research
A year ago, what feels like a past half-forgotten life, my art practice focused on time, memory, human perception of existence, fragility of humans in the face of nature and chaos of life. After the 24th of February 2022 it made a drastic turn to anti-war activism, anti-imperialism and post-colonialism in the post-socialist space. The reason was that the country I was born and raised in, the only passport I’m holding and with which culture I identify myself with, started the war in Ukraine. All the convoluted and wicked psychological challenges what were thrown at my fellow countrymen and me those who love our country but hate its government I described in detail in Unit 2 part: Research. All the processes that came into motion within the first three months of the war only intensified and expanded now already nine months later.
The war has become a filter that is permanently installed and I don’t have to open your eyes to see through it. The filter had a power to reveal unexpected underlayers and change meanings of everything. I went to see one of my favourite installation artist at Tate Cornelia Parker and her famous work “Cold Dark Matter: an Exploded View” and all I saw was any Ukrainian city, village, home that was a little universe in itself and is now blown up and still is in the mid-process just as we see it in the Parker’s artwork.
The war has drawn an invisible but tangible line between Eastern Europeans who feel the war with their bare skin and the people from the rest of the world who sympathise (and god bless them for it!) but have a luxury to live their lives as before. It has left an invisible but deep bleeding laceration between the Ukrainians and the Russians cutting family, friendship, and professional ties. It will not heel in any foreseeable future.
In the times of stress actions help to narrow down your field of view, which is what you need otherwise you get completely crushed by the scale of the catastrophe. I continued to volunteer providing help to the Ukrainians who were open to accept it and to the Russians fleeing from Russia. I volunteer at the community that unites creative people from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine who emigrate in thousands from their countries because of the war, persecution, or just because they don’t agree with their government. My family in its entirety with kids, pets, and elderly started their immigration process to Israel but they haven’t reached it yet. And I continued taking part in protests of “the Russians against the war” movement.
The Russian aggression towards Ukraine shattered both the post-Soviet and Russian identities that were inseparably interlaced in me. I came to realise that we, Russians, need to re-evaluate what being Russian means now. Now to many like me its meaning is filled with shame, loss, existential guilt, and collective responsibility (Jung, 2003). To others who are still being under the spell of skilful and well-funded Kremlin’s propaganda it is filled with chauvinism, imperialistic glory, and colonialistic greed. What does it mean to be a Russian after the 24th of February 2022? What are the basic constituents of the Russian self-identity? Do we all have been poisoned by the imperialistic thinking? How can we “kill the empire” within ourselves?
Since the doomscrolling the news every hour for nine months in a row didn’t bring much result I turned to books and films.
The post-colonial discourse sounds distinctly in the UK (Paxman, 2011). One of my favourite filmmakers and artists Steve McQueen addresses the colonisation history of the British Empire both in his films and his artworks. I draw inspiration from his “Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep” (2002) commemorating the bravery of his predecessors resisting the colonisers on Grenada Island where his parents came from.
In my part of the globe, however, we had another problem - the heritage of the colonial practices of socialism. In Unit 3 I learned that post-socialism is being continuously critically examined from various perspectives (Svašek, 2008), unfortunately not from the arts’ one. Finally, I found works of Madina Tlostanova of Linkoping University of Sweden, a scholar who investigates the post-colonialism in the post-socialist space in the context of arts (Tlostanova, 2017). She put my unformed thoughts into words that not only pro-Putin “majority” but also oppositional intellectuals have been and still are appropriating, trivialising, and depoliticising the decolonial discourse in the post-Soviet space. For centuries the Russian Empire not only has been invading neighbouring countries but also has been practicing the “internal colonisation” (Etkind, 2011). Its history is full of savage massacres, forced resettlement of indigenous nations, their relentless russification and eradication of their unique languages and cultures. Neither the USSR, nor Russia repented of it. The decolonial discourse within Russia is practically non-existent. Only few voices like Nikolay Epple’s in his book “The Uncomfortable Past. The Memory of the State Crimes in Russia and Other Countries” (2020) attempt to talk about it mainly from the historical perspective. Sadly, even among the brightest anti-war Russian activists now there is little awareness of it because they were raised that way. I find it crucial to bring the decolonisation and de-imperialisation narratives into the everyday life of a regular Russian person, both in and outside of Russia.
