In this new work, commissioned for RE-ALIGNED ART in Tromsø, Mikhail Dolyanovsky addresses the power and belief in oil and its representatives. Despite its remote location from the capitals of art and politics, Tromsø has recently been marked out as a future Norwegian capital for arctic drilling — a massive undertaking with massive-scale global consequences. It also has local consequences, with hotel-construction mushrooming and fishing rights being bought up in anticipation of the “gold rush”.

Its title Eat Oil, Drink Oil, lends this series an ironic-tragic liturgical reference. Made with acrylic, marker-pens, sanding and drilling on oil barrels, this distribution of free standing and wall-mounted half-barrels and a large wall-painting, depicts the leaders of the Norwegian state oil companies and other important oil-business figures, including from Norway’s neighbour and partner in oil exploitation, Russia.

A composition with the Norwegian Prime Minister and the Russian President, bowing to kiss their intertwined and dripping flags, with a sea of oil at their knees — in a today’s version of a “friendship of peoples” — greets visitors at the entrance to the art hall.

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Monstrations Banners on the TKF building. WE AREN’T COMPLAINING ABOUT ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING IS JUST GREAT, REGARDLESS OF THE THE FACT THAT WE HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE AND DON’T KNOW ANYTHING AT ALL ABOUT THIS PLACE.

“We, simple Siberian artists, woke up and – to our surprise – found ourselves at a protest art exhibition in Norway. Here, in Siberia, we organize May rallies with absurdist slogans that are called Monstrations, showing the absence of protest culture and political life in our country in an ironic way. We draw women in balaklavas and then read opinions of experts, who concluded that the halo is dark instead of light, which indicates the triumph of evil powers. The court insists on the fact that our art is a public insult of feelings of all orthodox and catholic believers. In Siberia we deal with prosecutors and militant orthodox believers. Living here we understand that the best curator for an artist is a cop.

But what is it like to speak ironically about that “old dame” Russia, when being in problem-free Norway? How can we, criminals, anarchists, blasphemers, put ourselves in the frame of the cozy exhibition, posing as revolutionaries on barricades, entertaining bourgeois European public?

Siberian savageness doesn’t let us to write a long text using abstruse language that is spoken in contemporary art galleries, and conscience can’t find an excuse for empty demagogy on safe territory. We don’t have an answer to the questions of who we are and what we are doing here, but we try to stay honest. We complain about nothing, we like everything, even though we have never been here and we know nothing about this place”.

[The phrase itself is a direct quote from a slogan first used by the “Collective Actions”, an artist group including, most prominently, Andrei Monastyrski]

RUSSIAN VERSION, dropped from roof of the TKR:

SAMI-LANGUAGE VERSION on the flagpole of the TKR

ENGLISH version, on the staircase banister of the TKF

Rebel Karaoke is precisely what it says it is: a sing-and-shout-along machine for engaging in revolutionary songs and chants. All of them were recorded on a street near you…

This audiovisual installation includes material from the latest political events and demonstrations in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, the USA  and elsewhere around the world. The viewer is familiarized with many forms of protest, including demonstrations and other rallies in Russian, Turkish, Arabic and English. The karaoke videos often include phonetic subtitles, to aid those inexperienced chanting or singing in a foreign language.

According the young Moscow-based artist Ivan Brazhkin, as a spectator-participant, one is given the possibility to express solidarity with the actors and movements by joining the protesters and chanting their progressive political slogans with them. He insists that the work pushes the viewer to merge with the protesting masses and acquire a political identity.

This is not so far fetched as it seems, as shouting on a quiet day, or indeed any day, in Tromsø Kunstforening, will draw a lot of attention, in this town where few demonstrations usually take place…

Graphic novel, 2013. Eight (double sided) A2 prints, and thirty-one A3 prints on the wall.

Art Activism (in comics) is a graphic novel about activist art events in Russia since 2000 composed and illustrated by Alexey Iorsh. The English translation by Isabel Ghorst and the prints were commissioned specifically for the RE-ALIGNED ART exhibition.

