In 1907, Oskar Kokoschka (1886­–1980) was commissioned to create an illustrated fairy tale for the children of Fritz Waerndorfer, founding member and financial supporter of the Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna’s premier design workshop. In Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys, 1917), Kokoschka produced a haunting narrative poem about the awakening of adolescent sexuality, set on distant islands, far removed from modern city life and bourgeois society. His meticulously crafted text draws on familiar tropes from classical and contemporary literature, including works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Viennese writer Peter Altenberg. While nostalgia is an essential trope of the Romantic period, Kokoschka’s work subverts this emerging canon. His work transforms what should have been a Romantic-style evocation of nostalgia and passes traditional wisdom through myth into a critical dismantling of such a gesture. The designs in the artist’s lithographs exemplify the prevalent decorative style of fin de siècle Vienna, showcasing his adept integration of various “primitivist” trends in European art. This is evident in Die träumenden Knaben’s cloisonné-like outlines, unconventional perspectives, and flat color planes.

Aside from the aspiration to awaken emotions across a vast geography, Romanticism was hardly a united cultural movement. Poets and writers such as Alexander Pushkin in Russia and Lord Byron in Britain were immersed in rethinking histories of imperial conquests and state-building. The emerging heroism of national liberation movements after the collapse of Napoleonic imperialism in Greece, for example, served as the utmost inspiration for Romantic literary mythmaking. Creating poetry out of the heavily imagined past while weaving new mythologies through it as a powerful embodiment of the Romantic style. Goethe asserted that “the highest lyric is decidedly historical,” alluding to the power of synergy between fact and fiction in shaping the ideological foreground of discourse through literature.¹ In the age of economic rationalization, Romanticism stood as a mystic guard of the unyielding power of subjective imagination. Applied to actual historical narratives, it became a powerful tool in constructing political imaginaries.

In 1818, Lord Byron published Mazeppa, a narrative poem introducing Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709), a political leader of borderland Ukraine who, a century before, had stood at the fateful historical intersection between the warring Swedish and Russian Empires. Undoubtedly, Hetman Mazepa played a crucial role in the war as custodian of a borderland; however, the exact details of his actions are disputed, leaving an empty vehicle for Romanticist imagination. Mazepa is known for changing allegiances, but the precise circumstances of his shifts are apocryphal. He initially supported Russian emperor Peter I (r. 1682/1721–25) but later defected to the side of Swedish king Charles XII (r. 1697–1718). As little is known about Mazepa from historical sources, Byron had the freedom to experiment with sentimental inventions. In Mazeppa (1819), he portrays the hetman (commander) as a youthful hero, a romantic soldier of fortune famous for his aesthetic tastes, and a supporter of arts and culture. Ten years later, Russian Golden Age poet Alexander Pushkin published, like a delayed “rhapsodic battle” with Byron, his own interpretation of Mazepa’s story in Poltava (1828–29). In Pushkin’s poem, the hetman is portrayed as an ailing traitor of the Russian Empire, a ridiculous and horrible old man.

Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi (b. 1985) has revived the Romantic-age rivalry with a transhistorical twist, revealing how a core stylistic element of Romanticism lingers in contemporary times, namely in the form of an uncompromising agonism. In his video work The Battle Over Mazepa (2023), commissioned jointly by Pushkin House in London and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, Ridnyi cast spoken-word artists from around Europe to stage an actual rhapsodic narrative battle of rendering and creating subjective takes of Byron’s and Pushkin’s stories. Referred to by the artist as a “rap battle,” the medium is more akin to the practice of the ancient Greek aoidoi (Attic bards or storytellers) who performed poems as narrative stories. While Ridnyi bridges the ancient and contemporary forms of weaving the narrative, Byron’s and Pushkin’s respective storytelling can be considered “a narrative digression,” or parékbasis in Attic, the important bardic strategy in which the narrator intentionally alters details of the story to deliver a moral, ethical, or political “lesson” to the audience while retaining recognizable fundamentals.

Ridnyi’s video reveals the transhistorical nature of political agonism by layering ancient tradition, Romantic source material, and contemporary style. The concept of agonism is rooted in the works of Nazi political scientist Carl Schmitt, who insisted that binary conflict is a natural state of the political animal—and that winning by any means is the only way to ensure survival.² More recently, political theorist Chantal Mouffe has developed agonism into a more general paradigm of looking at conflict as a healthy state of affairs and mitigating it as a fundamental task of the political system. Mouffe has criticized the possibility of post-conflictual mediation societies, which she thinks only serves to bury the conflict temporarily and, in effect, to create a ticking time bomb. The essential point here is that while agonism is discussed as natural, assigning roles in a friend-enemy distinction is highly volatile depending on the evolution of the context.³

In casting spoken-word artists as contemporary bards, none of whom were previously familiar with Byron’s Mazeppa or Pushkin’s Poltava, Ridnyi focused on the diversifying representation of those who contemporaneously weave the historical narratives anew, indicating the enduring relevance of re-rendering stories in modern political and culture wars. Before filming, the bards participated in a workshop led by Susanne Strätling, professor of Eastern European studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Mediated by Ridnyi and Strätling, the artists read Mazeppa and Poltava, and each formed a subjective interpretation of Mazepa’s character based on the literary portrayals—choosing their side (for or against the hetman) in the process. Mazepa served as source material in the agonistic setup for the artists in the video—reminiscent of contemporary tendencies of turning cultural memory into a site of an emotive battle of subjective truisms.

The 20-minute-long film, shot in 4K in a Berlin warehouse on a hot summer day, showcases rhapsodic battles against a pitch-black background. This staging recalls Kokoschka’s illustrations in which the baroque complexity of the Romantic backdrop is nullified by the flat, color-saturated figures set against a black background, highlighting their presence and accentuating the agonistic tension between them. In the film, the camera moves between pairs of poets performing the twisted verses inspired by Byron’s and Pushkin’s texts. The action is framed by chanting extras, who evoke an ancient theater choir. These singers carry meme-like banners and flags akin to the frequently posted short opinion statements on social media.

In their respective epochs, Kokoschka and Ridnyi each subverted the aesthetics of Romantic storytelling: They stripped the beautifying surroundings and focus on the essence of the brutal agonistic argument in place. They effectively challenged not only Romanticism as a literary and artistic movement but the act of romanticization of anything—and this leads to a fundamental questioning of the attitudes of the material and immaterial cultural heritage in the past, present, and future. The transtemporal relevance of this comparison stands by the essential question that pierces through the epochs: Are we continuing to romanticize Romanticism itself?

For the exhibition curated by Elena Sudakova at Pushkin House, Ridnyi developed a newspaper-like leaflet that presents a Wikipedia-style introduction of Mazepa’s character, somewhat mocking the possibility of arriving at truth through describing him. It is framed similarly to Kokoschka’s illustrations. Both artists emphasize temporality rather than constancy, the relativism in the narrative construction. Visitors to the exhibition could take home a copy of the one-page agitprop publication. Ridnyi’s video enlivens the message with new media energy and breathes dynamism into a rhetorical battle.

While Kokoschka challenged the use of folklore in reaffirming traditional values, Ridnyi has refused to take a side, to choose one or the other portrayal of Mazepa as more probable and outrightly highlighted the subjective nature of any possible reading and interpretation of the character. Both artists’ works boldly subvert the romanticization of generic conventions, “bastardizing” their elevation to the level of sanctity. They did not need to invent the methodology from scratch; rather, they employed ancient techniques of narrative speculation from rhapsodists of the deep past. With equally vivid energy, both challenged the norms of accepted discourse that preclude conformism to authorial position or its binary, agonistic opposition. Kokoschka dove into the psyche of his adolescent readers, offering them introspective agency in the face of the demanding regulations of the world around them. At the same time, Ridnyi emphasizes the artificiality of the restriction in the political stances on Hetman Mazepa offered to the passive spectator as if from a menu of acceptable positions. The works differ in style, but they are comparable in their seeming attempts to subvert the essence of the respective narrative in affirmation of the sociopolitical order and naturalness of agonism.

The creative impulse is comparable to how the ancient Greek rhapsodists, for example, wildly rendered folk stories and their characters. We have so many versions of Heracles, Dionysus, and other mythological characters, sometimes radically different depending on the author narrating them. Paradoxically, the creation of a myth was a demystifying gesture. The multiplicity of possible versions and the constant introduction of new portrayals of characters and new readings of storylines prevented them from fossilization and invited the dynamic approach to the social identity–affirming lore. The eternal and static become impossible, while dynamism and change characterize the necessary reaction to essential change with the constant transformation of the community. Unlike the Romantic search for fundamental, unchangeable wisdom and permanent cultural codes embedded at the beginning of time, the rhapsodic attitude to rendering the story invites the propositions of reformation, vital critique, and opposition. In this spirit, Pushkin and Byron can be seen as creators of entirely different characters in parallel literary realities. This assumption counters the historizing attitude of Romanticism and redefines the scheme of approaching storytelling at large as narrative speculation or a field of essential, dynamic digressions.

Shaping collective political memory is essential to legitimize contemporary forms of universal imperialism and its primary adversary—a particular nationalism. While the weaponization of cultural heritage in the political struggle is ubiquitous, Ridnyi’s film epitomizes the critical function of narrative digression, namely subversion. “Subversion,” rooted in the Latin verb subvertere (to overthrow), refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system are contradicted or reversed to sabotage the established social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. Kokoschka and Ridnyi have approached subversion from opposite ends, but they both aimed to achieve the same effect of critical confusion in their respective audiences. Kokoschka challenged his client’s expectations by subverting the fairy-tale genre as a vessel in which to preserve bourgeois norms and values and instead focusing on the realness of the experience of growing up. This strategy sparked effective intergenerational agonism instead of creating repulsion for the abnormal and a reverence for conservative ideals—as was desired by the party that commissioned the work—thereby introducing a speculative artistic agency. Ridnyi has thrown off presumed determinacies of the correct or incorrect political position by subverting agonism itself, equalizing the perceived real and the possible speculative. While the approaches to the subject differ, both artists have focused on subverting the status quo by addressing the normalized in a way “that is just human nature” agonism. They transform the gesture into effective and potent criticism by making the sociopolitical construction and conditions of agony visible, registrable, and estranged.

Ridnyi’s video challenges the audience to step back from choosing sides—and to focus on dangerous oversimplifications as a fundamental source of naturalizing fiction. The Battle Over Mazepa, the first video in a planned trilogy, restages Romantic agonism and demonstrates its actuality in the present—against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It also reveals the tendency of contemporary art to reaffirm the subjective, oversimplified battlefronts through aestheticization—as in the case of Romantic legacies. Like the meme-banner holders in the video, the artist with a political agenda draws the frontiers to the agonistic battle lines, reaffirming the distinction between friend and enemy.

As David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky argue, Romanticism sanctified the nation-state as the church waned.⁴ It legitimized the state as an absolute arbiter of ethical and moral judgement. As such, it materialized a political imaginary. While French philosopher Auguste Comte insisted on the “rationalization” of society through the nation-state, Romanticism in fact remythologized society anew.

The work of Kokoschka critically addresses the emerging bourgeois conservatism, which aimed to rearrange society’s new boundaries of restrictions as the power of the church vanished—and in that, to tighten the screws on the imagination of possible alternatives from the early childhood period. In challenging his commissioner’s intention so radically, Kokoschka revealed the intention behind the supposedly apolitical gesture of producing a piece of “edutainment” (educating entertainment) for children. Ridnyi, in his interrogation of our permacrisis-branded contemporaneity, spearheads our time’s burning ontological cleavage—normalization of the subjectivity of political agonism, in which the temporary arrangements and interpretations are communicated by power and perceived by the public through the lenses of multiple media channels as natural, eternal, and unchanging. This is among the feeders of the resurgence of new fascisms and other forms supposedly abandoned by the “never again” humanism’s progress, abominations as the solution offered is “final” and “simple.” The Wikipedia-style leaflet in the exhibition at Pushkin House and the one-line-slogan carriers in the video embody the rising number of these agents of further naturalization of agonistic battle.

The problems Kokoschka’s and Ridnyi’s works address intend to reaffirm the stance of historical truism beyond critique, nullifying or conveniently ignoring the context in which it emerged and removing it from the contested speculation space. Such conservative discourse contributes to the problem of “romanticizing Romanticism”—not actively challenging its positionality within “the greatest of eras” and as the source of nostalgic pride—which continues to emphasize the ethereal materiality of ghosts from the past. At the same time, it naturalizes and fixates as permanent the dynamic boundaries of agonistic struggles, presenting figures and ideas about the good and the bad as ontological categories, though they are, in fact, products of the sociopolitical context of their time and their power relations. The subversion and “bastardization” of Romantic tradition through critical speculation, as seen in Kokoschka’s drawings and Ridnyi’s video, show us a potent example of shaking up normality at a moment when reality starts to appear everlasting, futureless, and disjointed from its surroundings. Both works, though separated by age, demonstrate a successful multimedia address of the transhistorical challenge. Amplifying the messages conveyed in these works and further igniting the spread of their approaches is relevant in any time—but specifically in the present.

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The Fragile Body and the Damaged Subject: A Decade of Crisis and Resistance (1998–2008)

If in the early to mid-1990s, performative actions in Armenia were, to a large extent, launched by situational or strategic collectives and groups as interventions—as correctives to institutional operations of the state and the artworld—and motivated by the desire to communicate beyond the regulated boundaries of “systems” and borders, then the late 1990s marked a shift toward individual actions, enclosure within interiority, and exploration of the body as fragile and the subject as damaged and violated. In the meantime, the earlier emphasis on text, factorgraphic strategies, ephemeral “fixations,” and interventions had been replaced by the newly available medium of video and multimedia installation often involving theatrically infused live performances focused on the body as a site of antagonism toward the social and the political, tout court. The body in these actions served as the tragic locus of the irreparable schism between nature and culture, as a site of technologically inflicted hyper-alienation. This transition from collective actions and interventions to solo performances and video was partly a reaction to the sociopolitical transformations taking place in Armenia in the late 1990s. Fermented amid social and political upheaval, these transformations were experienced as violent and tectonic.

