Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries
On Saturday, January 28th, 2006, Eastwards brought together representatives of art institutions, critics and collectors from the countries of the new Europe.
Ivan Mecl (Editor and publisher of the international art magazine “Umelec”, Prague)
Mihnea Mircan (curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art/MNAC, Bucharest)
Viktor Misiano (curator, theoretician and art critic; director “Moscow Art Magazine”, Moscow)
Gregor Podnar (gallery owner and curator, Galerija Gregor Podnar, Ljubljana)
Zsolt Soml\032i (contemporary art collector and expert, Budapest)
Aneta Szylak (curator and theoretician, co-founder and director of Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk)
Organization and moderation: Marina Sorbello, art critic and curator, Berlin.
Marina … Read more
Hedvig Turai: Your best-known work is the Lego concentration camp set, but of course you did not start your artistic career with it, nor did you end it with that piece. Do you draw a distinction in your career “before” and “after” Lego?
Zbigniew Libera: Naturally, Lego was such an important piece that it divides my career into two parts. Lego brought me international recognition, and in this sense it really changed something. It is also very hard for an artist to have one of his works raise expectations very high. It becomes very hard to do any work after … Read more
Nikolai Izvolov, Fenomen kino: istoriia i teoriia 320 pp. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo EGSI, 2001. Second edition: 164 pp. Moscow: Materik, 2005.
Since its initial publication in 2001, Nikolai Izvolov’s The Phenomenon of Cinema: History and TheoryNikolai Izvolov, Fenomen kino: istoriia i teoriia. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo EGSI, 2001. 320. has remained a rarity among contemporary Russian publications in the field of cinema studies. While these publications range from well-researched, often revelatory collections of documents to exercises in political revisionism or metaphysical essayism, they tend to disregard the possibility of a more balanced approach to the problems of cinema. In this idiosyncratic … Read more
Ljiljana Coklin: How was the idea of an immigrant theater in Ottawa, Canada, born?
Vildana and Dimitrije Stanisic-Keller: Eleven years have passed since 1995, the turning point in our “Canadian life,” when we began to hope we could do theater again. The dramatic changes of 1992 affected not only the history and political life of former Yugoslavia but also the lives of ordinary people like us. The two years that we lived in a war-torn Sarajevo were the time of emotional exhaustion, hopelessness, and withdrawal from the public life. Leaving Bosnia for Canada at the end of 1994, we never … Read more
My point of departure is three pairs of photographs. The first pair juxtaposes the unfinished frame of Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall in Los Angeles (photo 1) and the destroyed carcass of Minoru Yamasaki’s Twin Towers in New York (photo 2). We are conditioned to expect a building frame to consist of (or at least contain some) rectangular elements. Gehry’s frame has none. We might see it as a “normal” rectangular frame twisted and distorted by the creative will of a modernist. The modernist vocabulary, as Anthony Vidler observed, has always included “displacement and fracture, torquing and twisting, pressure and release.”(… Read more
Ljiljana Blagojevic, Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture, 1919-1941. MIT Press in association with Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2003.
When young Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who under the name of Le Corbusier became the most influential architect of the twentieth century, arrived in Belgrade in 1911 during his travels across Europe, he did not hide his disappointment with “ridiculous capital, worse even: a dishonest city, dirty, and disorganized .” On a map of his travels he was marking places he visited with an I (industry), a C (culture), or an F (folklore). And while all the … Read more
Andrei Molodkin, December 8-January 21 2006, Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, New York
Andrei Molodkin’s most recent exhibition reveals some highly charged works which poignantly unmask the political intrigue that is often not far from the surface of the global oil business. By throwing together so directly the forces of culture and politics, Molodkin’s sculptures draw the viewer to reflect not only on their effect upon humanity and the environment in which we live, but also on their potential for the diminution of culture as a whole.
