Art from Russia HangART-7 Edition 5

HangART-7 Edition 5: Russia

"Russia fly by"

The fifth exhibition in the HangART-7 programme turned its attention to Russia and in particular to the three largest cities in this huge country with its 11 times zones: to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk.

During the era of the Soviet Union a large number of artists were opposed to the official culture and were extensively excluded from society. Contacts with the international art scene were barred. But now artists and institutions have found themselves again and are increasingly coming to terms with the mechanisms of the market. This is reflected not only in the Art Moscow fair, which has been in existence for ten years now, but also in the new Moscow Biennale, which takes place for the second time in January 2007. Official policies have also long embraced art as an asset – “part of the political approach to renewal in the country” – and promote major events with an international outreach. But artists still have difficulties in establishing themselves and in achieving international visibility under the constantly changing circumstances of daily life, despite the fact that there are now active and experienced experts, gallery owners and specialists in institutions in the West interested in promoting, distributing and selling art from the CIS. And there is another side to the coin, in the form of the justified and not infrequent complaints about the loss of critical traditions and the all too affirmative submission to the dictates of the Western art market.

To provide an adequate focus on these three major cities, experts have again been invited to select artists from “their” cities for the exhibition in Salzburg. In Moscow cultural life has been reanimated today in particular by private initiatives. The ERA Foundation, set up by Elena Bereskina, in one of these initiatives, and its director Asya Silaeva was engaged as one of the three curators of the “Russia Fly By” exhibition.

Dmitry Pilikin, an artist and curator from St. Petersburg, scoured the art scene in that city for HangART-7. The third member of the group, Ludmila Ivashina from Novosibirsk, was invited to select representative paintings from this city almost 3,000 kilometres removed from Moscow. These curators have put together an extremely varied picture of artistic attitudes and products. Siberia has long been associated with banishment and the Stalinist punishment camps or gulags. The deportations, that were in fact already taking place in Czarist Russia, did not cease until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Industry has been promoted in Novosibirsk since the 1920s and today the city with its 1.4 million inhabitants is an extremely important industrial and economic centre, with particular focus on the steel and armaments industries, mechanical and aeronautical engineering. Despite the fact that the region is not particularly well endowed with institutions or cultural production, a distinctive artistic character has emerged at the same time. Probably the most well known movement is the actionist Blue Noses founded in 1999, who have become a regular feature exhibitions, biennials and art fairs and whose co-founder Konstantin Skotnikov still lives in the region. Another potential member of the outsider art scene developing outside academic structures and the art system would have been Sergey Bespamyatnykh had he not studied architecture with excursions into design, graphics and public buildings. The four artists from St. Petersburg have all had academic careers. Marina Alexeeva, Sergey Denisov, Vitaly Pushnitskiy Pushnitskiy und Dmitry Shorin will be showing figurative painting from very different points of view at the Hangar- 7, although the theme of “flies” is a recurrent motive with all of them. Flies crop up repeatedly in Ilya Kabakov’s work as a symbol of social and autobiographical processes and elements, as in the inscription “We Are Free”, which turns out on closer inspection to be formed by a number of flies sitting on the wall. These insects have had many divergent significations over the centuries and are regarded in our culture today above all as a nuisance, disruptive factor and carriers of diseases.

In the work of Diana Machulina from Moscow, hair ribbons, Christmas tree decorations and the tape to be cut at an official opening turn out to be ingenious sticky fly-catchers – unpleasant reminders of the past perhaps, when only works of Social Realism with their glorification of workers and the peasant state were allowed. One would think that the themes dealt with by Aleksander Pogorzhelskiy, the second painter from Moscow, had their origins in this era, except for the fact that it is by no means clear what the farming (?) utensils used by the “modern” young people in his pictures are touching, working or destroying. This fifth Hangar-7 exhibition was designed once again to support artists, to make them more visible and to give them better professional opportunities in the international art market. For this purpose we had been assisted by a number of devoted experts and helpers, in particular the three curators and the ERA Foundation in Moscow. We would like to express our sincere thanks to them and to the artists who have agreed to embark on this adventure.

Works are being shown by:

Marina Alexeeva (*1959), Sergey Bespamyatnykh (*1970), Sergey Denisov (*1963), Diana Machulina (*1981), Aleksander Pogorzhelskiy (*1980), Vitaly Pushnitskiy (*1967), Dmitry Shorin (*1971).