Russian artists say no to war

Excerpt from the July/August 2022 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian artist Alisa Gorshenina saw no point in making art. Speaking on the phone from her home in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil, the 28-year-old – who goes by Instagram as Alice Hualice – tells me that when she woke up to the news, she woke up her husband by telling him there was a war and that his first thought was to react publicly, stating his position. The next day, Gorshenina climbed a slope that is a tourist attraction in the industrial city and planted a large sign on which she had written “NO TO WAR” in the snow. Nizhny Tagil is a small town.

The single picket made local headlines and drew negative comments, but it stood for two weeks, according to the artist. A few days later, she put up a sign saying “NO TO WAR” in her window. “At first, I thought I was dead as an artist. And then I came back to art – to resistance through art,” says Gorshenina. Then she sewed the words “NO TO WAR” and teardrop-shaped pieces of fabric onto a black coat and walked down the city’s Peace Street. “Some people ignored me, some women looked at me with understanding in their eyes, some men shouted that I was crazy. I would say that the official statistics do not represent what people feel. There are a lot of people who don’t agree with the war in secret,” Gorshenina says. “The next day [the authorities] prohibited [us] to use the words ‘no to war’, so we will have to invent new ways of saying it,” she adds.

After Feb. 24, the US, EU and others introduced far-reaching sanctions against Russia in an attempt to cripple the country’s economy. These sanctions targeted billionaires suspected of being close to the Kremlin, some of whom had funded key art institutions such as the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (co-founded by Roman Abramovich) and the VAC Foundation (co-founded by magnate Leonid Mikhelson ). This revealed what we had known all along: that the institutions funded by the oligarchs were not far from the state.

Ukrainians had more immediate concerns, such as survival, and many artists and cultural institutions turned to volunteering and fundraising, with galleries and art centers becoming temporary bomb shelters or places of residence for displaced persons. Of course, the Russians did not face such difficulties, but for artists and people who work in culture, it always seemed like a decisive period. Fear of Russia closing its borders prompted those who could afford to leave. Calls for a boycott of Russian culture began to appear from Ukraine and elsewhere. A few days after the invasion, the curator and two artists responsible for the Russian Federation pavilion at the Venice Biennale resigned, canceling the country’s participation in the event. The Italian artistic director of the VAC Foundation also resigned shortly after the invasion. The foundation had recently opened GES-2, a vast exhibition space near the Kremlin which was intended to be the Moscow replica of the Tate Modern. Several artists, Russian and foreign, have requested that their work not be exhibited by GES-2. The Art Russia fair, on the other hand, still took place at the end of March, with the participation of many Russian artists as if nothing had happened.

For Russian artist Vadim Zakharov, the red line he will not cross – he refuses to collaborate with an oppressive and murderous regime – appeared years ago. The artist, now 62, represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and has an extensive archive of Moscow conceptual artists. “Russia occupied Crimea in 2014. If I had been invited to represent Russia after that, I would have said no,” Zakharov tells me, speaking from his home in Berlin.

This year, Zakharov stood in front of the Russian pavilion in Venice with a sign saying, “I protest against Russian propaganda and the Russian invasion which led to war in Ukraine.” The murder of women, children, Ukrainians is a shame for Russia. I stand here in front of the Russian pavilion against the war and against the cultural ties of the Russian government. Zakharov insists it was a political statement, not an artistic “action” or performance. He thinks artists should speak out against the war, but, he adds, “My opinion, which is not very popular, is that Russian artists and members of the Russian cultural sphere should shut up [about art]at least until the end of the war.

Zakharov’s career began in the late 1970s when he and his friends (including Ilya Kabakov) held unofficial art exhibitions in their apartments. He has experienced completely different worlds, having also experienced – as a successful artist after the fall of the Soviet Union – how the Russian art scene is structured and the power of large institutions funded by the oligarch. “It should be a break or a break,” says Zakharov. “Creatives should collect, analyze [current] situation for the future.

To some extent, Zakharov’s desire for a break goes hand in hand with his hopes for a return of greater artistic autonomy for artists. “Artists can organize a lot of things today, without asking for sponsorship, or expecting collectors or galleries,” he says. Zakharov also believes that Russian and Ukrainian artists are at a turning point and that the ties established between Russian culture and the West over the past decades could disappear. “Everything closes for [Russian artists]. But for Ukrainian culture, everything is opening up,” he says.

