Category: ARTMargins Online: Interviews

A conversation between critic Linda J. Park and curator Olga Kopenkina about the Properly Past exhibition at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery in New York City (March 18 – May 3rd, 2008).

The recent exhibition Properly Past, curated by Olga Kopenkina, brought together the work of five Brooklyn-based artists to the BRIC Rotunda Gallery in New York City. Kopenkina frames these artists’ works around ideas concerning the failure of modernity and highlights the “obsolete phenomena and forms that contain signs of a modernist utopian promise for a future” (from the curatorial statement). Altogether, the works in the exhibition offer observations and … Read more

Olia Lialina was born in 1971 in Moscow. She finished Moscow State University in 1993 as a journalist and film critic. In the mid 90s she was one of the organizers of Moscow experimental film club CINE FANTOM. She is one of the net.art pioneers and writes on New Media, Digital Folklore and Vernacular Web. Since 1999 she has been a Professor of Merz Akademie (New Media Pathway) in Stuttgart.

SVEN SPIEKER: How relevant is the term net.art to you today? It has often been pointed out that the term started as a software error. In many ways, this seems … Read more

In a new series of interviews with contemporary artists from Russia (“Painterly Practice and the Post-Socialist Condition”), conceived and compiled by Yulia Tikhonova, ARTMargins explores art production in the post-Soviet age, with an emphasis on painting. While the way in which Russian painters engage with the (Soviet) past will be one of the threads running through the series, it will by no means be its exclusive focus. We begin our series with a discussion with New York-based Yevgeniy Fiks. In his series of portraits devoted to current members of the American Communist party, Fiks explores his personal position with regard … Read more

A theatre play named Teremin, written and directed by popular Czech film scriptwriter Peter Zelenka, has become the high-profile event of the last theatre season in Prague. The plot line was inspired by the fascinating story of Lev Sergeevich Termen (1896 – 1993), a Russian acoustical engineer and inventor of the first widely accepted high-frequency electronic instrument and the first instrument that could be played without being touched — by moving the hands in the space between two antennae, which control intonation and volume. Originally called Aetherophon, later renamed after the French version of the inventor’s name, the … Read more

Clemens von Wedemeyer studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. He has won several international awards for his short films, video works and installations, including the Böttcherstrasse Art Award in Bremen (2005), the VG Bildkunst Award for Experimental Film (2002) and the Marion Ermer Award (2002). His latest film “Rien du tout” (2006, together with Maya Schweizer), is based on a Beckett play (“Catastrophe”). It was shown both in the German Competition at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2006, where it won the prize as best film, and at the 4th Berlin Biennale. In 2005, von Wedemeyer … 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 Sheptulin was born in 1969 in Moscow. He studied in the journalism department at Moscow State University where he specialized in English Romanticism, resulting in a translation of De Quincey’s “Confession” published in 1994 in Ad Marginem. In 1991 he founded the publication house (and gallery since 1994) Obscuri Viri, which published for the first time many texts of the Moscow Conceptual school, among them Sorokin’s “Norma” and “Roman,” as well as the journal Mesto Pechati. Since 2000 he has been a member of the Moscow Artists Union, working in film since 2002.

Introduction

The film deals with conceptual … Read more

Vladimir Dubosarsky and Alexander Vinogradov are the most promising Russian artists of their generation. They represented Russia last year in the Venice Biennial. Their paintings are included in permanent collections of Le Centre Pompidou in Paris; MAK, Vienna; and The Houston Museum of Art. In 2003 they had five solo exhibitions throughout the world including a show in New York in the Deitch Gallery. Dubosarsky and Viongradov live in Moscow.

Veronika Georgieva: In 1994, the very beginning of your collaboration, your project appeared as a sufficiently radical and confusing gesture –because it didn’t fit into the two main art movements … Read more

Ivan Razumov is an artist working in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Exhibitions at the Academy of Russian Arts, Moscow, the Museum of the New Academy of Fine Arts, St.Petersburg, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Razumov is well-known for his illustrations of Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Basho, and Sei-Shenagon.

Yevgeniy Fiks: I remember seeing your “Pioneers” for the first time during my visit to Moscow in 97. How did this series come about?

Ivan Razumov: This series has been put together out of drawings that I made as illustrations for popular and independent magazines and literature at different points in time over the course … Read more

Just a 20 minute drive Southeast from Bratislava in Slovakia lays the provincial town of Samorin. On passing through, Samorin seems no different than any other small town in Central Europe still bearing the scars of war, occupation, and neglect. Yet through the endeavors of one average couple, Csaba and Suzanne Kis, Samorin is gradually finding its place on the map of Slovakian fine art. Neither Csaba nor Suzanne studied art, nor do they have any experience with running an art institution. Nonetheless, persistence and patience have finally brought the couple a place where both artists’ and their own dreams … Read more

Peter Forgács has a long-standing reputation as Hungary’s most innovative documentary film-maker. His latest film, A dunai exodus (The Danube Exodus, 1998), was a highlight of the 30th Hungarian Film Week and shared the Grand Jury prize for best documentary. Using amateur film taken by a ship’s captain, Forgács relates two stories which took place during the war: the exodus of Central European Jews to Palestine and the exodus of ethnic Germans from Bessarabia to “the fatherland.”

Sven Spieker: The first question I’d like to ask you has to do with the notion of “Mitteleuropa.” The question is … Read more

George Legrady teaches Interactive Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has previously held full time appointments at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, San Francisco State University, University of Southern California, and the University of Western Ontario. Recent interactive installation exhibitions have taken place at the Centre Pompidou, Paris [Pockets full of Memories], 2001; the new Richard Meier designed Siemens World Headquarters in Munich, 1999/2000; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Sept-Nov 98; the Kunst und AustellungHalle der Bundes Republik in Bonn, [Tracing], 97-98; the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 97-98; the … Read more