At the heart of this exhibition is Molodkin’s exploration of the concepts of consumption and … Read more
I left Bucharest when I was 9. My parents were political refugees. They spoke out against the Ceausescu regime on Radio Free Europe, and three years later, after many protests and hunger strikes, they were permitted to leave Romania. We received political asylum in Austria and later moved to New York. We were stateless for 6 years before becoming US citizens. I grew up poor but privileged, in the sense that I had an education at some of the best schools in America, social factories for the production of Marxist intellectuals. And then I dropped out of my PhD, left … Read more
Olga Chernysheva often says that she is interested in the motif of the “round” and the “spherical,” but she also talks about her interest in the “shapeless.” How can one reconcile these two? Isn’t the sphere the most perfect and self-contained of forms? In fact, this is exactly how one wants to describe the huge, planet-like cookies on one of her early paintings, or the self-sufficient spheres of anonymous knit hats on her later photographs. But no. In fact, the sphere is formless. Or, to be more precise, it is beyond the problematic of form if one looks at it … Read more
Yevgeniy Fiks: The Song of Russia, 24 December 2005 – 24 January 2006, Gallery ArtStrelka Projects (Moscow)
Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow and now teaches in New York, where he has been living for more than ten years. He presented his work in Moscow for the third time. Previously, he showed his work last year during the first Moscow Biennale at the group exhibition for émigré artists, “Post – Diasporas. Voyages and Missions”.
In December 2005, Fiks had a small solo exhibition that exhibited a work called “The Song of Russia” in a place that is very active … Read more
Zbigniew Libera belongs to Poland’s so-called lost generation of the 1980’s, to that generation whose most creative years fell with the barren and depressing time of Polish martial law. Added to the difficult socio-economic conditions were the philosophical and artistic crises brought about by the dominance of post-modernism with its confirmation of fragmentariness — a modern world no longer organized by any meta-narratives. This situation increased anxiety and fueled attempts at both the self-creation that would offer control of one’s own identity and the creation of private utopias. Within this fragmented world, it became necessary to ask the most primal … Read more
“A new spectre is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of sexual and love dissidence.”Tomek Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz, Love and Democracy. Reflections on the Homosexual Question in Poland, Aureus, Krakow, 2005, s. 290-291.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Poland and Eastern Europe face the task of discovering a new all-embracing culture, and of writing a new, affirmative history of diversified and plural stories of love and sexual identities and their cultural representations. After decades of censorship, discrimination, and homophobia, the time has come to discover the complex amorous subjectivity in Polish contemporary society and art.
To embrace such … Read more
The creative aspect of the humanities has not yet found its recognition in the established classification and methodology of scientific disciplines. Are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should there be some active, constructive supplement to them? We know that technology serves as the practical extension (“application”) of natural sciences and politics as the extension of social sciences.
Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study objectively. Is there any activity in the humanities that would correspond to this transformative status of technology and politics? In the following schema, the third line demonstrates a … Read more
A Peculiar Fluid
“Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft” (blood is a very peculiar fluid) says Mephistopheles in Goethe`s Faust. Indeed, blood attracts us and makes us avert our eyes, it fills us with fear and tenderness. What a symbolic potential it has! After all, blood is a symbol of sacrifice, martyrdom and redemption as well as war, murder, and sustenance to the dead. On the one hand, the artist deprives human blood of its magical, ritual power using it in spite of the Biblical curse (“Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the … Read more
Since the 1970s, critical practices of women artists in the region of the former Yugoslavia have proven that these women are not only subjects to ideology imposed on them. Their works actively participate in politics of representation: by refuting simplified notions of self-representation, these artists contribute to the feminist critique of identity politics.
This paper deals with feminine (self)representations that challenge viewers’ expectations in many different ways. Specifically, I am interested in bringing into focus self-representations by the artists that deal with notions of feminine beauty and body image, as they are perceived in ideological and media environments of the … Read more
Spot on… 9 September – 23 October 2005, ifa-Galerie, Stuttgart.
Spot on… is the name for a series of exhibits instituted by the German ifa-galleries that selects pertinent works from previous Biennales and various photography festivals, with a preference for works from more “exotic” countries.(Past examples have been the Sharjah Biennale and Noorderlicht, presenting Arabian photography.)
