Exhibition | Curator: Begüm Özden FIRAT
We are living in times of “neoliberal utopia” that keeps on generating ecological, social, economic and moral catastrophes on a global scale. While there are numerous evidences of capitalism’s demise, the memory and monuments of the Soviet Union, whose collapse was supposed to mark the end of history, still stand today. Although these monuments have been left to decay, abandoned or buried beneath the sand where they cannot be found, they linger on in local recollections in ghostly forms: they live on in altered street names; they resurface in unexpected geographies. The realized and actual “Communist utopia” continues to haunt the present, sometimes as a sentimental story of the past, sometimes as a nightmare. The exhibition Catastrophe and the Dream World brings together works that carry this mythical and vanished utopia into the present.
allesallen, 2017
Petra Gerschner,
wallpaper, 2016-present
2017 marks the centenary of the October Revolution. The political and social transformation that Soviet society experienced included an aesthetic revolution. With the emergence of the constructivist movement in art, art attempted to play a new social role by intervening in the production of everyday life. For the first time, artists had the opportunity to make their work accessible to large segments of society…
Petra Gerschner unearths a hand-drawn motif, probably conceived in 1921 by the two constructivist artists Ljubow Popowa (b. 1889, Moscow) and Warwara Fjodorowna Stepanowa (b. 1894, Kaunas) which was never produced in print, in the form of a wallpaper
By installing the wallpaper in public space, the artist problematizes the history of the distribution of revolutionary artistic practices and opens up for discussion the revolutionary potential of these practices today.
Looking for Lenin
Niels Ackermann and Sebastien Gobert, photo series, 2015-present
“Lenin is still alive. Lenin is still with you.” From the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to today, this anthem is more than just a slogan repeated at every opportunity. Throughout the 20th century, the figure of the revolutionary leader was omnipresent. But today, as Russia prepares to celebrate 100 years of the October Revolution, Ukraine, another wing of the Soviet Union, no longer wants to hear about this past. The country is completing the process of “decommunization”: Since the end of 2016, many of the more than 5500 statues scattered across Ukraine have been razed to the ground.
Photographer Niels Ackermann and journalist Sébastien Gobert have been traveling across Ukraine since the summer of 2015 to document what remains of the Lenin statues.
Through this selection of photographs, which oscillate between the documentary and the symbolic, the artists have created a catalog that will allow us to understand the workings of the memory of a country in search of itself. Lenin is dead. Lenin is no longer with Ukrainians. But his name still hangs painfully over Ukraine’s present and future.
Subtitle of the works
1. Zaporizhia. March 31, 2016
2. The “nose” is from the Kharkiv statue, once the largest statue of Lenin in Ukraine. The photo was taken at the exhibition Let’s Put Lenin’s Head Back Together! (2015) by artist Yevgenia Belorusets at the Pinchuk Art Center.
3. “Chernihiv Lenin” was taken down and dismantled by local artist Alexei Korzh. He planned to use the pieces to finance his new work, but the statue was confiscated by the police on the grounds that it belonged to the local government. After measurements, it was found that about 1 ton of the 3.5-ton statue was missing. Chernihiv. May 6, 2016
4. “Bessarabska Lenin’s” left hand. It is currently in the collection of nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) deputy Igor Miroshnichenko. Kiev, February 16, 2017
Sand Quarry
Raphaël Grisey
Video 6″- 2005
A group of friends set out to dig up the buried history of Germany in a forest. What lies beneath the soil are the fragments of East Germany’s largest statue of Lenin, a 19-meter statue erected in 1971 in the center of East Berlin. After the statue was removed from its pedestal in 1991, it was dismantled and buried in the Köpenick forest. What begins as a picnic in the countryside quickly turns into a challenging memory work.
Blue Wall Red Door
Alban Muja, Yll Citaku, 2009, video, 44″
The documentary focuses on the state of Kosovo, which declared its independence in 2008, ten years after the bloody civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and its transforming social relations. The artists search for this tumultuous recent history in the renamed and sometimes nameless streets of the capital Pristina. How do city dwellers, postmen, taxi drivers, firefighters find their way around this city? History is inscribed in space; each spatial layer contains a history. The streets are haunted not only by people, but also by the ghosts of the heroes who once gave the streets their names. The inhabitants of the city chart their own routes through the spatial monuments of their collective experience…
Apocalypse
Cevahir Buğu, video, 4.30, 2016
6 thousand workers, 20 artists, 25 million Leva (15 million dollars) and 7 years of work, the Buzluca Monument is the largest Communist monument in Bulgaria. Apart from the opening ceremony in 1981 on the 1300th anniversary of the founding of Bulgaria, it was used a few more times with special permissions.
In 1985, after the Glasnost and Perestroika movement, when the government and the political regime changed, the monument was confiscated by the new regime. The Buzluca Monument was soon abandoned to its fate and looted by the public. Designed as one of the icons of communism, today the Buzluca Monument resembles an abandoned UFO on a peak. As real and utopian as a UFO. Buzluca continues to hover over the present, its ruins collapsing on the present as well as the past.
Welcome Lenin
Ahmet Murat Öğüt, Aylin Kuryel, Begüm Özden Fırat, Emre Yeksan, Fırat Yücel
2016, Video, 20″
In July 1993, in the Black Sea town of Akçakoca, Mahmut, a fisherman, goes out to sea as he does every Sunday and notices something floating in the sea. He approaches the mass with curiosity and ties it to his boat with difficulty. What emerges from the sea is a wooden bust of Lenin, heavy from swimming and of unknown origin. Welcome Lenin tells the story of this statue, which was thought to be one of the statues discarded after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, traveled in the Black Sea for nearly two years and was finally “preserved” in a dusty warehouse in the municipality building.