After a period of “getting on with it”, Alexey Iorsh got himself a Mohawk again in his mid-40s, as the authoritarian Putin era kicked in. An active supporter of Pussy Riot and other political prisoners in Russia, the artist tells the story of changes in Moscow art activism scene over the last three decades. Going back to the 1990s, he reminds us of the likes of Anatoly Osmolovsky, Oleg Kulik and those that went into exile, like Avdey Ter-Oganyan and Alexander Brenner.  Coming to more recent events, he explains how the dark shadow of the 282nd statute of the Criminal Code has hung over Russian art activism since 2010. In 2010 Andrei Yerofeev and Yuri Samodurov were charged under Article 282 for organising the exhibition “Forbidden Art”, for example. Around this time, too, the new phenomena of “Radical Religious Activism” appeared. Subsequently Iorsh sketches the events surrounding Voina, Pussy Riot, Skif, Denis Mustafin, Tanya Volkova, Anton Nikolaev, Viktoria Lomasko and other central figures in recent art activism.

Comics provide a uniquely visual and compelling way to get across these important events in the Moscow art scene. Told “from the inside”, they are all the fresher and present to the an audience, no matter how far away from the “scene of the crime”.

The graphic novel in English translated by Isabel Ghorst for RE-ALIGNED ART

The original Russian version

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Installation of all covers of the newspaper of the Chto Delat? collective since its inception in 2003. Wall of the Re-reading Room, 2013.

The 10th anniversary of the Chto Delat? Workgroup and its newspaper coincided with the idea of installing a full archive of the publication’s back-issues in the “Re-Reading Room” of the RE-ALIGNED ART exhibition.

Dmitry Vilensky created this wall-installation, or design as he also called it, with 10 years of the newspaper’s title-pages arranged in 10 columns around the room. Each column represents one year of the newspaper’s production, with some displaying up to five issues. Below a line in institutional blue, offering both a visual and content-filled base for the columns of covers, are pages from inside the newspapers.

This installation provides the opportunity to look back at one of Chto Delat?‘s most influential contributions to the international art context. Each newspaper addresses a theme or problem central to the search for new political subjectivities, and their impact on art, activism, philosophy, and cultural theory.

Edited by Dmitry Vilensky and David Riff in collaboration with the workgroup Chto Delat? the bilingual (English and Russian) newspaper appears on an irregular basis (roughly once every 2-3 months) and varies between 16 and 24 (A3) pages. Its editions (3,000- 9,000 copies) are distributed for free at cultural events and exhibitions by its producers.

So far, the rubrics and sections of the paper have followed a free format, depending on the theme at hand. There are no exhibition reviews. The focus is on the local Russian situation, which the newspaper tries to link to a broader international context. Contributors include artists, art theorists, philosophers, activists, and writers from Russia, Western Europe and the United States.

Re-read the full back-archive here.

Graphic prints (B/W) 4,4 m x 4,0 m; series of printed photos (sizes variable); acrylic on wall; 3 helmets with head-lights.

Roman Minin’s detailed graphic work and series of photos laments the disappearance of his native Donetsk mining culture. Entering the pitch black of the “shaft” with only a light fixed to one’s helmet as a guide, one discovers a maze of intricate labyrinths, an iconography of life and death in the mines, and as a whole, what one might think of as shrine to a fast disappearing past.

Himself born into a community of miners, the vast majority of which are no longer employed today, a “plan of escape” became a necessary figure for the artist. The Donetsk Region was at the heart of Ukraine’s, indeed, the whole Soviet Union’s coal industry. In steep decline for years, it has faced severe crises, not only economic but also social and environmental.

The current generation stands at the end of the “gold rush” in the Donetsk Region, and faces the harrowing consequences — with only toxic fracking in the offing, beckoning even worse hazards. In arctic Norway, by contrast, the drilling for oil is about to begin.. (more on this contrast in the exhibition in Small Projects [link to be provided])

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Textual, discursive and educational formats form an important aspect of “re-aligned”, political or engaged art. Here is a space for the RE-READING of these materials. It also gives a room for the potential discussion and re-activation of the ideas they may inspire.

The journals, newspapers, books, catalogues, etc. presented here are only examples of current practices and does not claim to be exhaustive. Further related contributions (from any location or culture), proposals for discussion or other formats on “re-aligned” art and politics in this space are more than welcome.

Location: Kurant Gallery, Søndre Tollbodgate 17, 9008 Tromsø

Opening on the 14th of September, [time]

The installation has a form of rope way on roller skates with the flags of different countries. The flags are spinning in a circle, getting into a basin of water at the bottom and then squeezing by special rollers. Flags are painted with gouache on cloth, so gradually paint comes off and staining other flags, the walls and floor. National signs are fading away, as the “pre-mondial” stage of our planet does not need symbols of nation states. (ZIP Group)

For more photos see: http://artgroupzip.blogspot.de/2013/11/flags-washing-machine-kurant-gallery.html