The wild and unregulated free-market reforms of the early 1990s prepared the ground for the rise of the new oligarchy in Armenia while the Karabakh war with neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenia’s 1994 victory inflamed nationalism. Yet it was another political event that triggered a shift in general sentiment, from post-Soviet optimism to imminent disillusionment. On October 27, 1999, several gunmen entered the Armenian parliament, held the deputies and ministers hostage for hours, and subsequently killed the popular, newly elected prime minister and speaker along with six other political figures. In the aftermath of this carnage, which was almost fully televised since the session of parliament taking place at the time of the terror attack was being broadcast live on national television, president Robert Kocharyan usurped political power (which he would retain until the bloody crackdown on oppositional protests in 2008). The 1999 parliament shooting was experienced by contemporary Armenian artists as a cataclysmic event, one heralding the end of post-Soviet aspirations for the construction of a democratic nation-state led by a progressive liberal government. Politically and economically, the newly sovereign state promoting free-market reforms and liberal democracy had given way to a convenient marriage between ethnocentric nationalism and neoliberalism. The official cultural policy of the 1990s of representing Armenia as an ancient yet modern and progressive nation began to fade in the face of “one nation, one culture” rhetoric under the umbrella of Christianity, an identity that became both ideologically expedient and commercially lucrative for the new nationalist elites. Contemporary artists were relegated to the margins of this new social order, foreclosing their embrace of dominant social and cultural narratives or their artistic participation within the country’s official institutions. If, in 1998, the artist known as Sev could have an exhibition at the National Assembly triggering art critic Vardan Jaloyan’s anxiety over art’s identification with power, after the 1999 parliament shootings, the relationship between state institutions and dominant cultural narratives on the one hand and the contemporary art scene on the other could be defined only in negative terms.¹

Meanwhile, the late 1990s were also marked by a triumph of postmodern mediatization of the public sphere, where the world onscreen came to be perceived as more real than the social reality, which was replete with contradictions.² In contrast to the deceptive spectacle of media representations, contemporary artists used the technology of video to signify resistance and “truth.” Here, the performing body being screened for display served as a conduit to an authentic reality, one beneath and beyond the cultural “screen.” Video as a medium of subversion, truth, and exposure in Armenia had its roots in the early 1990s in the form of sexually explicit content on VHS tapes.³ The proliferation of video was technically possible because the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) imported cameras, DVD players, TV monitors, and projectors, which it then made available to artists, while the theatrical and ritualistic pathos of performative practices found nourishment in theatrically infused multimedia performances by New York–based Iranian Armenian artist Sonia Balassanian, whose aesthetics were promoted by ACCEA’s theater department.

The triangulation of theatrical video-performance, the conception of the fragile body as a site of violence, and the belief in art as a means of resistance was crystalized in works made by David Kareyan between 1999 and 2007. From ritualistic sacrifice (Dead Democracy, 1999) to eating the victim’s flesh (Eucharist-450, 2000) and splitting bones with an electric saw (Gastritus, 2002), Kareyan displayed the body, often naked, on a video monitor set among incongruent materials such as earth, plants, bones, and fleece to signify the subject’s alienation and estrangement from nature (fig. 1). Kareyan’s work of this period counterposed art’s promise of de-alienation with the false sublation of alienation within the social sphere—where the technologies of the cultivation of the self in a society in which standardized consumerist desires and behaviors promised fulfillment but instead mass-produced conformity. These social technologies of desire shaped the body as an image of power (in edified, upstanding form), while at the same time, subjugated it. The effects of political control and consumerism were inscribed on the body of the normative subject, whose complicit performance of militarism, patriotism, and conservative morality naturalized patriarchal domination. These ideologies produced autoerotic subjects whose frustrated desire could only be expressed through a primordial return to mud (The World Without You, 1999) or invoked through the impossible return to murder and incest (Sweet Repression of Ideology, 2000).

The culmination of these series of videos and performances was Kareyan’s No Return (subtitled Suicide for Eternal Life, Oral Hysteria, Speech Capability Paid [for] by Madness) of 2003.⁴ Realized in collaboration with curator Eva Khachatryan, this three-channel video installation was composed of a central screen showing a Bill Viola-esque video of Kareyan in a white nightshirt digitally superimposed on fire (in different versions of the work, the images on the screens vary) and two side screens showing montages of found footage from documentary films and world news reports of various recent turbulent events superimposed on politically charged signs and words. An audio piece composed of electronic bits and lyrics by early twentieth-century Armenian poet and writer Yeghishe Charents played in reverse accompanied the videos, as did a live performance involving seven female figures, most of whom were members of the punk band Incest, dressed up in hooded black gowns and drumming on tin plates and logs (fig. 2).  

These works echoed Sonia Balassanian’s multimedia theatrical performances of the same period, which were infused with myth and ritual. Balassanian’s performances, in turn, referenced Armenian ecclesial traditions, enacting victimhood, sacrifice, and various rituals of domination and subjugation (Shadows of Dusk and Collapse of Illusions, 2000; and There Might Have Been, 2003, ACCEA). The construction of a total environment that overwhelmed the audience with its production of affect combined video projection, ready-made objects, voice, music, performance, and other media and encompassed the entirety of the viewer’s sensorial sphere, a Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts. Often, such as in Collapse of Illusions, this total environment also functioned as a grand theatrical setting that accommodated other artists’ performances (including those by David Kareyan, Karine Matsakyan, Sona Abgaryan, and Diana Hakobyan, among others). Collapse of Illusions was formed through multiple discrepant activities performed by subjects in solipsistic self-enclosure and constituted a negative side of reality in which everything was as it is in the social world but nonetheless dysfunctional, futile, and completely deplete of time and context. Sewing, knitting, hammering nails, dancing, and “cooking” book pages in tar were performed in a dystopic, atemporal landscape littered with media images, objects, artworks, and debris.

Several artists in the early 2000s produced videos and performances exploring the body as a fragile yet subversive locus of sexuality, eroticism, and desire. Tigran Khachatryan’s videos pursue sexually explicit content montaged onto signifiers of youth subcultures and remixed with ready-made references to film and pop culture. Repetitive and futile masturbatory gestures—or their metaphorical representation through juxtaposition of image and rhythm—often follow the structure of male orgasm (such as in the “explosive scene” of the gas stove burning and being extinguished in Romeo, 2003). This image of the virile subject appears alongside the figure of a male subcultural antihero as an average representative of a bored and jaded generation (Stakler, 2004). In a 2002 performance titled Bread and Cheese, filmed in the medieval monastery Ayrivank, the artist, dressed as a punk soccer fan mimicking a soccer player from the Turkish national team (Umit Davalan), approached a miniature football field lined with white paint, sat in front of the camera, and proceeded to eat bread and cheese (fig. 3). As viewers of the recording of the performance soon realize, the camera positioned in front of the artist was not filming the performance but rather displaying a soccer game. The action of eating bread and cheese evokes a common Armenian adage that one must eat a lot of bread and cheese in order to become an adult.⁵ The saying is often used in a derogatory sense to indicate that someone needs to grow up or mature. This “rite of passage” experienced by the young punk recalls an ironically enacted oedipal patricide that took place at a site of patriarchal authority, that is, on church grounds. However, instead of assuming the father’s place after the symbolic murder, Khachatryan’s male subject remains forever juvenile.

If the male body in Khachatryan’s work is at times virile and sexually provocative (such as in his series of “Garage” film productions including Romeo, 2003; Theodicy, 2005; and Entertate, 2010),⁶ and at other times bored and indifferent, in Harutyun Simonyan’s video performances, it is fragile and vulnerable. Simonyan’s performances are framed in a decontextualized and compressed space in which the naked artist assumes a fetal position onscreen—as in a womb (Untitled, 2001). Simonyan’s naked body dances, slips, and tumbles in a room covered with black linoleum and smeared with Vaseline (Untitled, 2003), it falls asleep (Sleep, 2001), and it performs the feminine work of sewing and attempts to don a feminine dress that is too small (Untitled, 2001; fig. 4). The sexualized male body is masochistically exposed to voyeuristic scopophilia as the audience “infiltrates” the artist’s private space. Yet, masochistic exhibitionism and exposure here do not unambiguously grant the viewer visual control over the fragile body; the subject is also protected and sheltered by the screen/womb in the fantasy of a return to its maternal origin. In Lusine Davidyan’s video Untitled (2003), the embryonic state unfolding on the TV monitor is not a prelapsarian fantasy of the whole and undivided subject but rather the horror of certain and predetermined death. An abstracted form of a body flickers onscreen while a black text on the white wall behind it issues the verdict “Embryonic Death Embedded in Your Body,” echoing the lyrics of heavy metal band Slayer: “Embryonic death, / Embedded in your brain.” The temporality of Simonyan’s work is a regression to the ahistorical and pre-subjective time before birth, to the mother’s body, while Davidyan’s is that of the anterior future—that is, of a future that will have happened in the past.

If the above-described works confine the body to a claustrophobic self-enclosure refusing any relationality or “outside,” other artists of the same generation explore the intersubjective dimension of bodily communication. In Sona Abgarian’s videos of the early 2000s, friendship is conceived as a medium of intersubjective exchange in which play and violence, communication and its failure, appear as rudimentary forms of sociality. In Untitled (2001), two female subjects (the artist and her friend, Astghik Melkonyan) assume a four-legged position and engage in a play of love and envy, empathy and violence, as they circle, hug, and bite each other (fig. 5).

Diana Hakobyan’s videos of the early 2000s position the active body as disruptive to the induced passivity of media spectacle and consumerism as she engages with the deconstruction of the rhetoric of mediatized images and social clichés. In I Can’t Believe in Your Dreams (2002), the artist is seen skipping rope in a series of close-ups (of her face, abdomen, chest, or legs), while her action is rhythmically interrupted by shots of a hammer smashing panes of glass inscribed with social ideals such as “Collaboration,” “Productivity,” “Success,” and “Imagination” (fig. 6). In another, the artist boxes against a pane of glass covered in illegible scribbles in red paint. This figure of the female artist as warrior against social clichés and consumerist desires can be traced to an earlier work by Karine Matsakyan. In 1995, as part of her solo exhibition Triumph of the Consumer at Charlie Khachatryan Gallery, Matsakyan walked into a butcher’s shop with a toy gun and “fired” at hanging flesh (Suicidal Tendencies, 1995).

Anna Barseghian’s 1999 performative photograph taken in a men’s bathroom in the Grand Théâtre de Genève intervenes in the sexual division of intimate spaces. The image shows the artist dressed in a black ceremonial costume, like that worn by a widow or a theatrical performer (fig. 7). She is standing still and upright at a urinal, her back to the viewer. The contrast between the artist’s stern and austere appearance and the “hooliganism” of the act, the assumption of a phantasmal phallus by a conservatively dressed female figure, juxtaposes two incongruent notions, thus estranging the social reproduction of sexuality as it is conducted through the demarcation of segregated sights and signs. 

Up until the early 2000s, these actions were not overtly framed as feminist—with the exception of Barseghian’s work, among a few others.⁷ A shift in framework took place in about 2002–3, when Sonia Balassanian on the one hand and Austrian curator Hedwig Saxenhuber (who was visiting Yerevan) on the other, encouraged an explicitly feminist framing of women artists’ work concerned with the social reproduction of sexual divisions, gender roles and anti-patriarchal manifestations, and the body. The feminist exhibitions Women’s City curated by Arpine Tokmajyan, Heriqnaz Galstyan, and Narine Zolyan in 2004 and Rocks Melting in the Depth of the Earth in 2004 and Women’s City by Eva Khachatryan in 2005 were testament to this shift toward revealing explicitly feminist concerns through a language and discourse of difference and identity characteristic of US third-wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. First displayed at the festival Rocks Melting in the Depth of the Earth, artist and musician Tsomak’s video juxtaposes her frantically dancing naked body with a video of a dancing stripper filmed in a club in Yerevan, whereas Sona Abgaryan’s work shows the artist buttoning her blouse, taking it on and off in awkward movements, as a first-person account of violence against women runs in the subtitles.

Astghik Meklonyan’s work Bokhcha (2004) likewise engaged with traditional feminine roles and tasks. But this engagement was not guided by a subversive reperformance of sexual roles. Rather, it was carried out through an exaggerated over-performance in which the female subject became the object of her own labor. In Bokhcha, the artist’s body was wrapped and de-subjectivized and barely visible among other colorful and patterned wraps as she moved slowly through them (fig. 8). These wraps made of blankets and sheets functioned as signifiers of the household labor undertaken by women, while also evoking the experience of displacement and migration. Indeed, “bokhcha,” a Turkish word assimilated in Armenian slang, designates a self-made wrap that immigrants, nomads, travelers, and the displaced use to carry their belongings.

The dominant paradigm of Armenian performative art practices in the late 1990s and early 2000s could be construed as one of a critical deconstruction of socially imposed gender roles, sexual identities, and forms of subjectivization. In this context, Azat Sargsyan’s performative interventions propose another strategy: not to rearticulate the body, identity, and subject in order to subvert dominant discourses but rather to annihilate the very material upon which this ideology conducts its wicked schemes—that is, the subject itself. In Azat (free) Hanging on Freedom Square on the Independence Day (2000) the artist hung upside-down from a streetlight (fig. 9). The title of the action plays with the artist’s name Azat which in Armenian means freedom and is repeated in the name of the iconic Freedom square where the demonstrations for Armenia’s independence took place throughout the late Soviet period. According to the artist, through the action he was commenting on independent Armenia’s actual dependence upon larger geopolitical forces.⁸ A photograph shows the artist anthropologically opposite the human orientation and iconographically in contrast to the statue of Armenian composer Alexander Spendiaryan in the background on the right. This reversal or repositioning as a means of annihilation of the subject was performed in Welcome (1999), which took place at the exhibition After the Wall in Stockholm in 2000 and in 2002 at the São Paulo Biennial.⁹ This time, the artist positioned his body horizontally as a doormat and lied there for two hours to mark the entrance to the exhibition space. This willful self-objectification as a lowly, abject doormat beneath visitors’ feet marked a desire for the obliteration of subjectivity, a desire that reached its extreme in Azat’s subsequent performances involving death and the politics of its commodification.

