Floor-projection of video-documentation of this action of May 3, 2013. The curators take responsibility for the installation with 250m of barbed wire, which was not of Pyotr Pavlensky’s conception.

In this action-performance, Pyotr Pavlensky lay naked inside an enormous roll of barbed wire in front of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly. This protest against ever more draconian laws being passed illustrated how, in the artists words, “every move you make, causes pain”.

Carcass immediately drew the attention of passers-by and security personnel. As the artist puts it, “these projects are created by everybody involved. Some things are just impossible to predict. For instance with Carcass, I could not predict that a naked man would be taken into the main entrance of the Legislative Assembly’s building, because even officials enter through the staff entrance on the side. It was done by the police who joined and participated in the process.” (http://www.sptimes.ru/?action_id=2&story_id=37455)

Soon later the authorities brought Pavlensky to a psychiatrist, in an attempt to have him declared mentally unfit for freedom. Luckily, the doctor was unwilling to confirm this, and declared the artist perfectly sane. After a further day in custody, no clear charges could be found against the artist, and he was released to general surprise and public sympathy.

Social and traditional media attention the entire process resulted in the action gaining wide international resonance.

“Glitch” of print-paper on public wall, 2013.

Visibility: Seen by drivers from the road with the most traffic in northern Norway.

Artist’s text:

Location: Tromsø, Norway, 400 km. north of the Arctic Circle. 2013.

Subject: The Sami People. The Sami are an ethnic group which sparsely populates northern Norway, Russia, Finland, Sweden, with descendents in Northern America and also, according to official statistics, in Ukraine. The self-designation of the people is “sami”, “saami» (sami) — which according to some versions, derives from the Baltic word * ẑeme («Land”).

In a world that tends towards globalization, with homes filling up with Ikea stools, Coca-Cola and hamburgers — there is a blurring and loss of cultural knowledge and social uniqueness of small nations around the world. There is a forced destruction and self-destruction of difference. The social meat-grinder indiscriminately creates a total viscous mass out of us.

How: Glitch — for me a glitch is a visual representation of memory, recollections, situations when we remember the object, but cannot catch details. It is like a dream, like an attempt to remember the dream.

A glitch is honest, an attempt to get out of deceptive reality, out of the artificial manipulation of consciousness with sweet / vulgar / quality visual imagery of advertising space, out of branding systems and embellishment of everyday life. The poor image is authentic / truthful.

Glitches are very architectural, geometric, but inconsistent. This is very important. Every art work created in a city, must not spoil its architecture. Straight lines and simple geometry only underscore modern architectural forms.

Place plays an important part. The archetypical shape of the building in cross section (like when a child draws a house) is a sign (house / land / people). It is close to nature, to mountains, to water. The shape of the house, is the shape of mountains; the shape of the mountains, is the shape of the land.

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Learning Mural, approx. 23 metres in length and 4.4metres in height, 2nd floor.

Not only due to its excruciating subject matter, this “brief comment” on over 23 x 4 metres of wall space has been a focus of the Norwegian and international press. With characteristic aesthetic largess, emotional tact and intellectual breadth Nikolay Oleynikov’s work addresses what few Norwegian artists, so far, have dared to approach: the case of the Christian fundamentalist terrorist Anders Breivik.

Simply recounting the actual incident euphemistically referred to as “the case the 22nd of July” in Norway would necessarily reproduce, and hence risk amplifying, its deranged message. Oleynikov’s approach is more subtle. VillmarksLiv investigates its “conditions of possibility”, so to speak, looking deeper into societal changes that gave rise to it.

VillmarksLiv which translates into English as Wildlife, takes to task the “traditional Norwegian hunt”, a swath of “normality” which provides the material substance and vivid metaphor of Oleynikov’s work. His artistic research started by looking through hunting magazines sold at any airport news-stand. He was appalled by their grotesque glorification of blood and gore juxtaposed with images representing “tradition”. He vividly recalls the image of a “pure-bred” blond and braided young Norwegian girl, with a deer-heart dripping with blood clenched in her hands.

His case is clear; yet this is not all. From his research into the history of hunting magazines, Oleynikov observed a break around the turn of the twenty-first century, when media-culture underwent a profound shift. Before this, “practically the only dead animal one would see is a fish.” Now, the form of “pornography” is ubiquitous, he says, and found at the eye-level of any child (rather than on the top rack).

This visual-historical analysis and contextualization of the “22nd of July” makes VillmarksLiv the stuff of psycho-societal critique. Oleynikov’s large mural integrates political and cultural texts with graphic renderings of dead game, thereby putting into question what he understands as the self-satisfied self-perception of the exemplary “oil-welfare-state”. Conditioned by a false “media-memory” of a healthy traditional normality — and here the Oleynikov’s adroit perception extends well beyond the Norwegian case —  contemporary neoliberal visual culture mixes “visual neoconservatism” with a pornography of violence.