Since my background is in filmmaking and I truly believe in the role of cinema as a mirror of the society, I researched what films can shed some light on how people in the past reacted and reflected on similar atrocities, self-transformation and psychological traumas. I singled out a few. The most horrifying film in the history of cinema depicting the nightmares of war is “Come and See” (1985) by Elem Klimov. “The Night Porter” (1974) by Liliana Cavani was deemed as provocative and problematic but it seeks to show the doom and the perversions both psychological and sexual of a Holocaust survival and an SS-officer tormented by their past many years after the WWII. “The Conformist” (1970) by Bernardo Bertolucci depicts a Fascist secret agent under the Mussolini’s rule who commits horrible crimes and yet hypocritically seeks refuge in the normality of a traditional marriage having zero feelings towards his wife and children. All these stories can be seen in the present day Russia and in the new Russia to come.
Fiction filmmaking is a slow process and we are yet to see how the Russians of today will face the challenge to deal with this self-identity crisis and which forms this re-evaluation will take. Documentary films are on the contrary quicker to make and I have seen all of them that came out after the 24th of February and touched the topic of the Ukrainian war and postsocialism. The most shocking is “The Occupant” (March, 2022), made of a footage from a captured Russian solder’s phone documenting several months leading up to and the first month of the war in Ukraine. “Broken Ties” (April, 2022) by Andrey Loshak shows what irreconcilable division broke up the Russian families where older generations support the war and the younger generation is disgusted by it. These two documentaries depict the picture that I know for sure is the horrifying reality of my country now.
In my last works I explore one more indispensable attribute of this war - the Russian oil and gas bargaining and the energy crisis. Over the years Putin got most of Europe on his gas and oil hooks and now uses this as a weapon in the hybrid war. Since the beginning of the war the fossil fuel prices skyrocketed and the income the Russian government is receiving for its oil and gas has increased dramatically. All this money goes to kill the innocent people in Ukraine. It took Europe nine months to set the oil ban and to approve the natural gas price cap. The saddest catch of it all is that the loudest supporters of Ukraine are at the same time the biggest Russian fossil fuels importers like Germany for example.
Unit 3 started with our show at Wilson Road where I showed an installation called “Multi-Faith Prayer Room 2022”. This piece tied together the war in Ukraine, the refugees catastrophe, the disintegration of the Soviet empire, the Soviet ressentiment, and the energy crisis as a result of the above. I built the installation around the radiator that will become the altar this winter.
For the final show at Copeland Gallery I wanted to switch from natural gas to oil. I managed to procure a crude oil product solution similar to tar or bitumen and used it as a material. It is a tricky material. Historically, bitumen has been used widely in painting as an additive in the late 18th century and early 19th centuries. It created very deep dramatic black colour that painters were after. However, because of its properties it dries very differently than oil paint so overtime it wrinkles and cracks and transforms in unexpected ways. These effects can be found at Tate - for example the painting of Sir Thomas Lawrence “Homer Reciting his Poems” (1790).
In my works this shortcoming served only as a benefit. It highlights the ephemeral and perishable worth of fossil fuels compared to the value of human lives and the decay of this medium only intensifies the worthlessness of this war.
In my practice I feel a strong imperative that I must find and link together complex concepts from politics, economics, history, or other sciences with everyday life occurrences and to give shape to the connections between these concepts. I call it the “concepts-knitting”. The starting point for my works for the degree show was the underlying feeling I had all these months from the beginning of the war. The other Russians I talked about it confirmed I was not the only one feeling it. I had an amazing support from my friends here in London and across the world who are not from post-Soviet space and are not so deeply immersed in the war context. Friends, and acquaintances, or just random people I met expressed their sympathy and were genuinely concerned how I had been doing. Every time this happened I felt I was speechless and dumbstruck because I felt an overwhelming urge to explain the inexplicable, it practically teared me apart from inside out. They would ask me questions about the war and my particular situation and I felt they expected a concise and well-formed answers from me as someone who knew the situation from within. And I did know it from within. The problem was it was impossible to fit all this in one or two sentences. My urge was to give a three-hour lecture on the history of the USSR and the post-Soviet space to basically any question to show the depths of the problem in its entirety. Usually it all ended in my tears.