In Welcome to Armenia, Museum Under Heaven (2003) commissioned for the exhibition L’environement du corps génétiquement modifiable, curated by Barseghian and Nazareth Karoyan, the artist studied the economy of cemeteries, especially the real-estate speculations through which municipal burial grounds in Yerevan spread toward residential neighborhoods. They had become “last destinations” for expat Armenians who lived abroad but dreamt of being buried in their homeland. Azat showed funerary accessories across the city, including a guide to the cemetery “Armenia,” placing the country itself as a cemetery under heaven. The artist, wearing a black garment with a white painted inscription “Welcome,” was photographed next to funerary statues and tombs (fig. 10). His identification of Armenia as a place of death exposed the commodification of this myth and positioned it as an object of touristic consumption.¹⁰ Continuing identification with death and dying, this subject was finally obliterated in the impossible act of witnessing one’s own funeral (the Gyumri Biennial of 2008¹¹). 

Azat’s works recall the 1980s practices of unofficial artists of the Soviet Union, for whom disappearance and death became a means of escaping the watchful eyes of the Soviet apparatus. But, paradoxically, this self-annihilation was also a road to absolute freedom (“Azat” in Armenian means “free”). Enacted in the 2000s, Azat’s anachronistic dissidence was a reminder of the ghostly reverberations of a world that had supplied negative content for the conception of art as a free space for dreaming, a conception formative for contemporary art in Armenia and performative practices within it. This world was the disappearing landscape of Soviet modernity. In the 2000s, when identification with the social context could no longer be secured, the artist’s social function could no longer be affirmed. To be sure, amid conditions of increasing alienation, the imaginary world of artistic creations became a shelter of sorts, a compensatory mechanism, while the artist became ever more marginalized in the context of rampant nationalism and neoliberalism. The return of Armenia’s first president Levon Ter-Petrosyan, a liberal democrat, to politics in 2007 opened up a space for renewed participation in politics and public life for artists, a space that was soon to be violently shut down as the outgoing president Kocharyan announced martial law and, on March 1, 2008, issued a deadly crackdown of the opposition.

Editors’ note: Read the Introduction and Part I of this series here, and Part II here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

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This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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Performances of Politics in a Nation-State (1991­–98)

Armenian performative practices and “art actions”¹in the 1990s were characterized less by grand gestures of plentitude and excess and more by austere, minimal, and often barely visible acts engaging with the triviality of the everyday, intervening in “closed systems” of communication, overidentifying with or ironically repeating forms and procedures of the newly constituted liberal democratic state after the collapse of the USSR and its official rituals, and demarcating institutional boundaries of art. In the maelstrom of rapid transformations set in motion by the dissolution of the old world, many artists embraced the newfound quasi-anarchic freedom, the reestablishment of communication with the outside world, and the possibility of participating in the construction of the new world and new state. In the mid-1990s, for the first time, contemporary art from the Republic of Armenia was presented abroad under the aegis of its ministry of culture.²In this context, the artistic avant-garde largely positioned itself as the self-appointed vanguard of the culture of the new state as opposed to a resistant subculture. Its agenda often (but not always) coincided with that of the cultural politics of the new republic—to represent Armenia as a progressive nation with an ancient culture that was finally joining the progressive and free family of nations on the international stage.

The 3rd Floor ultimately dissolved in 1994 in part because of a crisis of resistance³but also because of the need to institutionalize, which came in conflict with the movement’s inherent anti-institutional stance, paving the way for a generation of artists who saw themselves as the avant-garde of the independent republic. This generation, which made its collective entry to the Armenian contemporary art scene in 1994–95 under the name ACT,⁴conceived of the the artist as the engineer of a new world—and promoted the artistic notion of a “pure creativity.”⁵This term denotes a conceptual procedure for cleansing artwork of subjective, material, institutional, and other determinations not integral to creativity as well as adopting concrete strategies for making the process of doing so visible through “fixation (inscription)” (documenting everyday objects and gestures), “intervention” (intervening in public spaces or “closed systems”), “inspection” (carrying out explorations and studies of sites, systems, and spheres), and “display” (presenting the results of the former procedures as works of art). At the same time, ACT understood art and the political sphere of the state as separate institutions, each constituted by its own procedural mechanisms, and collectively aimed to demystify both.

Beginning in 1993, David Kareyan, a key member of the group, was working on a project he called “POLIT-ART,” which involved three strategies borrowed directly from liberal democratic political practices—referendum, demonstration, and agitation—and was realized as collective actions upon the formation of ACT a year later. For the exhibition Act of 1995 in the Ex-Voto Gallery, Kareyan prepared leaflets titled “POLIT-ART,” “Referendum,” “Agitation” and “Demonstration,” and “Actayin hosank” (Actual stream). After using a megaphone to announce these same words through an open window, he threw the leaflets at the audience gathered below (fig. 1). He enacted a “referendum” the same year, in January 1995, at the exhibition of Armenian art held at the Museum Bochum in Germany.⁶Art Referendum incorporated a transparent ballot box labeled “referendum.” An archival photograph reproduced in several newspapers and periodicals shows the artist standing behind the box holding a pen in one hand and casting his vote with the other. The process appears to have been carried out with the utmost seriousness as the artist’s gaze is fixed upon the action he is performing (fig. 2). Viewers were likewise invited to mark and cast a ballot. Finally, in his seminal action Art Demonstration, which he undertook with ACT and other artists as part of Yerevan-Moscow: The Question of the Ark, an exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Yerevan, Kareyan enacted democratic expression in the form of an artistic action. This much-discussed work is a perfect example of ACT’s identification with and use of political procedures integral to liberal democracy within an artistic form of “pure creativity.”⁷.

On July 12, 1995, during the opening of Yerevan-Moscow, and exactly one week after the constitutional referendum in Armenia in which the first constitution of the independent state was approved, ACT, together with several other artists, marched along the main avenue in Yerevan (fig. 3).⁸They covered an artistically defined public space—the area between the statue of early twentieth-century Armenian modernist painter Martiros Saryan (1880–1972), which was also the site of early youth exhibitions in the early 1980s, and the Modern Art Museum. Approximately twenty people carried banners with slogans in Armenian and English, most of which were written in black letters on a white background, calling for “Interventions into Systems,” “World Integration,” “Polit-Art,” “Decentralization,” “Market Relations in Art and Economy,” “Realization,” “No Art,” “Art Referendum,” “New State, Art, Culture,” and “Demythologization”; issuing demands such as “Expel the Information Monsters from Rationality”; proclaiming that “Every Small Mistake Can Result in Big Catastrophes”; and asserting that “Creativity Will Save Humanity.” After reaching the museum, their final destination, the artists hung the banners on the wall as part of Yerevan-Moscow. In this action, the politics of “pure creativity” directly met the pure creativity of politics, as the slogans were both formal interventions in the art institution as well as manifestations of democratic proceduralism in the form of a public demonstration.⁹

ACT’s affirmative strategies of overidentification with the political forms of the liberal democratic state through performative actions could be considered unique in contemporary art in Armenia in terms of relating affirmatively to the state and its institutions. As opposed to this, the gestures of ritualistic mimicry by older-generation conceptual artist Grigor Khachatryan (born 1952)—most of which were ironic and often grotesque—related to the mechanisms of the constitution of power and authority. Khachatryan’s work renders political institutions simply as forms through which power and authority are enacted as and through ritual. He performatively assumed “absolute power” through self-mandated award ceremonies (the “Grigor Khachatryan award”), self-aggrandizing declarations (“You are within the radius of the sexual rays of Grigor Khachatryan”), pseudo-institutions (“Center for Planning Accidents”), ceremonial renewing of street plaques ( “Groghneri poghots” or “Writers’ Street”), and “official meetings” (hosting then Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili in the room specially designated for official meetings as part of the Armenian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011). The fictitious persona created by the artist “cannibalizes” the artist’s body as raw material and uses it in repetitive rituals. In the Grigor Khachatryan award ceremony (“tested” in 1974 and held occasionally since 1990),¹⁰there are a minimum of three  “Grigor Khachatryans”—firstly, the name denotes the artist-author who conceived of the honor; secondly, it appears in the self-referential title of the award; and finally, it is evoked in the trophy itself, which is in the form of the artist’s body—enabling the awardee to literally hold Grigor Khachatryan in their arms (fig. 4). Khachatryan’s actions are not confined to the rituals that constitute officialdom. Indeed, for many years, with humor and irony, he has been rendering everyday mythologies strange (television interventions on Ar TV such as the series City, which he produced with Suren Ter-Grigoryan in the 1990s), deeming national myths banal (Vanna Lich, Gyumri Biennale, 1998), and depicting male friendship as a fantasy of recovering a primordial and infantile state of jouissance (Aratez, with Norayr Ayvazyan, 1993). Khachatryan’s gestures are repetitive and often tautological, a logic that is constitutive of power for its own sake. As sarcastic and antiheroic as his performances might seem, his signature laughter, which often accompanies them, invokes the figure of a joker as truth-teller in the face of power, as a romantic whose heroism is precisely in his antiheroism.

Performative iteration as an intervention into institutional systems, combined with the conception of the artist as an itinerant whose role is to demarcate the boundaries of art’s permissibility characterizes several actions conceived by a loose group of conceptual artists in the mid-1990s. Initially affiliated with the activities of New York–based Iranian Armenian artist Sonia Balassanian (born 1942) in Yerevan since 1993 and ultimately with the foundation of the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) carried out by Balassanian and her husband, Edward Balassanian, in 1995, artists Karen Andreassian, Ara Hovsepyan, Samvel and Manvel Baghdasaryans, and Gagik Charchyan organized an unofficial intervention in the Tbilisi Biennial of 1996. The Biennial coincided with the artists’ schism with Balassanian and became a tacit protest against ACCEA, which organized the official Armenian Pavilion.¹¹Inspired by the rhetorical question posed by scandalous Russian artist Alexander Brener: “Why haven’t I been invited to this exhibition?” (“Почему меня не взяли на эту выставку?”), artists went to the biennial with so-called geopolitical cards (also the title of the intervention), carrying their own name tags along with those of famous artists and acting as representatives of a fictitious foundation called “Local Global.” On the one hand, the intervention voiced a locally articulated discontent with ACCEA’s collaboration with artists other than the group through a construction of a fictitious and situational counter-institution;¹²on the other, it brought to the surface a key problematic for post-Soviet Armenian artists—that of the desire to participate in a global art world through a language and means characterizing conceptual art.¹³It is especially the latter aspect that informed their expedition the next year to the German city of Kassel.

In 1997, the same group of artists—a collective that was situational rather than long-standing or cohesive—organized an unofficial intervention in the authoritative documenta X curated by Catherine David in Kassel (fig. 5). GEO-Kunst Expedition documented the artists’ journey from Yerevan to the exhibition. Once in Kassel, the group created a pseudo-official letterhead with the logo of the documenta, thus hijacking the institutional trademark. The artists posted copies of this fake stationery across the city with a call for the public to post messages or artworks on them. They conceived this intervention as providing a space on the stationery of the prestigious art event to post a message or an artwork, so that anyone could claim participation in the documenta. The letterhead thus acted as a sort of  parasitic institution created by the uninvited guests. Thus, the Armenian artists were inserting themselves into the global contemporary art context that had allegedly bypassed them.¹⁴This self-insertion was understood quite literally as the artists made sure to be photographed with David and to have the curator perform as an “artist” in the unofficial documenta by having her sign their fake letterhead. For a moment, the unofficial artists and official curator changed places.

All the examples discussed here point to a shift in late Soviet period discourse, aesthetics, and political attitude in performative artistic practices in Armenia. If the unofficial artists of the perestroika avant-garde conceived of their actions in terms of resistance toward official institutions, the artists in the early years of independence positioned themselves affirmatively in relation to the newly evolving state and its cultural discourses. They often did so through actions, performances, and artistic gestures that mimicked state rituals and forms of democratic participation.

The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

Editors’ note: Read the Introduction and Part I of this series here, and Part III here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

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In May 1988 unofficial artists from across the Soviet republics gathered in Narva, Estonia, for what would be one of the last Soviet art festivals and yet one of the first such events to celebrate experimental performance art.¹The Festival of Art “Narva-88,” as it was called, was held on the threshold of the Soviet empire at Narva Castle, the Estonian castle fortress facing the Ivangorod Fortress—its Russian counterpart across the Narva River—and on the beach by the Baltic Sea, which surrounds the country to the north and west. By this time, Mikhail Gorbachev’s launch of perestroika (restructuring) reforms to promote economic “acceleration” had waned into stagnation as glasnost (openness), the promotion of cultural expression, made way for sovereignty claims throughout the Soviet republics. Held against a backdrop of dissident mobilizations ranging from the Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in February 1988 to a series of environmentalist independence campaigns in the Baltics in 1986–87, Narva became a flash point in the lead-up to the empire’s collapse.²

One local paper described the large-scale, mixed media assemblage constructed on the lawn near the castle fortress as “installations filled with expression and sarcasm—human statues in wrestling poses tightly bandaged with strips of fabric, as if trying to escape from their binds, and next to them, a broken-down bus waiting dejectedly and hopelessly—the desire for action turned into inaction.”³ Sick Bus and its accompanying figures were created by Lia Shvelidze (born 1959) with other members of the unofficial Georgian art collective—the Marjanishvilebi.⁴ The asssemblage was the group’s first major work in an international public Soviet forum.⁵ Incorporating local found materials, the defunct Soviet bus parked in the castle yard was wrapped in cheap medical bandages, presented as not only a monument to wounded or arrested progress, but also a site of complex and conflicted feelings. The human figures captured a mix of rage, sarcasm, and raucous joy, expressions that were, in turn, concealed by the bandages.

Moreover, Sick Bus, as a metaphor for the stalled Soviet economy, seemed to serve as a counter-monument in its sideward glace across the Russian-Soviet and European borders to The Point Neuf Wrapped (1975–85) by  Bulgarian-born Paris-based artists Christo (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009). However, this critique of monumentality not only envisioned the specter of Soviet collapse, but also, more crucially, exposed the uncertainty of socialist belonging, a duality made palpalable in the uncomfortable conjunction between the work’s experimental form and its staging amid the official festival environment of state-sanctioned collectivity and optimism. Literally put under wraps, the mock-monument in the yard of the fortress under the banners of the Soviet festival drew viewers’ attention to the surface of its components—the texture of overlapping bandages. The symbolic object of the broken-down Soviet bus was transformed into a textural sculpture—a form that took shape in the contours of the cheap fabric covering it. In contrast to the official festival’s form, the installation represented an experimental and improvisational practice—figures suspended between political and social worlds—exposing the space of transition through the sensuous surface of the forms and the range of conflicted and muted emotions they evoked.

