 |
Main Project
|
|
Iara Boubnova
HISTORY IN PRESENT TENSE
event
site and dates
The artists in this part of the main program of the 2nd Moscow Biennial come from a region that is seen as questionably original – Eastern Europe has been invisible for what it actually is for it has been perceived as either a lesser copy of the Soviet model or as a bunch of countries little more then “ladies in waiting to Europe (to the West)” (to use a term coined by Sarat Maharaj during the Gasthof project in Staedelschule in Frankfurt in the summer of 2002). The dominant discourse seems to have awarded Eastern Europe the status of permanent emulation - either of socialist or capitalist models of a slightly more easterly or a slightly more westerly kind. Eastern Europe seems to be stuck in the double bind of being neither a winner nor a looser; from the global point of view it is like a living metaphor of the expression “you win some, and you lose some…” It seems that every time the God of Geopolitics is doing his casting for the global play in the world of today Eastern Europe is usually given the part of the footnote…
This section of the 2nd Moscow Biennale accepts this kind of casting with neither prejudice nor frustration. It considers the footnote to be of a rather positive value. Being a footnote has its advantages – one is less responsible for the wrong doings of the world; one is less responsible for the right doings of the world as well… One is more often than not on the receiving end of History, which makes it possible to take a distanced attitude to it. In Eastern Europe, in the footnote, criticality is more in the order of irony rather than of discourse.
The artists and works in this selection are dealing with the flip side of that famous Benjamin-ian notion of history, which is written by the winners. These artists are dealing with the invisible undercurrents of notions and agendas that flow either way, backwards and forwards in time and space. Not seeing themselves as either winners or losers, the artists and works in this selection are looking into cultural amnesia as a prerequisite of any kind of societal “progress”. For them cultural amnesia is seen as defining that unspoken part of the historical narrative that the winners are usually neglecting while the losers never have either the chance or the platform to voice out. The artists and works in this selection are looking into history in the present tense - while living in the here and now of their city/country of residence (wherever that might be at the moment) as well as keeping in mind their city/country of origin, they seem to be projecting thoughts and feelings, visions of the world and notions of its workings both backwards and forward. While exploring the benefits as well as the shortcomings of cultural amnesia they are able to construct a sovereign position for contemporary art where little remains unnoticed and nothing is taken for granted; where capitalism is born out of socialism, and where you may have to step aside in order to move forward…
Cultural amnesia is a defining characteristic of our time/world. It is not only a strategy for survival for specific cultures, now it is a pre-condition for inclusion into the mainstream global processes, a spring board for self-promotion and a marketing tool. It seems that cultural identity is defined now by the specific kind of amnesia as much as by mental constructions and imagined qualities. Cultural amnesia, while being common for a lot of countries, is for many countries in Europe identical to their ability to be European, to fit in, to access, to function as a satellite at least… On the other hand, that’s how cultures are becoming even more complex palimpsests where the important thing is not the purity of each layer but the multilayered quality of the cultural fabric itself. It seems that on this level cultural amnesia means - the more hybrid the culture, the more complex and interesting the identity. Thus amnesia of this kind provides certain societies, which we have in mind here, with the opportunity to erase bad memories and frustrating experiences of failure and humiliation. But it also provides them with the position of influence on the current political and cultural process through the imposition of their newly acquired “purified” identity status.
Take for example the process of enlargement of the EU and its currently complex relations to Russia - the formerly-part-of-the-USSR Baltic countries, as member states of the EU, are now in a position to dictate (or at least influence) to their former “master”, something the former “master”, in his turn, is not keen to accept or tolerate from them. And this applies to all new EU member states that used to be part of the Soviet Block of countries in the past. By forgetting their 20th c. histories these countries are able to construct new identities for the 21st c. The remnants of the old EE are now divided into already European (after a period of being semi-European or half-European, or not-quite-yet European, etc.) and not-in-near-future European cultures such as exemplified by Ukraine or Belarus for instance. On the other end of the spectrum are the ex-Yugoslav countries that while being not-really-Socialist countries in the past (from the point of view of the Soviet Block ideologues) are now largely seen as not-quite European countries in terms of their inability to demonstrate cultural and political amnesia in order to fit better into the new order of Europe. I have in mind here Serbia, Albania, Kosovo and all of these. The ability to “perform” cultural amnesia is in this respect equivalent to going through a test period for being European. The inability for that is what triggers the attention of the Hague Tribunal and all the other watchdogs of the “right way” to normalization.
I have focused on these artists from EE not in order to reconfirm the existence of some cultural ghetto, unlike any other today. The main reason is that in EE the processes of cultural amnesia are more visible while the new layers of the cultural palimpsest are much fresher… On the other hand, most of the EE cultures are officially presenting themselves as being European not only in the sense of their cultural roots but also in the sense of their newly acquired modernity, which is speeding up along the avenues of EU integration and mature capitalism. That makes them strangely more progressive in comparison to the not-yet European EE countries of the likes of Belarus, for instance. But the problem is that thus conditioned, cultural amnesia is accelerated, local problems and trauma are forgotten while the hypertext of these cultures is written straight on the European matrix. The works of the artists in this selection represent an attempt and a possibility to track down the non-dominant European cultural history. At the same time, the footnote locality and the status of being “neither winners, nor losers” provides the artists in this selection with open venues for generalizations, for the creation of new myths, for urban visual archeology of layers, for experimenting with the identity zone of the self and so on.
In other words, the artists in this selection are attempting to reconstruct the basis of the palimpsest through the authenticity of experiences on the receiving end of history.
Artists:
|
|