Works on paper, cloth, mixed media and on the wall. Includes several works. Dimensions variable.

In a secular revelation of the rich confusion of cultures Babi Badalov has travelled – including the Azerbaijani, Soviet, Russian, British, French, LGBT, asylum seeker, immigrant and many more  – he may be said to paint in the manner the ecstatic mystic “speaks in tongues”.

In this new installation at the landing of the second floor of the TKF, Badalov has given vent to his innermost thoughts and memories. It is a rare occasion that he tells the audience not only of his artistic pathways, his wonderfully a-grammatical poetry, or his a-status as a refugee and asylum seeker over months and years – but also of the rich confluence and confusion of his cultural genealogies. He speaks of his roots over 4000 km away on the Azeri border to Iran, of his several (false) birth certificates, of his anger with ‘mainstream makers’ and above all, of the interweaving of his many “geopolitical” languages. Cyrillic script morphs into latin, is overrun by arabic, and returns to English to reveal new meanings in its mis-readings. Nobody but Badalov could find as many ways to mis-spell the word SORRY, or rather, as he says, spell it as it might appear to you in the rear-view mirror: as if it was the writing on an ambulance or a chasing police car. In conjunction with his SORRY SOЯЯY SOЯRY (the letters on a keyboard do not suffice) Badalov’s “Mazimir Kalevich”, a white squashed square past which the visitor walks towards the future, let’s us overcome even the post-post-post-…modern. We are in a state of “pre-“.

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Series of illustrations with accompanying texts. Prints on paper, 59×42, 2012.

Installed in the “Infothek” where visitors of the TKF can relax and read the texts either on the wall or in a folder-booklet of the prints and texts of the “Chronicle”. Read it here.

Victoria Lomasko introduces her own work as follows:

“2012 was marked by heavily attended protests by the Russian opposition. For the first time since the early 1990s, the protest movement in Russian attracted worldwide attention. Many people anticipated an “orange” revolution.

Beginning with the elections to the State Duma, on December 4, 2011, and until November 2012, I kept a graphic “chronicle of resistance” in which I made on-the-spot sketches of all important protest-related events. [In this work I] recall and describe the protests, in which I was involved as a rank-and-file albeit regular participant.”

Originally published in Russian in Volya 8 (40), December 2012; subsequently published on Liva.com.ua; First published in English on the blog Chto Delat News in January 2013. Thanks to Thomas Campbell for permission to reprint his English translation of Victoria Lomasko’s accompanying text.

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The Front of Anarcho-Dolls is a mini protest-rally by a series of dolls that are symbols of resistance

against destructive ideologies, human vices and thoughtless actions and neglect by individuals and authorities. The message applies not only to Norway, because similar problems exist around the globe. The Front provides an opportunity for the audience — on the street, at a bus-stop or at the art hall — to think again about intolerance, ethnic hatred and environmental issues: to realize our failings and inaction in face of these threats, and prevent their overlapping.

Trailer of For Marx, Feature 100 minutes, colour, 1:1,85, Dolby Digital 5.1

Director’s Talk and Q&A at the Screening

Venue: Verdensteatret Cinema
Time: 7.30pm, 14 Septemeber

Director and Scriptwriter: Svetlana Baskova Directors of Photography: Maksim Mosin, Egor Antonov
Production Design: Svetlana Baskova
Sound: Kirill Vasilenko
Editing: Veronika Pavlovskaia
Cast: Sergei Pakhomov, Vladimir Epifantsev, Viktor Sergachev, Lavrentii Svetlichnyi, Aleksandr Kovalev, Vladimir Iakovlev, Denis Iakovlev, Mikhail Kalinkin
Producers: Anatoli Osmolovski, Andrei Silvestrov, Gleb Aleinikov
Production Ad Studio, CINEFANTOM

The workers in a steel factory have organised an independent trade union to protest against intolerable working conditions, rotten cafeteria food, wage cuts, and layoffs. The factory owners, who have the official trade union on their payroll, seek to combat their activities with every trick in the book. With a focus more on irony than psychology, the film cites all kinds of historical, literary, and aesthetic discourses in intelligent, entertaining manner. While the capitalist (portrayed here in the style of the oil barons from American TV series) is concerned with expanding his collection of representative art as a means of expressing his power, the members of the workers’ film club debate aesthetic concepts by pitting Brecht against Hollywood. And the independent unionists discuss the theses of Marxist historian Mikhail Pokrovsky, who relates the history of Russia as one of class struggle. While its content may be the stuff of heroic sagas (film history showing where rotten cafeteria food can lead), contemporary turbo-capitalism is more familiar with broken heroes and showdowns rather than revolution. Both Brechtian and Hollywood in formal terms: alienation effect and bloodbath.