Sick Bus also highlights the transition in artistic value during the late Soviet period, whereby unofficial art in the Soviet Union began to draw support in part from state funds. Yet as the inaugural Sotheby’s sale of unofficial Soviet artworks held only a few months later, in July 1988, suggests, experimental works were also already beginning to garner currency in a global marketplace—albeit their acquired value traded in Euro-American fantasies of the “underground” scene of the almost “former East.”⁶Narva-88’s liminality between the collapsing Soviet empire and the accompanying social, economic, and ideological transitions exposes a diverse portrait of this complicated moment, one that prefigures the term “post-Soviet.”

In our current moment, narratives seeking to explain Putin’s violent invasion of Ukraine have raised necessary skepticism with regard to the idea of “post-Soviet.” Following a question set in motion since the dissolution on December 26, 1991, as to whether the “post-” in “post-Soviet” should also be read as “postcolonial,” the invasion has both confirmed that narrative and, at the same time, somewhat paradoxically revealed a persistent tendency to envision the region homogeneously, conflating Soviet with Russian—and Soviet society with an impenetrable ideological and cultural Cold War gaze. In the 1990s, “post-” marked a hard break—the rupture of a geopolitical, economic, and ideological worldview that Francis Fukuyama has described in the totalizing idiom of the “end of history.”⁷ But this moment should have instead called for a passionate rewriting. Staged amid a messy and uncertain moment on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire, Narva-88 exposes the diversity and complexity of this space-time. It asks what would it look like to speak of the collapse not from the vantage of “post-,” but instead as a transitional moment that forged radically new modes and logics of belonging, violent rupture, and flourishing from within multilingual, aesthetically and culturally diverse, and affectively conflicted spaces that shaped the transition. It complicates a Euro-American vision of the Soviet Union as a homogeneous political and social mass located in a Slavic-Russian metropolitan center. It questions how one can document the sociopolitical transition from the indeterminacy and uncertainty of the present moment of its unfolding—as opposed to from the finality connoted by “post-” or the ethno-cultural homogeneity suggested by “Russian”—to the illumination of a set of complicated attachments to Sovietness. This essay seeks to open one such vantage by exploring Narva-88 as the site of experimental performances of alternative logics of belonging that both precede and exceed the so-called post-Soviet.

While many studies of performance in the context of late Soviet neo-avant-garde art have focused primarily on Russian and male artists—from the Mitki to the Moscow Conceptualists—Narva-88 illuminates the liveliness of the Soviet art scene in the late 1980s beyond the Russian metropolitan centers of Moscow and Leningrad. As Kyrgyz artist Gulnara Kasmalieva (born 1960) remembers, the festival’s guest list took shape through personal connections she made on Soviet-funded trips through the Caucasus and during her tenure in Estonia for studies in printmaking in 1987, exposing more broadly how informal networks, seminars, and exchanges animated connections across the republics over the course of the 1970s and 1980s.⁸

Narva-88 also marks the heyday of the unofficial art collective and of performance art broadly speaking—blending installation environments and performative actions carried out by individual and collective bodies. The festival was attended by members of the Georgian Marjanishvilebi, the Armenian Third Floor group, several Belarusian groups—Forma, Kvadrat (the Square), and Belarusian Climate—and the infamous Russian Mitkis. Artists exhibiting at Narva-88 who went on to have solo careers in the mid-1990s in installation, performance, and video art in addition to Shvelidze and Kasmalieva include Mamuka Japharidze (born 1962), Niko Tsetskhladze (born 1959), Mamuka Tsetskhladze (born 1962), Oleg Timchenko (born 1957), Gia Rigvava (born 1956), Koka Ramishvili (born 1956), and Karlo Kacharava (1964–1994) from Georgia; Igor Kashkurevich (Ihar Kashkurevich, born 1957) and Ludmila Rusava (1954–2010) from Belarus; Arman Grigorian (born 1960) from Armenia; and Zhilkichi Zhakypov (born 1957) from Kyrgzstan, among others. Narva-88 also marked a pivotal moment in the development of improvisational performance, installation, and public art across the Soviet Union, building on movements staged in private apartments and squats or outside of the urban setting since the 1970s. Moreover, for the first time, it brought improvisational works manifest as collaborative actions orchestrated between collectives to an international public stage.

The organization of the official Soviet festival foregrounded the tension between waning attachments to the Soviet institutional form and the unofficial genres of installation and performance works staged there. While the festival organization in part reflected Kasmalieva’s personal connections to emerging unofficial collectives, the Estonian festival organizers also sent official invitations addressed to “national delegations”— the artist unions of the Kyrgyz, Georgian, Armenian, and Russian Soviet Socialist Republics (rather paradoxical given that many of the artists who attended were not affiliated with the official unions)—inviting them to a festival and two-day seminar on the problems of contemporary art. The festival program, held at Narva Castle, consisted of exhibitions and youth events. Lodging was provided for artists at the nearby youth summer camp – the Estonian International Youth Center—on the banks of the Baltic Sea. The cultural program for the festival included classical music concerts, rock concerts, literary readings, and a performance by the Estonian children’s choir. The seminar program included a series of lectures and discussions of problems in contemporary art and film screenings, including of the previously censored Andrei Rublev (1966) by Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986), signaling the increasing integration of unofficial culture into official forums during the late Soviet period.⁹

Official documents outline the general aims and structure of the festival. They announce the creation of a local archive in Narva for the promotion of “peace, ecology, and culture,” reflecting Cold War environmental campaigns that began under Nikita Khrushchev and called for a turn away from Stalinist industrialization and toward the new ideological frameworks of “friendship, ecology, and peace.” Narva-88 is described as a prazdnik, or holiday, celebration, and festival, a sentiment echoed in the youth summer-camp setting. The goals listed for the seminar include “the development of the new structures of the festival to form the basis of a new tradition” such as “festival design” and a study of the urban and social infrastructure of the festival.¹⁰Many of the activities, including youth choir performances, rock concerts, and film screenings, drew directly from the traditional Soviet festival playbook as did the lodging and official invitations. The works created in the seminar, which were largely improvisational and incorporated found materials, were required to be exhibited and then to become part of the primary collection of a Narva museum of contemporary art. In this way, Narva-88 made the festival genre—the development of festival traditions and social infrastructure—foundational to the creation of a contemporary art scene. The festival environment, in turn, played a broader role in generating experimental performance aesthetics, exemplifying a shift to bring experimental art into public spaces.

From late 1986 through the summer of 1987, a wave of environmental protests and indigenous land rights movements sprang up in the Baltics, motivated by increased ecological concerns following the catastrophic Chernobyl disaster and a series of Soviet industrial projects that created an influx of Russian workers to the region that further heightened social and cultural tensions.¹¹ Against the backdrop of these dissident mobilizations for territorial and cultural sovereignty in the late 1980s across the republics, Narva staged works that resonated with signs of the imminent dissolution of the Soviet empire. The festival thus at once emphasized the politics of the cultural turn through spectacles of the Soviet “good-life”—promoting Soviet optimism and friendly multinational relations—and called for the aesthetic renovation of contemporary unofficial art movements that mediated local desires for ecological preservation and cultural autonomy. Ecology and wildness served conjointly as recurring themes, political symbols, and methods driving the experimental art at Narva. Belarusian Climate described their art as an attempt to “convey the wild (dikii) humidity” of late Soviet life in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. “Here, in this territory, it feels a little bit colder, then hotter—that is, everything is unbearable. A small thing becomes hypertrophied due to this wild humidity. There is no comfort here.”¹² The Georgian Marjanishvilebi also called themselves dikie, or the wild ones, in a parodic reversal of the imperial Russian Orientalist imaginary of the “wild Caucasus.”¹³ For Kyrgyz artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and painter Zhilkichi Zhakypov, wildness also invoked a connection to nature. For their installation, they constructed an artificial garden at the Narva castle: an abstract composition of grass, stones, and plastic bags filled with water laid around a circle cut into the grass.¹⁴

While the work was hailed as a “synthesis of the national and international,” as if echoing Soviet internationalist propaganda, Kasmalieva instead described her interest in the textures of the installation, which like Sick Bus, highlighted the sensuous and environmental dimensions of the work.¹⁵ For Kasmalieva, it illuminated the play of light reflecting off the water-filled bags and the contrast between the texture of the grass from the field and the stark geometric imprint of the cut circle that became visible when viewed from the castle above.¹⁶ Both the festival and natural environment at Narva shaped the sensuous experience of the encounter with these installations. Kasmalieva’s recuperation of the artifice of the “natural” installation, in turn, playfully subverted a Soviet image of an “authentic” Kyrgyz national art. Poised between a critique of Soviet industrialization and Orientalist imaginaries of the non-Russian republics, for the Belarusian, Georgian, and Kyrgyz artists, the wilds came to reclaim ecology as a site for unofficial art-making, cultural and ecological autonomy and the basis for a collaborative improvisational method.

One of the most captivating documentations of the festival wilds is recorded in a video of the event filmed by Belarusian filmmaker Yuri Igrusha (Jury Ihrusha, born 1963) and collected at the Narva Museum archive.¹⁷ The structure of the video itself echoes the official festival framework, with each “chapter” attributed to a national artist delegation. However, though the narrative follows this formal arrangement, Igrusha’s videography features experimental documentary film techniques, including sometimes jarring handheld camerawork, exaggerated close-ups, lengthy pan shots, and montage. Igrusha’s cinematography also captures the improvisational performances staged on the Baltic Sea beach next to the camp where the artists resided, a thirty-minute bus ride from the exhibition at the Narva Castle.

The montage sequence begins with a close-up of a JVC television, which zooms out to a wide-angle shot that situates the TV on the Baltic Sea beach.¹⁸The JVC television was one of the iconic foreign imports that gained popularity in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Its image here also prefigures the promotion of the medium of video art by “post-Soviet” development initiatives like Soros in the late 1990s through early 2000s. Belarusian artist Igor Kashkurevich (Ihar Kashkurevich), dressed in a black scarf painted with white crosses—a garment designed by Ludmila Rusava to evoke the Black Square (1915) by avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935)—walks along the beach to greet the camera.¹⁹

The camera then cuts to a shot of three members of Belarusian Climate, who are buried feet-first in the sand, their naked upper torsos emerging from the sand—suspended in classical poses as if sculptures—as the fog from the sea rolls across their bodies. ²⁰

The next shot is an image of their bodies planted face down in the sand, and it cuts to a sand sculpture made by Kashkurevich of a woman’s body stretched across the beach. The camera pans—tracing the sand sculpture’s form against the evening light—and then cuts to morning, when it has been severed by a tractore. ²¹

Every evening, a military tractor patrolled the border, policing movement across European waters by night. Both the sand figure and the performance actions made by the artists’ bodies are staged on the tractor lines, which mark both the policing of the political border and the temporal transition from day to night. Belarusian Climate walks into the sea, naked, holding pododeialniki,or Soviet-made duvet covers, notable for their design, which features a rhomboidal hole in the center.²²

The rhomboidal hole seems at once to conjure a contorted vision of Malevich’s canonical avant-garde revolutionary form and to evoke the material tradition of Soviet manufacturing. The objects—the JCV television and pododeialniki—thus render cotemporaneous the global import and consumer product as they expose the artists’ bodies suspended in a complex set of desires: for a Soviet festival “good-life,” for global consumer products, and for the legibility of experimental performance on an international stage.

These artworks improvised visions of wilds that captured the dynamism of this transitional space and time, engaging found materials and collaborative performances that illuminated shifting border zones on the eve of dissolution. The natural landscape (the sand and sea), the liminal spaces of the fortress and beach, the margins of the Soviet empire, and the sociopolitical scene at this site of border policing across which allegedly only consumer products could circulate shaped the artworks around and through the political and social collapse. As one of the last Soviet festivals, Narva-88 not only challenges the finality of “post-,” its homogeneous portrait of the end of history, and the whitewashing of the Soviet empire. In its exploration of this transitional space and time—on this border zone at the eve of collapse—Narva also exposes how artists from Tbilisi, Minsk, Bishkek, and beyond drew on performance art to experiment with their own repertoires of aesthetic and political gesture. Narva-88 conjured the waning imaginary of Soviet-national art in the process of its unraveling, and in so doing, generated political and aesthetic openings—rhomboidal or otherwise—for the unruly collectivities that must succeed “post-.”

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Series Introduction

This series of three articles presents a selection of the performative practices in Armenian art in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods, practices that would herald the separation of nonofficial artists from the official Soviet cultural discourses and practices, and subsequently, in the 1990s, mark the institutionalization of nonofficial or semiofficial art as “contemporary art.” These practices were often not only symptomatic but also, at times, prognostic of broader sociopolitical developments in late-Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia.

The twenty years covered here—from 1987 to 2008—are conditionally demarcated as the period of transition from the late-Soviet to the post-Soviet condition (with an ideological implication of being a transition to liberal democracy)¹ and ultimately to a marriage of neoliberalism and nationalism in the 2000s. The political and cultural discourses of glasnost in the 1980s would herald the onset in the 1990s of market capitalism, with its “inhuman face” (in contrast to “socialism with a human face”)²combined with the construction of the liberal democratic nation-state on the ruins of Soviet modernity. However, in the later 1990s and throughout the 2000s, market capitalism and liberal democracy were decoupled, and late capitalism’s Armenian variant triumphed alongside the ideology of neoliberalism under the protective umbrella of political authoritarianism. This periodization, however, is not solely guided by political events. It also follows the internal development of performative practices as they unfolded within the complex contradictions and tensions of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet conditions. If in the late 1980s and throughout most of the 1990s, artists participated in the construction of a new state and in its cultural discourses through collective actions and interventions in the public sphere, in 1999–2008, with a few exceptions, they conducted solo performances and actions. If in the first instance, artist collectives laid claim to social participation and engagement, in the second, individual artists explored the embodied, sexed, damaged, and annihilated subject violated by political and social forces of control and repression.

