At Fragment Gallery in the centre of Moscow, I make my way through a room that feels like a translucent labyrinth. The floor is covered with waves of white soft material and numerous videos flick on fine sheer fabric hanging from the ceiling. The videos are a fluid collage of alien-looking natural landscapes, insta-stories and stray images. Together with glossy photo-sculptures, bits of black plastic, scented smoke and coloured moss, it’s an immersive experience of the future yet to come: post-human, post-gender, post-digital. The exhibition, titled Transverse Hyperspace, is the debut show of emerging Russian artist Sofya Skidan. Skidan is a recent graduate of Moscow’s Rodchenko School of Multimedia and Photography, and a Russian artist of the new hyper-connected era, keen to take on questions which sprawl much further than the borders of Russia and its national narratives.
In the Western cultural narrative, Russia is often viewed through the prism of otherness. The fashion world has become obsessed with Russia in recent years, thanks to the so-called “post-Soviet aesthetic” movement which manifested through the work of designer Gosha Rubchinskiy and stylist Lotta Volkova. During a time of intensifying political isolation, fashion and photography channelled the new authentic youth culture movement — but through the lens of “poor but sexy” post-Soviet stereotypes. Russian contemporary art, however, is a completely different story: a manifestation of the growing global connection emerging beyond the ghostly walls of 20th-century history.
Summer 2018 paved the way for a moment of newfound cultural dialogue in Russia. During the month of the FIFA World Cup, Russian cities were flooded with thousands of visitors from all over the world. They may not have been art buffs exactly, but many were lucky to witness Pussy Riot’s performance “The Policeman Enters the Game” during the final. Away from the football buzz, the sixth Moscow International Biennale of Young Art took place in venues across the city, uniting over 60 emerging young artists from across the globe. Together, they explored the particularities of the contemporary human condition: constant consumption, constant online presence and our subsequent fatigue. Underneath the isolationist political narrative well-known in the West, the currents of a new global-minded Russian culture were rising.
This summer, Russia’s key contemporary art institution, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, celebrated its ten-year anniversary. Located in the Gorky Park, Garage Museum occupies a former Soviet restaurant, a modernist structure brought back to life by Rem Koolhaas and his OMA studio in 2015. Garage Museum is well known for bringing global blockbuster artists to Moscow — Takashi Murakami, Rashid Johnson and Juergen Teller, to name but a few. But aside from attracting big names, Garage has been doing hugely important work to educate its audience about contemporary art: it has an expansive public programme; pioneers inclusivity; supports young Russian artists through grants, and in September is planning to open a number of artist studios, available to Russian and international artists.
“When we started Garage ten years ago, we had ten thousand visitors a year, and last year we finished with 700 thousand,” says Anton Belov, director of the museum. “I think people’s perception of contemporary art is changing — and much faster I expected. Even classical institutions, such as the Pushkin Museum and Tretyakov Gallery are now investing in contemporary art. I thought for the changes we’re seeing now to come about we would need 20 or 30 years, but they’re already here. People here are hungry for culture, that’s why everything is changing so quickly. ” Today Moscow remains the centre of the Russian art world, with spaces like Fragment Gallery and ISSMAG championing emerging names, but its biggest cultural developments often happen outside of the country — in the international context of Manifesta and biennials in Liverpool, Riga and Venice.
In the programme of this year’s Liverpool Biennial, Aslan Gaisumov showed his recent video works which address personal and collective memory and history. Keicheyuhea (2017) follows the artist’s grandmother as she returns to her lost homeland in the mountainous scenery of the North Caucasus for the first time since the displacement of her family 73 years earlier. People of No Consequence (2016) documents the gathering of a group of elderly men and women, all survivors of the 1944 Soviet deportation of the Chechen and Ingush nations to Central Asia. These stories are rooted in the history of Gaisumov’s native Chechnya but unmistakably relate to the current processes in the contemporary world. “I’m not interested in exporting local into global, and in Chechnya everyone thinks that we’re the centre of the world anyway,” Gaisumov says. “On the contrary, I want to define and preserve something inside the context of where my works are created”.
Displayed at Manifesta 12 in Palermo, works by Evgeny Antufiev also exist in the balance of local and universal. Antufiev often refers to shamanic practices common in his native Siberian Tuva region. At the same time, his ceramics, wooden works, castings and carvings combine imagination with aspects of different international cultures and personal stories. They are endlessly relatable, just like ancient fairytales, dreams and fears.
With a background in Russia’s Dagestan region, Taus Makhacheva had works displayed at three international biennials this Summer. At Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, she showed a collection of speakers on tripods all of which transmitted recorded messages apologising for the delayed reply to an email. For the Liverpool Biennial, she created an ASMR spa: reclining on a specially produced sculpture (by Russian artist Alexander Kutovoi), the visitor received a facial while listening to the history of the lost art. At Manifesta 12, she showed Baida, a video installation which combines a conversation about the challenges of artistic work with the stories of illegal fishermen on the Caspian Sea. “I don’t feel like I belong to a geography,” Makhacheva comments. “I feel much more like exploring the bigger belonging which I share with other artists”.
Working on the intersection of local and global, Russian artists today are asking questions relevant worldwide. How much do our heritage and political circumstances define us? In the world we live in, the global issues we face are much bigger than our national differences. We come with our own unique stories — but we’re all in this together.