The last Spot on… exhibition presented recent developments in Caucasian photography from Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. The focus of the exhibition was “to examine the subject of authenticity in photography from the perspective of the ‘documentary’”(See the web-site of the exhibition: … Read more
Russia Redux #1, 17 September – 17 October 2005, Schroeder Romero Gallery, New York City
It is a more interesting combination than art and beauty, or art and domestic interiors, but it presents the viewer with a dilemma: how do I evaluate the art without also evaluating the politics? In other words, can I possibly relate to the artworks without also delving into the political point of view, and is my appreciation of the artworks dependent upon my acceptance of the politics?
I would say no. The idea of a completely formal analysis is absolutely vacuous: the notion that … Read more
RUSSIA! 16 September 2005 – 11 January 2006, Guggenheim Museum, New York
The exhibition RUSSIA!, which opened at the NYC Guggenheim in September 2005, has become the subject of heated debates among cultural commentators both in the West and in Russia. Because of the symbolic value of the venue, the show is catalyzing discourse about the state of affairs with Russian art, the post-Soviet condition, and the representation of Russian art in the West today.
The organizers of RUSSIA! rightfully claimed that this exhibition was “…the most comprehensive and spectacular showing of Russian art ever sent to the United … Read more
RUSSIA! 16 September 2005 – 11 January 2006, Guggenheim Museum, New York
The magnificent RUSSIA! exhibition at the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum in New York(<http://www.guggenheim.org/russia>), introduced to the public as “the most comprehensive exhibition of Russian art ever shown in the United States,” features over 270 “of the greatest masterworks of Russian art, from the thirteenth century to the present, many traveling for the first time outside Russia.”(<http://www.guggenheim.org/press_office.cgi?which=/press_releases/release_116.html>)
As indicated on the wall preceding the display, it is “realized under the patronage of Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation” and “organized … Read more
Moscow-based artists artists Natasha and Valera Cherkashin’s work(Valera and Natasha Cherkashin, Real and Unreal (installation, 2005).) can be seen in three upcoming exhibitions: their “Futurism and Nostalgia” will open on September 24 at the Great Neck Arts Center in Long Island, NY; a collaborative exhibition with German Artist Jorg Coblenz opens on October 21 at the Schneider Gallery in Chicago; and they will participate in the International Festival of Photography in Bratislava during November.
Sven Spieker: I’ll just begin by asking you what you’re doing at the moment, what your projects currently are and how they differ … Read more
Amerika, May-June 2005, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
In her project entitled Amerika, Kristina Leko employs the tools of ethnology to explore the Croatian émigré community in America. The artist’s method is analogous to anthropological research, which takes culture as its object, is concerned with the contextual and involves fieldwork in the everyday.
While anthropology “deals in the present with the question of the other,”(Marc Augé, Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Verso: London and New York, 1995), 18.) Kristina Leko evokes the intertwining of self and other, past and present, “Amerika” and the “old … Read more
Boris Mikhailov Retrospective, 22 September 2004 – 2 January 2005, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
If we were to define photography today, we would have to posit its essential anonymity. To be more precise, we would have to rethink the very conditions of its theorizing: it is no longer “my” photograph that has to be redeemed by being set against the flow of time or the grand narratives of history. (And such, we remember, was Roland Barthes’s project.) It is “nobody’s” or, better still, “whatever” photograph that is likely to take its place in theorizing.
This radical shift in the … Read more
“I will paint every rule I or others have invisibly placed. Oh how they penetrate though and all over.” – Eva Hesse(Entry in diary from 28 October 1960, quoted in Eva Hesse, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.)