As part of the explosion of political and cultural practices that challenged the officially sanctioned discourses, institutions, and narratives—and that encouraged a spirit of reformism licensed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist agenda within the framework of perestroika and glasnost since the mid-1980s—performative gestures executed in the context of multimedia and multi-genre exhibitions therein formed within and in response to perestroika’s imperative of reforming official institutions from within.³Here, performative acts and actions came to signify unmediated communication between the artist and their public, an aspiration for the late-Soviet Armenian avant-garde artists. In their very origin, performative acts, as discreet as they may seem—whether Happenings and art actions in the late 1980s and 1990s or performance and video art in the late 1990s and 2000s—shared one fundamental characteristic: they were undertaken in opposition and resistance to dominant political and cultural discourses and narratives, even in moments when they adopted an overtly affirmative tone.⁴ The performative gesture became a necessary means for pointing toward and critically challenging the boundaries of institutions, disciplines, discourses, established cultural narratives, and dominant aesthetic regimes at a time when the relationship between the center and the margins of culture was shifting and unstable.Attached to the advent and institutionalization of semiofficial and nonofficial art in the late Soviet period (which in the 1990s came to be referred to as “contemporary art”)⁵and part of the broader context of overcoming the medium-bound imperatives of officially sanctioned art, performative practices carried with them the dilemmas and ambiguities characterizing late-Soviet and post-Soviet avant-gardes: the desire to remain marginal and resistant (even if political conditions were at times ripe for occupying “the center”), self-institutionalizing, and yet—espousing a quasi-anarchic anti-institutional rhetoric—adopting grand and absolute gestures that aimed to constitute their own artistic context as more real than reality itself and ultimately being formed by the negation of the Soviet historical experience. 

Part I

1980s: Resurrected Ghosts, Underground Heroes, and Saintly Saviors

The show “Happening,” which opened in Yerevan in 1982 and was curated by V. Tovmassyan, was an important show. Vigen Tadevossyan . . . presented a huge balloon that was constantly being filled with air. There was a wonderful poet named Belamuki. But focus was on two actors who, in a very strange way, resembled Salvador Dali and Picasso.

“To be honest, it was neither a happening nor a performance, but theatre directed by the sculptor Vardan Tovmassyan. I was not invited to the above-mentioned exhibition, and a month later decided to make a performance entitled “Exit to the city.” . . . For about an hour we were screaming texts edited from politically oriented newspapers and art magazines. The speech of Henry Igityan (the first and “irreplaceable” director of the Museum of Modern Art since 1972) that followed the performance was very typical of the times: “Our people do not need your experiments” (we performed both “Happening” and “Exit to the City” in his museum space). It meant that neither my friends nor I could have exhibitions there any more, not to mention at the Artists’ Union. We had to exhibit on the streets, at the conservatory, and the education worker’s house.”⁶—Arman Grigoryan

This quote from artist Arman Grigoryan’s recollection of the early to mid-1980s art scene in Yerevan is one of the very few published statements on performative artistic gestures in Armenia at the time. But Grigoryan’s testimony is more than symptomatic. Indeed, it not only reveals the discontent that he and his peers experienced with nonofficial artists of the 1970s generation, it also places them antagonistically in relation to the “officially oppositional” Museum of Modern Art and its founding director.⁷The museum was the first of its kind in the USSR. It presented works by the 1960–70s generation of artists who entered the scene because of the Thaw, Nikita Khrushchev’s liberalization of culture. In their work, they reflected on national and ethnic themes with modernist form and positioned themselves as oppositional to orthodox Soviet culture, although the very foundation of the Museum was licensed by the Soviet state. Given this anti-institutional ethos, one would expect the Museum to be a natural ally of the younger generation of rebellious artists. However, acting from a position of defense of high modernism and its national spirit, the Museum responded negatively. The anti-institutional ethos—even when enacted from within an institution, as was already the case with the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan—was to characterize the first large artistic/cultural movement of nonofficial artists in Armenia: the 3rd Floor. The assumption that truly free art has the power to break away from institutional boundaries and conventions was to become formative for contemporary art in Armenia and serve as a key signifier of the resistance and subversion attached to performative practices. These practices were often seen as a means of revealing the truth that the deceptive facade of official narratives and institutions concealed. As the figure of truth, the performative gesture occupies a structurally marginal and, at times, subterranean position vis-à-vis the official institutions.

In 1987 young art critic Nazareth Karoyan—as if echoing Grigoryan’s retrospectively expressed discontent with the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan—first discovered and then meticulously categorized the garbage accumulated on the roof of the Museum. The pile of trash was documented in an inventory that Karoyan presented the same year at the Union of Artists’ official meeting, to the distress of many of those present. It is interesting that garbage, as a signifier of contradictions hidden behind the beautiful facade of official cultural politics, was not merely revealed but also categorized and itemized. This conceptual gesture was among the triggers for the 3rd Floor’s first exhibition, held that same year, and marked the movement’s mission, which was to reform cultural institutions from within and resist official culture from its very margins.

In the same year as Karoyan’s “garbage action,” a group of artists embarked upon the reformation of the Union of Artists of Armenia. This first event was more of a festival than a coherent exhibition, and it took place in the conference hall located on the third floor of the Union, a space not designated for exhibitions. It was the location of the organization’s first convention that gave the movement its name: “the 3rd Floor.” The 3rd Floor came into being in 1987 when several young artists were invited to be part of the youth division of the Union.

Ideologically, the movement presented a mixture of romantic liberalism, nationalism, and libertarianism, with anarchist dreams of omnipotence and contradicting ideologies that often went hand in hand. Its members romanticized symbols of Western consumerism and subcultures to the degree that they had come to denote ideals of individual freedom and autonomy. The critique of Soviet culture through its opposite other—signs of capitalist consumer culture as inherently democratic—situates the 3rd Floor within the intellectual climate of the late-Soviet and socialist intelligentsia’s romantic alliance with liberal democracy. In the practices of those involved in the 3rd Floor, these ideals were understood from an artistic perspective: the citizen’s freedom was equal to that of the artist’s “absolute and universal right to mix different artistic styles and images on the surface of the canvas.”⁸The Union’s seminal 1988 performance Hail to the Union of Artists from the Netherworld: The Official Art Has Died reenacted the opposition to the Soviet and its cultural policy on metaphorical terms.

On December 12 several artists in the movement dressed as the resurrected dead and, like their heavy-metal heroes, strode into one of the Union of Artists’ conventional exhibitions and declared the death of official art. In this Happening, recorded under two different titles—The Official Art Has Died and Hail to the Union of Artists from the Netherworld—they made their way silently through the exhibition hall, viewed traditional paintings hung on the walls of an art institution defending Soviet official orthodoxy, and recognizing the symptomatic significance of their action, took photographs of themselves in various groupings and positions before walking out. (fig. 3) This event crystalized the 3rd Floor’s belief in the incommensurability of art as a space for free creation and the institution ruled by the tyranny of banality: if art is the collectively constructed dream of underground heroes, the institution is the counterimage of the conventional domain of a properly dead and officially sanctioned reality.⁹

Within the framework of perestroika’s belief in change from within, the 3rd Floor oscillated on a thin and delicate line between official recognition and rejection, occupying both the cultural mainstream and its vanguard margins. The official discourse of the pre-perestroika period of stagnation, identified with the Soviet experience as such, returned in the practices of the 3rd Floor’s members as a trauma never able to be articulated but rather transformed through the recurring return of various invented and real personages. These personages were born from the anti-Soviet realm. Sometimes they occupied the margins of official discourses, styles, forms, and techniques; at other times, they hid underground from the watchful eyes of the Soviet collective consciousness. The “Soviet” recurred in the haunted figures of ghosts and “authoritarian personages,” such as a character found in the works of Grigor Mikaelyan (known as Kiki), who was, at that time, part of the 3rd Floor. Kiki constructed and consistently pursued the “revelation” of Bobo, a disembodied fictional character with no particular shape or form, whose name is commonly invoked to scare children. In Kiki’s series of abstract paintings, which materialize through performative gestures, Bobo is the secret service agent, the KGB officer, the immaterial eye that controls: he is the scarecrow for the dissident intelligentsia. The figure of Bobo had to be constantly reconstituted, constantly in process, never fully materialized. (The first Bobos appeared in the mid-1980s, and they continue to appear today.) This figure would be indexed through a performative action enacted on a canvas spread out on the floor around which the artist circled in mad movements as they threw paint in scribbly brushstrokes (or rather “broomstrokes,” as Kiki would always use a broom). The canvas itself became a site of exorcism of the official and ideological. This character’s formal features include two circles created through the expressive gestural application of paint and sometimes enclosed in a triangle, while its repetitive reconstitution reveals the compulsively repetitive structure of trauma—a repetition that paradoxically recurs as a unique event each time it is reproduced. The canvas appears as a space of psychic discharge upon which the repressed returns.¹⁰

In the framework of the 3rd Floor’s exhibitions, artist Ashot Ashot executed several performances that made metaphysical claims of transcendence through the overcoming of “facts.” For this, Ashot Ashot adopted a self-designated strategy called afaktum, which comprised deliberate and methodic reduction of matter and speech to their basic elements, pointing toward “permanent art.” A photograph of his performance A Structure of Communication for the 1989 exhibition 666 shows a woman standing in the middle of the action with threads diagonally stretched from her head to the ground and forming a web around her. (fig. 5) Here, communication is revealed as a cultural imperative of a supposedly closed world opening to the outside, but as soon as it is revealed, it is demolished: the threads are subsequently unthreaded and destroyed.

Another underground hero of the netherworld Sev (Herik Khachatryan) used performative actions to produce objects from scrap metal. His adopted persona was itself performative, involving his signature black clothing, a color reaffirmed in his artistic name (sev in Armenian means “black”).¹¹As early as 1985 (since his first encounter with Kiki), Sev had been visiting junkyards, collecting scrap metal, and welding it in front of audiences as objets, a practice that is ongoing. A photograph from 1987 records one such expedition to the Yerevan Thermal Power Plant with photographer Aram Udinyan. (fig. 6) In this image, both protagonists are squatting next to materials they have gathered. One can only imagine Sev’s “sinister” visage, dressed all in black, marching with a fire torch and manipulating metal in front of bewildered audiences in the late-Soviet years. Sev’s work was directly inspired by postwar Neo-Dada and Nouveau Realism, which he encountered for the first time through catalogues and slides introduced by art critic Nazareth Karoyan.¹²In a 1989 action, the artist paid homage to his idol of Nouveau Realism César (César Baldaccini; French, 1921–1998) during the 3rd Floor’s visit to Paris for the opening of their exhibition. The artist executed a reverse summersault in front of one César’s assemblages. (fig. 7) For Sev, artists of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, such as Kazimir Malevich (Russian, born Ukraine, 1878–1935), César, and Alberto Burri (Italian, 1915–1995) were his guides and inspiration toward a countercultural understanding of art as a sphere of freedom.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the imperative formulated by the late-Soviet anti-Soviet artistic avant-garde in Armenia was the revelation of the authentic yet subterranean layers of reality as truth that had been distorted and falsified behind the ideological facade of official lies. The allegorical personifications of this subterranean truth were various netherworld dwellers, as in the case of the 3rd Floor’s 1988 Happening, or antiheroes whose painterly materialization invoked deep-seated scopophobia (Bobo’s main feature are the two empty circles that gaze back from their void without forming an eye—a “location” of the scopic drive that circles around the organ but never dwells within it, as per Lacan’s formulation of the gaze)¹³ and the surpassing of the empirical and factual in search of a quasi-mystical pure reality (as in the work of Ashot Ashot). But paradoxically, these anxieties of visibility were not revealed through disappearance and immaterialization but instead through loud gestures and actions of excess and plentitude that were positioned as constituting a counter-sphere to the official and the ideological. Ultimately, the 3rd Floor was striving for cultural and social visibility.

Aesthetically, the artists associated with the movement engaged with painting in an “expanded field” in order to exceed it from within, through the body and temporality: artists of the Happening walked through an exhibition of paintings with their faces painted, Bobo was invoked in paintings, and Ashot-Ashot “overcame” paint by spilling it over the model’s body. Painting here was both affirmed and surpassed through its multimedia expansion, and this dynamic of affirming a traditional medium while exceeding its specificity and, at times, negating it altogether rhymes with the structural positioning of these gestures from within the official discourse and in resistance to it. In other words, these performative gestures were articulated from within the margins of the officially sanctioned glasnost policy as its avant-garde. Retrospectively, however, the 3rd Floor artists often situated their exhibitions as a resistant and anti-institutional subcultural response to what they perceived as the violence of the official culture that hindered freedom and creativity. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Armenia’s independence, this understanding of avant-garde art as a mode of subcultural resistance to the dominant culture entered a certain crisis. As the Soviet world was disappearing through fast-paced privatization, financial collapse, de-modernization of urban spaces, and socially induced historical amnesia of the recent past, to the late-Soviet avant-gardists, the 1990s promised a reconciliation between art (imagined as a realm of free creation) and dominant culture (understood as a regressive and repressive mechanism of conformity).

Editors’ note: Read Part II of this series here, and Part III here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)

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5.0: The Fifth Position

air cut into song was first installed in four parts at the seventh Singapore Biennale at the invitation of Nida Ghouse, one of the show’s four co-artistic directors. The artwork is part of an ongoing project that is less a comprehensive collection than a compilation of “gaps.” This fifth entry, composed of five videos and an accompanying essay, is an after-the-fact addition, a postscript or “second cut.” The “fifth” occupies a privileged position in music theory with a particular historical origin,¹ serving as a reminder as something in nature that continues to bring about disharmony. This is one proposition of this piece: to hold onto the incompleteness and disjuncture that gave rise to the project and the practices that continue to inspire it, that is, to let out some of the air in all its unfinishedness.

