Contested Spaces in Post-Soviet Art
Isabelle Dupuis
In "Contested Spaces in Post-Soviet Art," the second part of the "Russia Redux" exhibition that premiered in the fall, curator Elena Sorokina assembled works by 13 artists and two artist collectives in a conceptually tight and intellectually intriguing exploration of space.
Considering the fact that one of the first decrees Lenin issued was the total abolition of private ownership, the concept of space within a Russian contemporary art context is a crucial exploration of the radical shift in reality that took place when the Soviet Union disintegrated. The communal was privatized; new national and geo-political spaces emerged as countries along Russia’s borders declared independence and improvised forms of economic trade moved across vast geographic expanses.
As such, many of the exhibited works explore boundaries–both physical and symbolic. Olga Chernysheva photographs humble and feeble fences improvised out of chicken wire or mattress springs, symbolic of a desire to protect small plots. Abilsait Atabekov has friends pose wearing a t-shirt from Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie museum, a comment on independent Kyrgyzstan having become a new zone of American influence. In their installation, Trans-Siberian Amazons, piled high with canvas suitcases, Muratbek Djourmaliev and Gulnara Kasmalieva explore trans-national space and the emergence of a new predominantly female transient economy of so-called "suitcase traders" that crisscrossed Europe and Asia to fill the Russian demand for consumer goods.
There are also a fair number of documentations of performances in which artists deliberately encroached on previously Soviet owned land and monuments. During the early 90s, a time when monumental symbols of the Soviet Union were being torn down faster than reforms could be enacted, Anatoly Osmolovsky climbed on the–very high–shoulder of Moscow’s monument to Mayakovsky while Dmitry Gutov strung 3,000 shuttlecocks above a Young Communist League summer camp. The gestures can be read as protective, sacrilegious or prankish, but above all, they seem intent on testing the boundaries of a new reality.
The shortfall with such an exhibition is that many of the works resonate only once their specific cultural and political circumstances become apparent. But nonetheless, there should be more curators like Sorokina to remind us that there is much art to be explored beyond Chelsea.
