On a hot day in July, a line of shiny black Mercedes pulled into St. Petersburg’s Palace Square. To the delight of onlookers, a security crew unloaded some 600 pounds of artificial snow.
As the snow quickly melted, Moldovan artist Pavel Braila explained to journalists from Russian television that this snow — some of it brought straight from the carefully tended Olympic pistes of Sochi — was a symbol of the money that had evanesced in the hands of the Russian state as it transformed subtropical Sochi into a winter sports arena. The same public money, Braila added, was probably being used to arm separatists in southeastern Ukraine.
“Now you see,” the artist said as a couple of children started a snowball fight, “we don’t want war, we want fun.”
Photo: Reuters
Golden Snow of Sochi, Braila’s project, is one of a series of playful but politically critical art events that have taken place in St. Petersburg as part of Manifesta, the European contemporary art biennial whose 10th edition opened in June.
Invited by the powerful State Hermitage Museum three years ago — when conditions in Russia were considerably less repressive — this year’s biennial faced a number of existential crises.
‘SHAKESPEAREAN DILEMMA’
Photo: Reuters
“We’ve been confronted with an almost Shakespearean dilemma,” said Hedwig Fijen, the founding director of Manifesta, which is based in Amsterdam. “With Crimea, Sochi, the fighting in eastern Ukraine, the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, every time we were confronted with the dilemma: Should we go or should we stay?”
That Manifesta 10, which has drawn about a million visitors and runs through October, decided to stay in St. Petersburg is less surprising, some say, than that they were permitted to. “We are allowed to have a critical voice in Russia, and nobody quite understands why,” Fijen said.
With exhibits including portraits of famous gay men and radical feminist borscht cook-offs, she said, “no one understands what the borderline is, what you are allowed to do and not.”
Photo: Reuters
So far, though, Fijen said, no artists have been censored, even when they have taken to the streets as part of Manifesta’s Public Program, which is supposed to bring discussion of contemporary conflicts to the city’s public spaces.
BREAKING TABOOS
The city agreed, for example, to let Estonian artist Kristina Norman erect a Christmas tree in Palace Square for two weeks in July — despite the fact that Norman’s tree was an explicit reference to the Christmas tree that stood for many months during the anti-Russian protests in Kiev’s Independence Square, also known as Maidan.
Photo: AFP
In St. Petersburg, Norman’s Christmas tree remained mostly bare. But the morning after the Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down over Ukraine, a white paper airplane appeared hanging from the tree. Just as mysteriously, it disappeared.
“Of course, it was provocative to have a Maidan Christmas tree in front of the Hermitage on Palace Square,” Norman said of the artwork, which she called Souvenir. “It asks the question: Is there a revolutionary potential in Russia, or not?”
In another project, Norman invited Ukrainian artist and Maidan activist Alevtina Kakhidze to St. Petersburg. In Palace Square, Norman filmed Iron Arch, a video in which Kakhidze describes everything she sees as if she were still in Kiev, showing someone around the site of the protests.
“And the bullet holes are here,” Kakhidze murmurs at one point in the film. Gesturing to the Hermitage she says, “They were probably shooting from that roof.”
In a public statement, Mikhail Piotrovski, director of the Hermitage, interpreted Norman’s projects as a warning. “You look at this film, and you see how terrible Maidan is,” he said in an interview. “We should do everything we can not to have Maidan in Palace Square.”
PROTECTED BY HERMITAGE
Organizers and observers attribute Manifesta 10’s ability to function relatively freely to the patronage of the influential Piotrovski, who said he wanted to bring the biennial to St. Petersburg because his city had fallen behind Moscow in its contemporary art offerings.
“You can’t use art for political purposes,” said Piotrovski, whose museum celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. “This is a sacred territory. It has its own rules.”
Another exhibit, Apartment Art as Domestic Resistance, a series of readings and performances held in a former Soviet-style communal apartment, was less sanguine about the inviolability of art. Olesya Turkina, the Russian curator of the exhibit, said the city’s independent artistic life took place mainly in kitchens after it was driven underground by the Soviet regime.
That Russia could see a return to this kind of cultural repression was one concern of the participants. “Whether Manifesta is here or not, it is really important for us to include our view and our voices in the public space, because this possibility could end,” said Pavel Arsenev, a poet and activist based in St. Petersburg. Arsenev, 28, came up with the popular anti-government slogan “You don’t even represent us,” which in Russian also means, “You cannot even imagine us.”
Sergei Medvedev, a professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said it was only natural that artists were staging performances in response to current events in Russia.
“In the conditions of severely limited political freedom, when the opposition and the free press have been almost entirely eliminated, contemporary art has to step in,” Medvedev wrote in an email. Of course, the audience for contemporary art is small, said Ilya Orlov, a Russian artist who looked at historical memory and the fate of Soviet shrines to Lenin for Manifesta. “What we do is not important to the masses,” he said. “But it is our responsibility to present some opinions.”
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