This ongoing work aims to think of matter, in this case, of air as a substance with material considerations, and its metamorphosis into the cultural medium of song, in its affective sensation. air cut into song questions the oscillation between these modes, focusing on the gap between matter and medium and the possibilities that such a cutout generates. The result of a large collaboration among sixteen artists, the tone and voice of the work is choral. Thus, the first-person “I” in this entry is, at times, a substitute for the compound “we,” acknowledging the contributions of the many named and unnamed individuals with whom the artwork was conceived, inspired, and generated. And yet, at the same time, I do not wish to speak on their behalf. The first four parts were split according to material composition and operational speed. These autonomous fragments were distributed across two physical sites: the fifth floor of the main exhibition space in Singapore Art Museum (SAM), which is housed within Tanjong Pagar Distripark, a shipping-container port, and St. John’s Island, a temporary public exhibition site located south of the mainland. These artistic components utilized the visual sightlines and cellular network between the two locations.

Within the institutional interior of SAM, an arrangement of six directional wire antennae in a radial pattern made up air cut into song 01: A Broken Sky (2022), a sculpture and operational live-listening device that I built together with artist and design engineer Flora Weil. It worked in real time to tune into radio channels in Singapore and was simultaneously engineered to be sensitive to the discharge of lightning activity from several hundred miles away.² This work was based on the co-constitutive history of radio broadcasting and weather measurement, wherein one of the first radios was also used to detect lightning activity. Because of this design, the installation was susceptible to the electromagnetic charge of the exhibition space (literally the electrical wiring inside the walls and the residual static) and would continuously broadcast a low-volume white noise that was specific to what could be called the “weather” of the museum.³

The second part, a video work titled air cut into song 02: The Wind Between Two Winds (2022), was a live video feed from a camera attached to a metal post on St. John’s Island and pointed toward SAM’s main exhibition space. The video work was viewed on a screen located within the structure of air cut into song 01: A Broken Sky. The video was overlaid in real time by a set of graphic weather glyphs designed by the Malaysian type and design collective Huruf and based upon Malay weather charts and Chinese characters associated with the climate.⁴ Huruf’s glyphs, arranged on the screen by a computer processing the real-time video feed according to set of predefined rules for describing the weather, resulted in an autonomous “annotation” of the weather through visual symbols.

Huruf’s symbols were framed by a horizontally scrolling text in a font created by graphic designer Ejin Sha. The text was a transcription from air cut into song 03: The Nat. Radio Weather Channel (2022), a two-channel sound work made with audiographer and sound artist Sukanta Majumdar and installed a few meters from where the camera relay was located on St. John’s Island. The stereophonic track was composed of recorded readings by “international weather correspondents”: a group of artists and scholars invited to read and interpret weather reports from important historical moments.⁵

The final piece of this four-part compilation, air cut into song 04: Rainy Days (instrumental) (2022), which was installed on St. John’s Island, was made up of six metal panels into which ancient Arabic names and a diagram of winds and rains had been engraved. These panels were hung directly in front of the audio work and shielded seated listeners from the elements against the otherwise exposed oceanfront.

The experience of this artwork was intended to be piecemeal: you couldn’t read the transcript in the video and hear its audio component at the same time; you couldn’t simultaneously see the lightning in the sky and listen to its radiophonic crackle in the exhibition space. This bifurcation of the senses of sight and sound was necessary for the work to inhabit the space between matter and medium. This disharmony and conceptual challenge lend themselves to this fifth entry.

5.1: Heavy Air

As part of air cut into song 03: The Nat. Radio Weather Channel, anthropologist Jerry Zee described a hybrid matter that is both geological and gaseous, naming it “wind-sand.” Zee narrated this formation via the example of a dust storm that was blown by a Siberian jet stream from the desert of northern China, which borders Inner Mongolia, to Jeju Island off the Korea Strait in May 2001. In his weather report on this land-sky situation, Zee posed this question to listeners: “If the dust storm indicates the capacity of land to phase into an aerosol, as a Chinese desert in the sky, what could the term ‘weather’ mean? If not the passive meteorological background against which the dramas of state and society are lived; if not the realm of the atmosphere, to the exclusion of the earth that now fills it—makes it heavy with land, delivers [it] onto the plate glass windows of skyscrapers? Or enters it into lungs with the un-refusal of breath?”⁶

This meteorological incident impresses a certain literalness: a delegation from Mainland China had visited South Korea that same month to resume and repair diplomatic relations between the two countries. Their arrival was coincidentally announced at the same time the very particles of the land they represented were arriving. The agenda for the 2001 mission was to ensure smoother trade and shipping along the East China Sea to the South China Sea between the two economic giants, and this weather event was an unexpected transmission broadcasting material proof of geographic interdependence between nation-states and, inevitability, the political reality of their correspondence.

The “wind-sand” determined the weather, land became contingent, and diplomacy was coupled with the downwind of atmospheric phenomena. The dust storm entered the South Korean airspace without consent, was breathed in by its population, and then entered their lungs without possibility of refusal. The ramifications in this combination of ineffective meteorological policy and the inescapable earthbound phenomena that produced the dust storm could be heard for some time after; indeed, an audible trace of this weather event was evident in the hoarse tonality of those who experienced and then spoke about it. The weather became biologic to a different degree, as laryngeal injury and involuntary vocal alteration.

In medical terms, subjection to this heavy air modified the faculty of the voice, with the particulate matter so fine that it spanned transnational distances, meaning it also penetrated the deepest parts of the lungs, causing inflammation and irritation of the vocal cords. This led to the acute states of epiglottitis, dysphonia, or general respiratory distress. Simply, with varying degrees, it changed how one spoke, the tenor of their exhale and wheeze, and their capacity to take in air.⁷

In Jerry Zee’s earlier narration of the 2001 dust storm, he cites interviews undertaken as part of his long-term ethnographic project: “At daybreak, it was witnessed as an anti-optical event, as ground-level observers described seeing the dust by what they could not see. The density of the dust cloud, and its intensity disappeared buildings and eclipsed the morning sun.”⁸ While Zee charts the geologies’ new regimes of visibility, I use this example to highlight the movement from the environment to vocal quality. As a mediatic shift from the geological to the sonic, it demonstrated the cut that was importantly not an aesthetic practice, but rather a harmful reality that not only came with grave consequences and also had historical precedence.

5.2: Phonotrauma

The 2001 diplomatic mission sought to facilitate oceanic trade across the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. A hinge in this Asian market was the oceanic conduit of Singapore and the container port of Tanjong Pagar, which is the place on view in the video works accompanying this piece (and where SAM is located). The air is an occlusion in the frame, filling the space between the camera lens and the view, a composite of floating matter and the compound of gas carrying it, visually collaged in the aperture of shipping containers, choreographic cranes, and waterborne vessels. It is the “in-between” space of this air that I want to focus on, to measure, and to be attuned to.

At noon on October 23, 2022, a westerly prevailing wind that had its origin in the Korean peninsula picked up speed along the Indian Ocean monsoon currents. This current of air then passed in front of the camera that is part of the artwork on St. John’s Island and found its final destination and dispersion in the Sahara beyond the East African coastline.⁹ This transcontinental transfer of matter became a conceptual bridge that allowed me to connect two culturally disparate traditions in South Korea and Algeria, respectively: the p’ansori ritual and the Aissawiyya Sufi’s remembrance practices.

In both rituals, the voice is transformed by the air that it uses to sing, demonstrating a shared understanding of the multiple provisions of the mechanics of breathing, of the pressure caused by the push of gas against the soft tissue of the body’s interior. This process involves a visceral “opening up,” a type of bodily augmentation through an intentional “phonotrauma.”¹⁰ These practices were concerned with the oscillation between air and song in a fundamental way, as a form of gaseous labor. For singers in either tradition, air was a way to literally tune their bodily organ as an instrument, facilitating the auto-mutilation necessary to achieve the shape required to make the correct sound.

In their preparatory breath work, the singer contorts and contracts the buccal and intrinsic laryngeal muscles so that the air agitates, literally aggravates and harasses, the soft tissue of the vocal fold within the throat. The aim is to transform the shape and elasticity of the voice and to use air to produce different sounds. The method of “breathing” to achieve this alteration differs: whereas p’ansori typically pushes the individual to sing at ever greater levels of loudness, to the point that “a singer will get blisters and she will bleed, but if she keeps practicing, at some point she will finally be able to sing.”¹¹ In the Aissawiyya practice, the name of god (Allah) is broken down into three parts (Al – La – Hu) in order to regulate breathing, putting increased glottic pressure on the end of the exhaled third syllable (and thus the throat). This is repeated until the voice becomes so strained, it blends the distinction between the three segments of the word (Allah) into one.¹²

In this shared aspiration to let out air differently, a gap opens to an understanding that the conditions for song were materially differential. I do not mean to collapse the significance of the Korean and Saharan specificities; I take them together as they share a tactic of using air as a medium—to transfer a vibratory and auditory range of tone (in both traditions, singers sing without prosthetic accompaniment) and as matter—that physically modifies the structure of the sound-making faculty. They highlight how air as a substance has a long precedence in artmaking, and how the gap becomes a site of modulation and possibility.

5.3: Fishing for Dots

What empowered both p’ansori and Sufi practices was the ideal of a certain kind of song-making that considered the voice as a physical site made malleable by its surroundings. The tongue, lips, vocal cords, and cheeks move, contract, relax, and gesture to produce sound—all individual components of a broader atmospheric network that, in their orchestration, could achieve the “correct” performance. P’ansori performers traditionally practice in nature, and against nature—for example, being able to be “heard over the sound of waterfall” was a prerequisite for professional recognition and fueled an imaginary in which the outside world marks and is marked by the voice.¹³ To cry at the elements as an expression of lament is what I am calling a “phonotraumatic” act in how it embedded a sound signature as a scar on the interior of the singer’s throat that would then be carried onto the stage and into social settings.¹⁴

The capacity for auditory distinction, for how the air hits the eardrum, was a necessary aspect for realizing the vocal alteration by listening for the correct sound. There was a precision in the practice that required calibration, as it was taught within the local context of a cultural idiom (what would give rise to a regional “accent”) but was subsequently subverted by the very environment that surrounds it as these two examples highlight.

The training that comes with language and vocal qualities relies on an imitation of sounds and enunciation. I grew up speaking a northwestern Libyan dialect of Arabic, a mother tongue that was made to give up space for an Estuary English. Reading in Arabic obviously looks and sounds different than reading in English, and the logic of the reading differs more radically in the way each conceives of the speaker and her presence within the environment. The two contain radically opposite sensibilities regarding the mechanism to instruct how one was to make sounds from what they see.

Reading is a bodily act and, in Arabic, the phonetic process is aided by minute morphological differences between letterforms that make unique demands on the eye and how it scans the sentence. It is beyond the current exploration to highlight the relation of the reader to her environment (something I explored in an earlier artwork),¹⁵ but to give a pertinent example, there are five letters distinguished only by the different placement of dots: baبي , ta تي , tha ثي , noon ني , yaa¹⁶. يي . Though the dot is the most minimal mark on a page, it is a significant arbiter of meaning while, at the same time, it exhibits an asymmetrical epigraphic economy that easily eludes the net of comprehensive capture, it was easy to miss. The weathering of older manuscripts meant reading these old Arabic texts was literally an exercise in fishing for dots.

Drawn and named differently, there were two dots that went for a lexical swim in a rectangular map named after its commissioner, the last ruler of the Abbasid empire caliph al-Ma’mūn of the ninth century.¹⁷

Al-Ma’mūn’s cartographic mistake transformed the ancient Arabic name for the kingdom of Java, as it appeared on the map, into a label on the page to designate the people as those who live there as “below the wind.” This scribal error altered the positions of the dot above the middle letter of the first word and under the last letter of the second word, in effect, changing (تخت الزبج) to (تحت الريح). The slip was slight, but in this new meaning and climatic determination, a people became defined by the atmosphere blowing above them, and so reading the weather took on a different valence; translated into Malay as “bawah angin,” it was borne into the present as a phrase still in use though denoting a more charged cultural meaning.¹⁸

The correspondence between Western Asia and Eastern Africa and the islands of Southeast Asia continued from this typo, propelled by Indian Ocean trade, such that in contemporary Malaysia, both Arabic and Latin alphabets are used in official and popular contexts. The introduction of the Arabic form into the Malay writing system (as well as those of Acehnese and Maguindanaon, among others) necessitated the addition of six new characters, and the script was given the name “Jawi,” which is also the Arabic word for “weather.” In this formulation, reading Malay in Arabic was, in a literal sense, reading the weather.¹⁹

5.4: The Approximate Tone

In describing the “weather” of the Malay writing system, the history of Latin is also riddled with many transformations, a textual lineage concerned with the production of meaning through spacing. For example, there were no gaps between words in written Latin and thus no differentiation between the beginning and end of a word; in other words, “it used to be written like this” would have appeared as “itusedtobewrittenlikethis.”²⁰ This discrepancy is important in understanding how the same sounds can be produced by different visual practices.

I am not writing a history of orthography, of how the history of writing impacted that of speaking, but rather exploring how a textual lineage becomes important in terms of thinking about the artwork in the gap—a form of artmaking that moves between the abstract realm of linguistic expression to the concrete spacing of its material, graphic forms, and sonic performance.

What was at stake in the spacing of words in Latin was the practice of reading aloud and of reading silently, the latter being a rare occurrence until the thirteenth century in the Middle Ages of Europe.²¹ The spaces between words were introduced in the moment in which “silent reading” was “invented,” and yet they also assisted in reading in isolation. Prior to the introduction of the space, Latin had to be read with others, in an oration or congregation, to be decipherable. It demanded that a human, in a gathering and specific environment, serve as a sonic aid.

Intra-textual space, that is the space within the text, afforded the oral reader a ready ability to decode not only the text’s meaning but also its indications for pitch, intonation, and tempo. At first, spaces were placed across moments in a sentence that would enable the fluent rendition of a syllable to pitch, a process that was necessary, for example, in the performance of medieval chants. This wasn’t space between words, but rather gaps introduced according to when one needed to take a breath. In this system, some words were still pressed against other words, and spaces were sometimes introduced within the middle of autonomous words, between two syllables that were separately vocalized before and after an inhale and exhale.

These gaps were first introduced in the seventh century by Irish scribes copying Latin manuscripts. This process resulted in something called “aerated text” or, literally, the airing out of the text.²² I interpret that this was understood to relate to both the visual spacing between words in a script, and to the air within the mouth that was performing or singing the script. Even highly “aerated” text still opposed the arbitrary autonomy of words, whereby the script continued to wobble between grammar, rhythm, and visual image on the page. The air of the text was the literal air within the mouth, and its aeration was both an abstract notional form and its physical performance.