In the series of works for the Copeland Gallery show which I called “…self-identity as a Russian 2022: Doves vs. Empire” I explored this feeling and applied my method of “concepts-knitting” to it. My goal was to strip down the complex nature of the events to some basic elements that can actually be expressed with the simplest signs in the semiotic sense of it, just like a one sentence answer.
So, in “…self-identity as a Russian 2022: Doves vs. Empire I” I “knitted” the crude oil medium with the worldwide symbol of peace as a dove and a concept of a game. The doves were origami pieces made of the most fragile and perishable material - rice paper. The concept of a game came from the impression I had from the way people relate to this war. Due to the inability to do much against the nuclear weapon state people worldwide have nothing to do but be third-party observers. Like team supporters who root for their team in a football game. I wanted to condense this impression down to the simplest concept of a game. As the war started with the Russian battleship attacking the Snake Island the concept took shape of the game of battleship known to everyone across nations. In the corners of the canvass I planted the first letters of the phrase a Ukrainian solder replied to the Russian battleship’s call to surrender that day which translates into English as “Russian military ship go fuck yourself”. It became the catchphrase not only among the Ukrainians but also the Russians opposing their government’s military frenzy.
In the second work of these series I simplified it all to the bare minimum: the dove flying from the west to the east i.e. from Ukraine to Russia and the oil pumpjack facing from Russia to the west. The oil pumpjack is made in sgraffito technique, the schematic scratches on the half-dry oil surface. In the last work the torrents of oil are pouring down on the doves and imposing danger on the idea of peace everywhere in the world.
professional skills and career path
Only few months passed since the tragic events turned suddenly my practice and my life upside down. I am still in the process of adjusting to the new circumstances and the new side of my practice. I define the new add-on subject as self-identities and anti-war movement in post-imperialism and post-socialism. I aim to express the ambiguous and conflicted feelings that come as a reaction to the war in Ukraine and the monstruous transformation of Russia. My biggest realisation during this course was the understanding that I see my practice develop as a conceptual art rather than anything else. I enjoy working with 3D materials and I tried an array of different techniques and materials however the driving force for me is an idea, a concept or a complex of concepts. Knowing that it is easier for me to move forward.
The last term I concentrated on learning how to work with clay. My next project is a continuation of the previous works and it's too devoted to the break-up of the USSR. It is a rather big-scale installation made of clay that will transform with time during the show due to the natural qualities of the clay. This project was not suited for the show in the Copeland Gallery because it was not possible to transport it. It must be shaped and built on the premises. So, at the moment I am looking for locations to install this work.
My future plans are to develop a career as an individual artist but also I aim to engage people with Russian and post-Soviet identities in communal art practices and provide platforms for the dialogue on this subject. With the Russian Democratic Society we plan an exhibition of the Russian artists who since the beginning of the war made anti-war protest art in Russia and are now imprisoned for that. I am also starting a blog on the Russian anti-war art and a film club to screen films on anti-imperialism and decolonisation.
The other goal in my practice is to trace and analyse imperialistic memes and ideologemes (as units of cultural ideas and symbols, transmitted from one mind to another through text or speech) that exist in Russian and Soviet art and cinema. The result might take a form of a publication or a short animation film where I’d like to show those memes that hide as innocent jokes but actually carry imperialistic meanings. Such work can be accompanied by interviews with people from ex-Soviet republics and their personal stories how they experienced Russian imperialism in everyday life. Or it might take a form of a guide to help the Russian people who want to improve their communication in this aspect and demonstrate respect to those who suffered from the Russian imperialism. These practices will serve as a foundation for a PhD proposal I am working on. Since I consider myself still very new to the topic I need more practical material and theoretical knowledge to proceed to the next level of research.
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