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text: Olga Kopenkina

Exhibition Post-Diasporas: Voyages and Missions is dedicated to strategies of cultural identification in the works of the artists who have had experience of living in emigration and diaspora (or diaporas), with its characteristic contradictions between a voluntary assimilation and cultural self-isolation. The artists, most of whom moved to the West in the beginning of the 90s – Alina and Jeff Bliumis (USA), Daniel Bozhkov (USA), Pavel Braila (Moldovia – Holland), Yuriy Gavrilenko (USA), Anton Ginzburg (USA), Olga Kisseleva (France), Anna Kowalska (Poland – Austria), Joanna Malinowska (USA), Yaroslav Mogutin (Russia – USA), Sviatoslav Solgannik (USA), Yevgeniy Fiks (USA) – have an experience of navigation between various cultures as well as understanding of the differences between "foreign" and "one’s own" cultures.

From one side, all participants came from Eastern Europe; each of them undertook the transition from the socialist and post-socialist reality - with the memory of its forcible cultural and national assimilation - into the pluralist world of the democracies of Western Europe and the USA. From another side, the reality of the Western world does not at all mean the absence of ideology. The 90s and 2000s – when the artists’ identities were formed – were the time when the world became aware of the consequences of globalization and when the stereotypes and categories of political correctness, laying in the foundation of the late-capitalist practices of cultural exchanges, began to shape. Contemporary context of the Western world (especially of the big metropolises) is an intersection of the various politics of identity: gender, ethnic, racial, class, etc. This is tightly connected to discussions of globalization, in relation to which the discourse of locality, national and political autonomy becomes of extreme importance. At the same time, artists are obviously confronted with the situation in which “diaspora has become a constant reminder of the Soviet past, of the Soviet trauma that the new Russia, in its desperate wish to remain in denial, wants to suppress.” (Yevgeniy Fiks) In these discussions, post-diaspora represents a contingent subjectivity which is not something to be located but a process through which the world is to be perceived.

The issue of the relations of diasporic subject to her/ his national culture and history is refracted in peculiar way in practices of those artists, who undertake a journey to the country of departure, combining both Gulliver’s encounter with “strange” societies and Ulysses’ anticipation of “cultural shock” in his comeback home. It occurs in Postcards from Warsaw, a work by Anna Kowalska. Kowalska juxtaposes the postcards, made during her trip to the native Warsaw, that depict, with the effect of deja vu,” realia of Warsaw ghetto of the 1940s, which turn out to be the setting built for Roman Polanski’s film “The Pianist,” with the photographs that Kowalska took two years after Polanski film on the site of the former ghetto, in which the economic utopia of the contemporary post-Soviet metropolis is presented.

The theme of return, undoubtedly, is present in the three-chanalled video Barons’ Hills by Pavel Braila, which looks into modern Moldova, artist’s motherland. The work shows the houses of gypsy “barons,” Moldavian Noveau Riche: eclectic, abundantly decorated facades and interiors of the gigantic mansions embody the essence of a diasporic subject-nomad which builds its own culture from the elements of “others’.”

Personal experience is projected by Olga Kisseleva in her video work Border as parallel to social-political material that she “finds” during her multiple trips around the globe – trips that Julia Kristeva would call “cosmopolitan voyages.” At the same time, she points out to a “border” as a symbol of contemporary disintegration and alienation occurred inside the post-soviet world which is opposed to the infinite freedom of an individual represented in Kisseleva’s video by the dance of Katie Anjur.

Alina and Jeff Blumis, in their pictorial series entitled geometric geography, generalize their experience of emigration associated with dramatic transition from the socialist - above-the-individual - reality into the context of other cultural and national identifications. In the creation of this series, the artists used the industrial materials and production processes, whereby provoking the conflict with work’s highly personal content.

In her work Untitled, Joanna Malinowska cleans New York residents’ apartments in exchanges for lectures on philosophy – an image of Polish émigré utilizing the stereotype of a Polish woman in the Western consciousness. Another work of Malinowska, 2,258.3 square meters of ”Karamazov Brothers,” a manual copying of Dostoyevski’s novel, is revisiting a national (in this case, Russian) culture in format of tedious, time-consuming action that is associated with the self-discipline and exercise in “faith” of what art is.

Daniel Bozhkov, in work “The Station of New Productivists,” explores mutations of Western culture (including consumer culture) on the Eastern-European soil: Swedish furniture store IKEA appears as a “Western” bacillus the presence of which in Russian context is analyzed through the juxtaposition of Swedish names for IKEA items and their description in Russian. Another part of Bozhkov’s project – documentation of the action of cutting of Bozhkov’s own beard realized in front of the statue Peter the Great in Moscow – an artist’s reaction on the historical perverseness of Russian reality, its harsh transition from the appropriation of the foreign (represented by beardless Swedes inspiring Peter the Great to forbid to wear beards in Russia in 18 c.) to the hostility towards it (if to assume that the possessor of the beard is a foreigner for whom beard is a unalterable and comfortable part of his look.

National references can be recognized in Maxim Vakhmin - a Russian immigrant, artist and master of survival, living at the streets of New York – the protagonist of film 20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup by Yuri Gavrilenko and Sviatoslav Solgannik. Vakhmin’s troubles, his self-destructiveness and self-negation, put him in line with the famous characters of the literature of social realism.

Yaroslav Mogutin, in his photographic works, united under the same title “No Love,” Yaroslav Mogutin confronts his own media image of “Russian Slava,” made by the Western mass media, a narrative based on the real experience of extensive travels and intimate encounters, where the author persuasively avoids dealing with the fixed national identifications and appealing to the cultural clichés.

Dilemma assimilation/ isolation is present in Anton Ginzburg’s work totemdoppelganger. Ginzburg, using (and reproducing) totems and signs of “other” diasporas (like Raiders, Latin-American football team from Oakland, California) as well as mass-produced objects of the 2000s (in totemdoppelganger, it is an “ipod”), which are perceived by the author as contemporary “totemic poles” of desire, reveals one more aspect of diasporic subjectivity, the essence of which is, from the one hand, personal mimicry of an immigrant inside of “other” culture (in this case, it is Western modernist and postmodernist culture), and from another - one’s parallel and exclusive existence in it as an alien.

Focusing on the subject of computer hacking, Yevgeniy Fiks, in Hackers’ Cubicle explores the potential of art to intervene in the sphere of the repressive apparatus of states and big business. At the same time, Yevgeniy Fiks juxtaposes the activist hacking of the western artists to their Russian fellows – computer programmers, who “professionally” break into banks. Thus the hacking gains the form of two parallel practices, which have different origins and different cultural codification. Within this dilemma, the author attempts to position himself as a representative of the Russian diaspora in the West. As a narrative parallel to the 3-D model of the “cubicle of a Russian hacker,” video projection includes the footage filmed in the Rickers Island prison where the prisoners learn how to refurbish computers.