As development of Latin’s syntax progressed, words gained their status as individual semantic units of account; the hyphen, which became known as the “line of union,” attempted to further re-suture this history of linguistic unmooring.²³ While it is a solid horizontal element that weaves letters back into a definitive space, its more uncertain cousin, the tilde, is used as the symbol for approximation. The ~ is placed before a term that is deemed not completely determined.²⁴ Taken from the Latin titulus, “a mark of suspension” over the letter, it was originally employed to indicate the rise in vocal pitch, to indicate uncertainty through tone.²⁵

The aeration and hesitation of the text, from the spacing between words to the use of symbols of approximation, are two instances of what I am referring to as gap-making. They highlight an aesthetic practice that has developed across a vast geography, where even an empty word-space or a single dot can be a hinge that transforms a cultural or environmental system. Much like the p’ansori and Aissawiyya Sufi singing modes, these tactics enabled a way to imagine what lies in the spacing between medium and matter, air and song.

5.5: On Being Cut Out

The five videos that make up this piece are edited segments from the air cut into song 02: A Wind Between Two Winds live stream. They show the view of the Tanjong Pagar Distripark container port four miles away from St. John’s Island in different moments of the day. Huruf’s glyphs populate the video across the frame, as annotations of the already-visible elements of the environment, and at the bottom is a scrolling text composed of transcripts from the weather reports heard in air cut into song 03: The Nat. Radio Weather Channel. The text utilizes a font Ejin Sha made in response to the project. Based on the tilde, it indicates the weather report’s statistical improbability and indeterminacy—as if to be read in the spirit of a rising question. Watching the actual weather alongside the glyphs of the weather, and reading about past weather in the present weather (the work was originally in real time) was an experiment to try to disrupt acts of reading and viewing.²⁶

This disruption was present in the set of examples I drew from; in the ambiguity of land, atmosphere, and politics, such as the case of Zee’s “wind-sand,” in the examples of phonotrauma in the p’ansori and Aissawiyya, and in the last two explorations of literacy as the degree-zero of art as a text that tests itself. Air cut into song gathered these moments to pry open and try to inhabit the space between the concrete and the conceptual. By building a multipart series, with numerous collaborations, cultural contexts, historical moments, and speeds of transmission, I was hoping to question and pressure the gap between medium and matter.

In this way, working with others as credited in such a piece, and in leveraging references that show mistranslations, typos, adverse weather effects, and the “bruising” of the voice, is to take a position on art-making, authorship, and inclusion that cannot be completely sustained. I reference the “I” and “we” compound from the beginning of the piece to denote the debit of many named and unnamed influences in this work, and yet it continues to cut out aspects that cannot be accounted for while also hopefully questioning the disharmony of conceptual distinctions and other possible modes of practice. 

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In this text, curator and writer Nina Mdivani revisits the lives and work of Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953) and her student Natela Iankoshvili (1918–2007). She emphasizes how these two Georgian women artists navigated between undertaking state commissions and finding windows of opportunity to oppose the regime and, in the process, creates a genealogy of Georgian artistic practices.

History of Georgian art in the twentieth century reflects two dynamics influenced by the larger history of Soviet occupation.¹ On the one hand, official art followed formalist norms of Socialist Realism by submitting to the fiction of a bright Communist future. On the other, this official directive inspired artists to find unique ways of subverting the artistic dictates established by the regime and defiantly pursuing their individual ideas. The work of women artists Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953) and her student Natela Iankoshvili (1918­–2007) illustrate these concurrent tendencies.

Abakelia, considered one of the most intriguing Georgian artists of the 1930s and ’40s, worked as a sculptor, illustrator, and costume designer for theater and film. She was made an Honored Artist of the Georgian Socialist Republic in 1942 and is remembered as one of the most authentic Soviet masters of her time. Her family background is integral to an understanding of her life and work. Her father, Grigol Abakelia (1880–1938), was a member of the Highest Court Commission of the Georgian Socialist Republic and, accused of being a member of the Polish secret service and of working for the Polish government, was executed during Stalin’s Great Purge.² Her uncle, Ioseb Abakelia (1882–1938), was a notable professor and founder of the Georgian Institute for the Study of Tuberculosis in 1930. Like his brother, Ioseb was executed after he was accused of being a spy and plotting an act of terrorism against the Soviet regime.³

Although Tamar Abakelia’s oeuvre is vast and multifaceted, one project in particular exemplifies her aesthetics while also evoking complex developments in Georgian history.⁴ In 1936–37, she completed five friezes for the Institute of Marxism-Leninism on Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s central thoroughfare: Batumi Demonstration under the Leadership of Comrade Stalin in 1902, The Meeting of Partisans with the Red Army, Georgian Agriculture, Industry in Georgia, and Happy Life. Leading artist of the day Iakob Nikoladze (1876–1951), who was Abakelia’s teacher and mentor at the Academy of the Arts and himself a student of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), had been commissioned to design sculptural details for this important building and invited Abakelia to work with him. The Institute was a special project of Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953), then leader of the Communist Party of Georgia and a close comrade of Josef Stalin. Figures 3 and 4 reproduce archival documentation of two of the friezes. Figure 5 reproduces an archival photo of the Institute in 1941, when it opened. Figure 6 depicts an archival photo of Tamar Abakelia, Beria, and Nikoladze in front of the Institute building at the time it was erected.

As can be seen in figures 3 and 4, Abakelia truthfully adhered to visual formulas associated with Socialist Realism in her depictions of the social progress and triumph of Communism in Georgia. Friezes were widely regarded as marking the revival of the Georgian bas-relief tradition—and were important examples of Georgian monumental-decorative sculpture of the twentieth century. What is visible here is a form of monumentalism that is characteristic of Abakelia’s visual style throughout her career. This return to Renaissance aesthetics is not out of line with the Soviet “promotion” of the physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being of the individual. As postulated in 1934 during the First Congress of Soviet Writers formulated by Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948) and Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), Socialist Realism represented the single “artistic method” requiring “a true, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development . . . [reflecting] the new world, the new person, and a new style.”⁵

Abakelia’s friezes depict chains of soldiers and laboring farmworkers symbolically ready to give up their youth and life force for the glory of the Motherland. One important aspect observable here as well as more evident in other works by the artist is that the women stand by the men in equal positions. Women representing strength and power look stern and capable of action; they are not playing secondary roles, but rather are agents of force and change.

Again and again in a diary that she kept from 1918 to 1940, Abakelia emphasizes: “People and their characters interest me the most. First and foremost, I want to know how they look and what they feel.”⁶

Idealized naturalism, a term coined by Georgian art historian Giorgi Khoshtaria, aptly describes the Soviet art of this time.⁷ In fact, idealized naturalism was a cornerstone of Socialist Realism as it helped to distill the normative and prescriptive ideology of Communism into digestible, optimistic, life-affirming symbols and imagery. One could argue that the ideology of the totalitarian conveyer was not vastly different from that of Ancient Egypt or Greece, both of which were slave-owning societies that produced strong visual imagery to support their ideologic stances. Sociological aesthetics, a term first used by Georg Simmel in 1896, theorizes that aesthetic forms and sociological organization are linked to produce one final, total reality.⁸

Bulgarian philosopher Vladislav Todorov has further elaborated on this point, suggesting that “society is a poetic work, which reproduces metaphors, not capital.”⁹ This fairy tale of a healthy new race was one that Abakelia, as an artist within the system, had no choice but to illustrate. We can only surmise how she felt when members of her own family were persecuted by the creators of this gruesome delusion and the Empire that promoted it, but in order to be able to live and work as an artist, she had to produce works that adhered to the Soviet regime’s strict artistic guidelines.

The history of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, originally called the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute, reflects the larger context of subsequent Georgian history. Construction of the building took place in 1934–38 and cost fourteen million Soviet rubles. Three years later, in 1941, the architect, Alexei Shchusev (1873–1949), was awarded the Stalin Prize, first degree, for his design. During Khrushchev’s Thaw in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s and the dismantling of Stalin’s cult, the Institute removed Stalin from its name. Its rich library became a public library in 1990 but, soon after, was in disarray. During the civil war in Tbilisi in 1991–92, vandals damaged Abakelia’s friezes.¹⁰

In portraying women as figures of equal strength, Abakelia effectively fought the patriarchy and age-old values in traditional Georgia that insisted upon positioning the male figure at the center of the visual culture produced by Socialist Realism and its male artists.¹¹ She showed women as equal to if not stronger than their male comrades, a stance in contrast to the traditional sentimentalization of women as gentle mothers and caretakers—and a torch her student at the Tbilisi Academy of the Arts, Natela Iankoshvili, would continue to carry.

The landscapes and cultural landmarks of the Kakheti region in eastern Georgia, where Natela Iankoshvili was born and raised, influenced her work throughout her life. Her parents, Archil Iankoshvili and Mariam Zardiashvili, both teachers from Gurjaani, a town in Kakheti, instilled a love of nature and literature in their three daughters. Iankoshvili started drawing and painting as a child and, in 1937, enrolled in the Academy of Arts in Tbilisi, where she studied with renowned Georgian artists David Kakabadze (1889–1952), Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953), and Sergo Kobuladze (1909–1978). After graduation from the Academy, Iankoshvili actively pursued painting, initially accepting the dictates of Socialist Realism, and from 1930 into the 1950s, building up a substantial body of work. She started to travel around the country, painting her favorite locations. Over time, she drastically changed her style, and at one point, burned over two hundred of her earlier, more traditional works.

A solo exhibition of Iankoshvili’s work opened at the Tbilisi State (Blue) Gallery in 1960, and she became the first woman painter to have such a showing in this official space. With its more than 250 starkly different, dynamic, progressive, fresh, and emotionally raw works, the exhibition stirred many voices in the Soviet art community. Contemporary art critics aptly compared Iankoshvili’s paintings to compositions by Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) in their sophisticated yet poetic structure and approach. As important Georgian-French art critic Gaston Bouatchidzè wrote, “One does find subdued colors and smiling softness, tenderness in her works, but it is above all in these profound, dark depths where the essence of her paintings is rooted.”¹²

Autumn in Kiziki from 1976 (fig. 7) underlines her independence and strength of will, especially when seen in comparison to the docile landscapes of her contemporaries. The expressionist landscape of Kiziki is likewise portrayed with uncommon freedom and exuberance. The silhouettes of trees blend with the black background, connecting the work to that of two Georgian masters: Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), a self-taught artist and iconic presence in Georgian art history who used a dramatic black background for his still lives and genre scenes, enlivening them with vibrant splashes of color, and Elene Akhvlediani (1901–1975) who, like Iankoshvili, painted landscapes, albeit in much more traditional style, and also used trees as compositional devices.¹³ The connection of Iankoshvili to her Georgian roots rather than to Soviet ones is noteworthy. As one contemporary writer noted, she consciously rose against the notion of the artist as chronicler of “nature’s tireless reconstructor and transformer,” as was expected in landscape painting of the time.¹⁴ The work’s abstract elements and rich lushness of color intensify the uncanny emptiness of the landscape, which is devoid of figures. To be sure, Iankoshvili seems to have eliminated the surrounding Soviet compatriots, instead focusing on a spiritual communion with the Unknown. The fact that Iankoshvili created her works during the Thaw, a time of relative liberalization and de-Stalinization initiated by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), made this form of abstraction and her highly individualized method of portraiture not only possible, but also celebrated. In 1976, Iankoshvili became the People’s Artist of Georgia; in 1987, she had an exhibition at the House of Literature in Moscow; in 1996, she received the Georgian Medal of Honor; and in 2000, the Natela Iankoshvili House Museum was founded in Tbilisi, and the artist left all her works to the museum.

Though both Abakelia and Iankoshvili lived and worked in the Soviet period, they were nonetheless able to realize their visions. Neither of them was a dissident in the traditional artistic sense of producing so-called unofficial or underground art, and yet both fought the demands and restrictions of the authoritarian machine. Abakelia was able to produce fundamentally new sculptural representations of women fully equal to their male comrades and to engage in building the country’s artistic future. Iankoshvili continued this line of representation by creating distinct and bold portraits of her contemporaries and then went on to produce even more controversial, abstract, spiritual renderings of the surrounding landscapes. Although neither was a dissident, both held nonconformism as a personal value. Their positions as artists paved the way for underground artists of later decades.

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Wong Binghao: Julie, Kang, how and when did you meet? 

Kang Seung Lee: I was introduced to Julie by Young Chung, founder of Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles, sometime in 2016. I think it was right before my second show at the space, titled Absence without leave (2017). I had moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 2013 and was not too familiar with Julie’s recent work at that time, though I knew of their¹ work with ACT UP NY; her early collaborations with Ron Athey and others; their involvement with New York’s queer womxn’s space, the Clit Club; and, of course, the famous 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do” campaign by Gran Fury. Julie is a legend in many ways.

Julie Tolentino: I remember Young Chung talking to me about Kang’s work; I can’t recall when exactly, but it was long before we actually met. I had lived and worked in New York for twenty-seven years and had just moved to the Mojave Desert. I took a chance to define a practice that had been moving through performance, conceptual, and visual art. My introduction to the gallery exposed me to many local artists. I was immediately caught by Kang’s commitment to re-orientations of representation, presence/absence.

KSL: I vividly remember that my first encounter with Julie’s work was Future Gold (2014), their collaborative exhibition with her partner Stosh Fila (aka Pigpen) at Commonwealth and Council. It consisted of remnants of their recent performance in Abu Dhabi, such as honey, gold thread, and saliva that were “smuggled” to Los Angeles and mixed with silicon and mortar in a glass box with a steel frame. The artwork was permanently installed inside a brick wall in the gallery space, visible from both inside and outside of the building, and it became part of the architecture of the gallery. It almost looked like a fish tank full of amber-colored water lit by sunlight. Through this artwork, I began to understand Julie’s artistic ethos, particularly their consideration of the body as an archive of embodied knowledge.

