RE-DIRECTING: EAST. Conversations # 1
Anna Ilchenko & Andrey Shental

Wednesday, June 5, 2013 at 6 p.m., CCA's Laboratory Building

RE-DIRECTING: EAST. Conversations # 1:
Anna Ilchenko & Andrey Shental from CSW TV.

The presentation will focus on the definitive changes that occurred in the early 90s such as the emergence of unrestrained market forces ("shock therapy"), development of a new institutional framework and educational system in the arts that attempted to include Russian artists in the global art network. In this context, there is a need to demarcate the difference between art of Yeltsin’s (1991-99) and Putin’s (1999-present) epochs and to question the notion of so-called "post-soviet condition" - a traumatic and long-lasting process of transition from communist state to the constitution of neoliberal society.

In 2011-2012 numerous protests against election fraud marked the end of post-soviet transition and emergence of new political consciousness. Supported by ‘creative class’, the protest movement stimulated a redefinition of the role of art within Russian society: art historians called to de-artify political protests; artists responded to the protest action in various ways; curators became "companions-in-arms" and "artivism" groups operated on the verge of art and politics. Therefore, Russian art community attempted to reconfigure cultural production, according to the current social and political situation.

A subsequent subject of the presentation will be complications of art education in Russia, describing the difference between Institute of Contemporary Art (neo-formalism) and the Rodchenko School (socio-political art). Simultaneously, the commercialisation and neoliberalisation of the academic system instigated creation of alternative modes of education (and politicisation) that emerged as a critique of this state of affairs.

Identification struggles, that became visible as part of the wider protest movement, since then have developed their own modes of operation and require a separate discussion. Young feminist artists and curators were heard due to media scandals and post-colonial art gained academic and institutional support, whereas the absence of adequate LGBT and queer studies was retroactively constructed through fictitious re-politicisation of certain artists of the 90s. This tendency would be articulated and questioned in its relation to a more general struggle for "social justice".