“Help me to peel this mountain of potatoes! Help me to swipe the floors! Knit with me! Help me to paint this landscape! Help me to be myself…and help yourself to be yourself too!” – Julita Wojcik
The essence here is trans-individual, made up of bonds that link individuals together in social forms which are historical and cultural, friendly ‘networks’ … Read more
“The world offers itself to us in full spectacle, but there is nothing to see except a deluded man who calls himself Emperor standing naked in the street”,(<www.guidetopsychology.com/terrorism.htm>) “King of terror hits Moscow cinema screens,”(<www.newsfromrussia.com>) “A Rider Named Death: Terrorism Before Chechnya,”(An interview Dostoyevsky vs.Nietzsche by Olga Shumyatskaya at www.english.mn.ru, N 39, 2004.) “In his new film, Karen Shakhnazarov uses Russian history to revisit the issue of terrorism…”(<www.filmfestival.com>)
These are only some of the titles which followed the international premiere of Karen Shakhnazarov’s latest film … Read more
Deisis, October 2004, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
The project Deisis/Forthcoming exhibited at the State Tretyakov gallery in October 2004 shocked Moscow’s art community like no other exhibition before. Under their irony, critics barely disguised their rage and even alarm. According to them, the project only pretended to be an example of advanced art, being in reality a threat against it.
One can imagine that the computerized version entitled Deisis/Anthropology (shown at the Moscow Biennale as part of the “Art Digital” project in Mars gallery) will give rise to a similar reaction. It seems that the artists succeeded in seriously … Read more
1 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, January 28 – February 28, 2005, Various Locations, Moscow
“Our project, which happened to be the first of this kind in Moscow, presents the first alternative to the current formation of the Russia’s capital, which has been overlooked for a long time: this “neglected” center has never been integrated with the others. The logic of changes can form here recognition and glory of a new kind. This does not mean “again to conquer a central place,” but it refers to the assumption of “being in the center.”
– Curators’ Foreword to the catalogue … Read more
Anri Sala(In our conversation in Venice in April 2008, Anri Sala and I tried to define tactfulness and failed over and over again. I decided to record our informal interview in a hope of a future intellectual revelation. Upon my return home I discovered that my interview was missing sound. Inadvertently, our interview ended up being off the record, and all I had were scribbles on a sheet of paper, variations on the theme of impolite tactfulness. As we got more and more lost on Venetian streets with names like Calle Amor dei Amici and Calle della Vida, … Read more
Anri Sala, Now I see, 12 October 2004 – 30 January 2005, Art Institute, Chicago
Upon entering the installation of Anri Sala’s Now I see (2004), his first 35-mm film, the viewer is enveloped in total darkness. The effect is, at first, purposefully disorienting; then a flicker of light flashes upon a 10 x 12 foot screen. A second or two later, the face of a young man emerges from the pitch-black along with the pulse of an electric guitar. What follows seems to adhere to fairly standard conventions of rock video, with its guitar antics and male posturing, … Read more
In the foreword to an issue of Janus magazine dedicated to notes on subversion, Jan Fabre and Henrik Tratsaert ask themselves one of the most frequently asked questions of the last decade:
“What strategies do artists, dramatists, performers, philosophers, scientists and others put into effect to undermine conventions, and to pervert and question society’s codes?”(“Dissident Voices / Notes on Subversion.” Janus 16.04, Antwerpen, 2004, 3.)
An answer may begin with Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s statement: “Each metier, language, genre and/or format demands a different set of strategies and methodologies.”(Gómez-Peña, “Navigating the Minefields of Utopia,” (A conversation with Lisa Wolford).” … Read more
Marysia Lewandowska and Neil Cummings, Enthusiasts from Amateur Film Clubs 25 June – 29 August 2004, Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej, Warsaw
Walter Benjamin produced his most unambiguously Marxist statement about art in his 1934 lecture “Der Autor als Produzent.” Stepping back from inflamed Weimar debates about the politically correct form of progressive art, he maintained that to argue the case for one artistic language over another was to miss the point.
Whether socialist realism was more legible than abstraction was not the issue; the key challenge for Marxist culture, he maintained, was to wrest the technologies of reproduction from the bourgeoisie.… Read more
ARTMargins Print is pleased to announce the publication of the Volume 13, Issue 2. A recurring idea in the current issue is difference and contradiction. While art historiography has often treated artistic styles and movements as integrated and consistent wholes, with bookended beginnings and closures, and treated artists as equally stable authorial voices rooted in their respective dispositions, art practice for the most part is marked by contradiction rather than consistency, challenging us to capture the dynamism that contradiction and difference produce in art.
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