ipod"), which are perceived by the author as contemporary "totemic poles" of desire, reveals one more aspect of diasporic subjectivity, the essence of which is, from the one hand, personal mimicry of an immigrant inside of "other" culture (in this case, it is Western modernist and postmodernist culture), and from another - one's parallel and exclusive existence in it as an alien.
The exploration of the identity politics in the art of new media
and activism connects individual reflections to the larger movements
and radical tendencies in art that is reflected in video projection
ofYevgeniy Fiks "Hacker's Cubicle." The author tries to position himself as a representative of the Russian diaspora in the West, drawing the parallels between Russian "hackers," professionally breaking into banks, and western artists-activists who intervene in the sphere of state and big business.
Curator: Olga Kopenkina
______________________________________________
SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe
Info, archive and help:
http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