It is striking that many anti-war activists and many artists who protest against the war are women. Although, as Gorshenina tells me, “Most protests against the war come from activists rather than artists. As for artists, there aren’t many big names, artists who have won awards or exhibited their work in major museums like Garage. (She received a scholarship from the museum in 2019 and participated in its second triennale.) “I think it makes sense that the anti-war movement has a female face,” Gorshenina says. “Anti-war movements often do this. We react more harshly to injustice because we are constantly confronted with it.

Russian-speaking feminists have created a horizontal organization called Feminist Anti-War Resistance which focuses on small actions, rather than mass protests, such as “Women in Black Thursdays” and attempts to counter official propaganda in the form , for example, graffiti or messages on banknotes. Aleksandra Skochilenko, a 31-year-old artist and musician, followed the band’s lead when she replaced price tags with information about the war in Ukraine at a St Petersburg grocery store. Her friend Anastasia Williams, who emigrated to the United States eight years ago, tells me that Skochilenko was reported by an older woman who reported her to the store manager and then to the police in April. Skochilenko was one of the first to be charged under the new criminal law for “discrediting the Russian Armed Forces”. Prosecutors said she was motivated by “political hatred of Russia”. She faces up to 10 years in prison.

Aleksandr, a street artist from Moscow who does not consider himself “an artist”, tells me that anti-war inscriptions have multiplied on the walls of the capital. “You can tell most of them are done by ordinary people. I haven’t seen much of the great graffiti artists,” he said, speaking via an encrypted messaging app. “Whenever someone does graffiti against the war, they are immediately removed by municipal employees or workers [often migrant workers from Central Asia]many of whom struggle to read in Russian.

So we have to beat them. You have to disguise what you say, so that these workers don’t understand it, but everyone else understands it,” he explains. In March, Moscow street artist Andrey Toje wrote “We came with -” (the last word covered in paint) on a city wall in Kolomna, a reference to the Russian phrase “we came in peace “. On May 9, Victory Day in Russia, an artist working under the pseudonym of Philippenzo Madonnaro drew rows of coffins on a wall in Volgograd and wrote “The zinc is ours”, an allusion to the closed zinc coffins in which were placed the Soviet soldiers who died in Afghanistan. sent home – and a reference to the 2004 slogan “Crimea is ours”.
Many artists have left. Sometimes those in exile seem even more destitute than those who remained in Russia. Artem Loskutov, an artist from Novosibirsk, is known for creating an annual “Monstration” (a subversion of the traditional May Day procession) in his hometown. This hasn’t happened for 3 years. On February 24, Loskutov was out of the country and did not return. “I don’t want to end up in jail,” he said over the phone from Riga. “I ended up in jail 13 years ago and understood how the court and the police work – they don’t need any evidence to send you to jail. It’s gotten much worse now. They can arrest you and you could stay in prison until the end of the war. When I think of Russian art, I have a feeling of defeat. We did all that and today it seems like it has no value. If I had known that a war would break out in 2022, what should I have done?

Others see it differently. “I thought I would be more useful here. Leaving would be safer, but I will take the risk,” says Gorshenina. After it became a crime to call war a war, Gorshenina stitched the word “pain” in the native languages ​​used across Russia onto a long black garment. “The war revealed our internal problems. Russia went to “denazify” another country. Why doesn’t he pay attention to the discrimination that is happening here? »

But is it useful, I wonder, to demonstrate inside Russia? Williams, who worries about her friend Skolichenko, says, “Will such small actions stop the war? No, they won’t. They won’t stop the bombings […] It will make a person who thought they were the only one not supporting the war feel connected. And I think after the war is over, we will understand the value of these little things, because they will help society transform faster and maybe know what to do after the war is over.

Meanwhile, the war continues and although some Western commentators have hoped for a coup, Vladimir Putin’s regime shows no sign of losing its grip on power. As for the fear of consequences, Aleksandr says: “How long can we be afraid? I understand that I am right.

Excerpt from the July/August 2022 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.