Featuring: Alina & Jeff Bliumis, Konstantin Bokhorov, Olga Egorova (Tsaplya), Factory of Found Clothes, Yevgeniy Fiks, Dmitry Gutov & Lifshitz Institute, Elena Kovylina Anatoly Osmolovsky Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (Gluklya), Taras Polataiko Dadvid Ter-Oganyan & Aleksandr Korneev, Dmitry Vilensky & Chto Delat (What Is To Be Done?)

Curated by Elena Sorokina.

This multimedia exhibition features works by 12 artists and artists’ collectives, who are informed by such issues as communities, strategies of resistance, Soviet history and its post-Soviet developments and are concerned with problems of representation of local art scenes to international audiences as well as with the notion of “national construction” in art exhibitions.

Tsaplya’s (Olga Egorova) audio piece 35 Years After 10th Commune discloses tensions between the Soviet past and its current representation in popular media; David Ter-Oganyan and Aleksandr Korneev’s video Illegal Library is a personal meditation on their practice of shoplifting Western art books; in his Factory Moments Yevgeniy Fiks deploys photographs provided to him by Russian sex workers; Alina and Jeff Bliumis take a closer look at the phenomenon of recent “revolutions” in the post Soviet countries; in her confrontational performance Shooting Gallery Elena Kovylina presents herself as a target, testing the spectator’s reactions; Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya) reflects on issues of fragility and military power in the collaborative work Trilogy; Taras Polataiko shows the documentation of his project Cradle, for which he traveled to Chernobyl’s alienation zone and infected himself with radioactivity; Dmitry Vilensky and the group Chto delat (What Is To Be Done?) discuss issues of resistance and state of emergency in a newspaper-like reader, Dmitry Gutov and the group Lifshitz Institute present a film documenting the life of one of the most paradoxical intellectuals of the Communist period, the “Russian Clement Greenberg”, Mikhail Lifshitz, who is also referenced in Konstantin Bokhorov’s series Phenomenology of a Soup Can; and Anatoly Osmolovsky’s new installation powerfully comments on the problem of the post-Soviet national symbolism.

Originally from Russia, Elena Sorokina is an independent writer and curator based in New York. She completed the Whitney Curatorial Program and recently curated Crude Oil Paintings at White Columns, New York and the show Enemy Image which is currently on view at Momenta Art, Williamsburg.

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