JT: My first performance-based interactive exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, RAISED BY WOLVES (2013), was actually the basis of Future Gold, the work that Kang mentioned. RAISED BY WOLVES was an outreach to a new creative community, in which I sought out physical and conceptual contributions from fifteen local visual and performing artists that I then transposed into drawings on laminated cards. The audience collectively pulled three to five cards from the deck that I, in turn, responded to through an improvised performance. Each artist’s work would “work on” the other, and thus influence me and the objects and people in the gallery space. The exhibition left behind a permanent wall work entitled Echo Valley, for which we had painted an excerpted text from Shame: A Collaboration by Birgit Kemper and Robert Kelly on a gallery wall. Over time, my partner, Stosh Fila and I would age (that is, darken and blur) the hand-painted text. As an additional transformation, and after we toured the durational performance installation Honey (2013) in Abu Dhabi, we repurposed empty oud perfume bottles and smuggled the performance’s excess honey to create an intervention. Removing a concrete block from the wall, we inserted a handmade thin glass container into the opening. The container was filled with the gold metallic thread, saliva, and honey from the performance. The work was renamed Future Gold.

The first work of Kang’s that I encountered was a wall mural that was part of a collaborative piece with Young Joon Kwak and Candice Lin. It emerged soon after RAISED BY WOLVES. I recall that the collection of work was situated on two walls, with a piece hanging from the ceiling, and a soundscore that accompanied it. It was near a door that is often left open and traversed—a social doorway. This work continues to hold significance for me as it embraces and holds my own wish for intergenerational, interdisciplinary, East-West art-activist-queer collisions, and transnational exchange. It was more “writing on the wall,” carrying collective love and many kindred conversations among us. It was a stunning way to meet Kang as I was already in love with Candice and Young Joon. 

WBH: Kang, what do you remember about the collaborative work/exhibition that Julie mentioned? 

KSL: The artwork is a collaborative installation in a hallway of Commonwealth and Council and was assembled by Young Chung. It consisted of my wallpaper installation Untitled (William Yang_The Morning After_1976) (2016) with Young Joon’s hanging mirror ball sculpture and Candice’s sound piece. I remember Candice’s work was played using a cassette player, and Young had to replace the battery almost every day. 

WBH: In what ways have you collaborated since your first encounter? Are there any ideas or projects that you’d like to embark on together but haven’t gotten around to?

KSL: Julie’s engagement in queer activism, kinship, and care are especially pronounced in her work Archive in Dirt (2019–ongoing). The work, also known informally as “Harvey,” is a living cactus that Julie revived, that had been propagated from its “mother” plant that originally belonged to the activist/politician Harvey Milk. It came from their friend, an archivist in the special collections department at UCLA, who acquired cuttings from one of Milk’s ex-roommates in San Francisco. When I saw the work for the first time in the exhibition Altered After curated by Conrad Ventur at PARTICIPANT INC (July–August 2019), which both Julie and I were part of, the plant was quite fragile, with just one new, pale green leaf sprouting. The plant is a container of multigenerational memories of activism and connections in constant transformation as it grows and multiplies.

In 2020, Julie allowed me to include Archive in Dirt in Becoming Atmosphere, my collaborative exhibition with Beatriz Cortez at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. I thought of it as a gesture of transference of intergenerational responsibility and care to Beatriz, me, and the staff at the gallery. With the help of Julie and Young, I became a participant in the evolution of the work through making ceramic planters and repotting the plant, taking care of cuttings, and sharing them with other members of the community, documenting the growth of each plant, making drawings and mapping connections, etc. In 2021, I extended this gesture by including Archive in Dirt in Permanent Visitor at Commonwealth and Council, as well as in New York as part of my untitled installation for the 2021 Triennial at the New Museum.

JT: After submitting Archive in Dirt and my accompanying anxious, Siri-mediated catalogue text for Altered After, which was part of Conrad Ventur’s Visual AIDS project, I was pleased to learn that Kang and I were showing together, and that our works were in proximity to each other. I sensed a mutual responsiveness to the intricacy of Kang’s gold-threaded embroidery on the floor of the gallery and the liveness of “Harvey.” As Kang mentioned, Harvey was a cutting, gifted from friend, beloved, anarchist, educator, archivist Kelly Besser from the still-here garden of Harvey Milk in San Francisco. A gift from a friend of his, then a piece shared with me. My best guess after some research is that its genus may be derived from the Schlumbergera russelliana—a species pollinated by hummingbirds. It’s understood that the birds stab the seed with their beak, then rub it off onto the bark of a tree, which is an impetus for germination and, too, that this species often gives pink or reddish flowers. The particularly opaque seed interests me as it is known to not open easily, and thus needs intervention and movement for growth. I resonate with this personally and related this to the Archive in Dirt’s origin as a gift. Community and archival care are both a form of conjuring and a way to see oneself in others.

Harvey, the succulent, had endured plane trips, various re-pottings, and imperfect conditions in an effort to find its roots as an artwork. It was extremely fragile in the post-exhibition transition—a very key moment for its multi-future as it was sprouting and rooting in different locations, under extreme changes. It was shared with Conrad, Kang, Commonwealth and Council/Young, and was eventually returned home to Pigpen and my apartment in Northern California—just seven miles from its original home, the activist Harvey Milk’s rooftop garden.  Everyone received these tender shoots—experiencing the responsibility of the split, transfer, transition, and reach. Kang posts how Harvey is doing and installed Harvey in a show at the New Museum. There is a rich three-way text thread running between Young, Kang, and myself. Conrad touches in from time to time, and we all gasp at the flowers and any tiny offshoots—signs of life. 

KSL: Skin (2021) and Untitled (Skin) (2021) are two other works in Permanent Visitor that came out of our conversations. Drawing from Julie’s consideration of the body, I was thinking about tattoos and scars as bearers of and witnesses to memories, pain, trauma—a mode of knowledge inscribed directly into the body. The two works are my attempts at capturing lifelong transformations through aging. I scanned the skin of Julie and three other friends: artists Jen Smith, Jennifer Moon, and Young Joon Kwak, who are all represented by Commonwealth and Council, trying to map a multigenerational fabric of our community’s embodied experiences. Skin is a video work in which the scanned images from the four artists are mixed together and move from one screen to another, resembling a flow of a river or human text as one collective body. In the floor installation Untitled (Skin), I embroidered these tattoos and scars on sambe cloth in antique 24-karat gold thread and juxtaposed them with fossilized leaves, seeds, and copper from the Pennsylvanian and Eocene eras. Sambe, a woven hemp textile, is traditionally used in Korea for funeral shrouds. Through the use of these materials, I was trying to honor our shared personal histories, address mourning and reverence, and reimagine collectivity through the flows of forces beyond one single life.

JT: Our bodies are laced together in Skin, tracing an opaque history that is built into the way we find ourselves drawn together—both with and onto each other. We are all UNEVEN in our togetherness—key to the way we use the archive. I lean toward the term “COUNTER ARCHIVE” to activate a liveness in oral recollections—that is, the liveness in the work shares the touch of Harvey, not a representation of Harvey Milk. This is not a critique so much as it is allowing terms around and between us that I experience as productive and queer.

I imagine that we take part in artworks and exhibitions as a kind of “forever practice.” Perhaps what I am saying, especially in the proposition in the tender-holding of Archive in Dirt as an archival expansion, is that we will always have opportunities to think with this kind of affiliation—as advocates for those among us and ourselves. This is always-in-process as our terms shift, as our surroundings and bodies change. I believe that Harvey and all the simpatico Harveys are part of a speculative forever-invitation offered to me—and thus, an Archive in Dirt translates as a verb: a care that is active, in action.  

I hope that we can find ways to continue to talk at all the various stages of our encounters with Harvey. I feel like this interview across time, distance, space, caregiving, touring, artmaking, teaching, research, etc. is a form of continued public and privately negotiated dialogue, writing, and rewriting.

WBH: What first drew you to your engagement with queer histories (for example, genderqueer clubs, community organizing, HIV/AIDS activism) in and/or beyond art?

KSL: Growing up in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s, I was very frustrated with the lack of representation of queer people in the mainstream media. My mining of queer archives definitely started from the desire to be connected and to be part of a lineage. It also meant negotiating with Western-oriented hierarchies that shaped the narratives and histories of the queer community, a complex position for queer Asians, who face oppression and homophobia within their own culture while being on the margins of the White Euro/US–centric queer culture.

As I go back and forth between Los Angeles and Seoul, I try to find ways to contribute to the queer communities in both countries from my privileged transnational position. For example, for the past four years, I have worked with QueerArch, also known as Korea Queer Archive, a personal archive of activist Chae-yoon Hahn that was established in 2002 but became public soon after. 

I make use of resources and funding opportunities from the contemporary art world to exhibit collections of books, magazines, newsletters, etc., and items such as ephemera from Pride parades from the archive, collaborate with younger generations of queer artists based in Korea creating new works influenced by our research at the archive, and also include items from their publication collection within my participation in the biennial in Gwangju, among other venues.

My projects are rooted in archival research. I try to reposition queer archives and collections, to connect distinct geographies and experiences to forge new sites of knowledge. For example, in my 2018 exhibition Garden, I juxtaposed the artworks and lives of two activist-artists, Oh Joon-soo and Derek Jarman, who were from two different continents but both died of AIDS in the 1990s. In a series of drawings on paper called Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi) (2018–20), part of which was exhibited in a recent solo exhibition Permanent Visitor, I appropriated and attempted to create a critical context and history for the Hong Kong–born artist Tseng Kwong Chi’s works. I want to keep the legacies of these artists and HIV/AIDS activism alive to challenge dominant whitewashed narratives.

JT: I grew up deeply impacted by early LGBT and race riots in San Francisco, raised by teen parents and first-generation Filipino and El Salvadoran immigrant grandparents. Language and access bore down on how we navigated progress narratives, access, the reality of living with and among HIV and AIDS, the various forms of belongings and the righteous making of lives through clubs, affinities, drugs, difficulty, disabilities, art forms. . . . In retrospect, I learned to take in isolation as something to address, support, and surround, yet also allow myself to identify and work with. I look at how archives can be challenged to examine and champion other kinds of marks and signs of life—to see into the shape of (im)possibilities. Our experiences are uneven and this is important to remain open to. Legibility can also be elusive, exclusive. Relationships are dreams that need care. Art-making helps us reimagine ways towards another—and along queer lines, past and future.

WBH: How does dance figure (or not) in your artistic practice?

KSL: I am currently working on a new project The Heart of A Hand, which pays tribute to Goh Choo San (1948–1987), an internationally renowned Singaporean-born choreographer who died of an AIDS-related illness at thirty-nine years old. During his lifetime, he performed and choreographed for prominent ballet companies throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. His legacy remains largely absent from dance history in the United States, most likely due to his diasporic identity. His accomplishments have been slightly more recognized in Singapore, perhaps fueled by nationalism, but his place in global queer cultural contexts is still vague.

The research process for this project has been quite challenging as I had to follow traces of Goh’s inherently ephemeral work and life between worlds. Last summer, I took a very rewarding trip to Singapore, where I met with a group of queer artists and cultural workers who helped me move through the huddles: Ming Wong, Jimmy Ong and, of course, Bing, who made all the connections. It felt like we were on a mission to learn about this queer predecessor and his last years, and I had a realization that the invisible memories of queer lives can only be sustained by this kind of cross-generational curiosity.

Through Janek Schergen, Goh’s friend and ballet master, and his sister Goh Shoo Kim, I learned much about Goh’s last years in New York City; his partner Robert Magee, who died of AIDS-related complications a few months before Goh; and how they were looked after by a group of friends for the last year as they became weak. I am trying to find ways to address these untold memories and to convey the ongoing grief and their bodily experiences of caregiving and resistance. The centerpiece will be my collaboration with Joshua Serafin, a performance artist born in the Philippines and based in Brussels. We are in the process of creating a video inspired by Goh Choo San’s Configurations (1982), a queerer, nonconforming, and clubby version, of course.

JT: Dance—ah, so much to say here. I left capital D dance long ago, having trained via a queer, brown, not-designed-for-dance, classed, and racialized body. Coming up, out, and through formal training in the ’80s highlighted how my formation was imbued with mixed racialization—a kind of triple-dosed consciousness and its special brand of impacting encounters with classism, racism, and homophobia. Though it lingers, forty years ago, being an “imperfect and unrecognizable” body in the dance room, in its skinny mirror and stage that prizes the spectacle, there was always something to work through (resist) and break with (refuse). Movement (and movements) create choreographies of being with and listening for other bodies, speculatively echoing back and forth across time. 

I worked professionally in David Roussève’s REALITY, originally a predominantly Black experimental dance company for twelve years. With many other artists, I contributed as performer/mover in more theatrical settings and this propelled my own practice into movement-based durational performance installation in the mid ’90s, when I experimented with folks like Grisha Coleman and Patty Chang. Years later, for my own work The Sky Remains the Same (2006–present), I archived works of other body-centered artists such as Lovett/Codagnone, Athey, and Franko B, as well as choreographers David Roussève and the late Stanley Love into/onto my body as a form of advocacy and community recognition expressed as curation<!>—while fully acknowledging the inadequacy of such a claim due to my own (disintegrating) body. This leans heavily on the necessity of movement—its weight, space, time, gathering.

Movement always leads, as in the 108-hour durational performance and visual art exhibition entitled REPEATER (2019) or the invitation to float and submerge, one-on-one, with audience members underwater in a gold-lined tent and cedar pool in Slipping into Darkness (2019). In recent collaborative and durational performances ECHO POSITION (with Ivy Kwan Arce, 2022), HOLD TIGHT GENTLY (with Stosh Fila, 2022), and LET’S TALK (with Jih-Fei Cheng and other artist/activist/writers, 2022), I consider the potency of collective movement embedded in light, reflection, and glass to call upon the voices of past and future to help us express stealth learning and the intricacies of public and private mourning, kink, care practices that are moving, and complex forms of love. There is so much more to say about the role of dancing and its material contagion—alone, on stage, slow drags, stuck in things, or just being the last messy one still swaying at the bar. Perhaps it’s the feeling of a kind of melancholic punk lingering, an in-person pulsing that remains. All that submerged melancholy drenched in fierce dancer epaulement. A nod to improvisation, ball culture, and the blues. All that swish. . . There is a kind of loosening I aim to engage in as a form of touch. A rigorous shaking (it up).

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