Pussy Riot Presents Putin's Ashes @ Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles

photographs by Morgan Rindengan

On January 27, Pussy Riot brought its radical performance art to Jeffrey Deitch's Los Angeles gallery, inviting everyone to join their protest against the authoritarian leader of Russia who started the biggest war in Europe since World War II. This was the first presentation of Pussy Riot’s political performance art at a gallery in Los Angeles.

Putin's Ashes was initiated in August 2022 when Pussy Riot burned a 10 x 10 foot portrait of the Russian president, performed rituals, and cast spells aimed to chase Putin away. Twelve women participated in the performance. In order to join, women were required to experience acute hatred and resentment toward the Russian president. Most of the participants were either Ukrainian, Belarusian or Russian.

Pussy Riot's founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova bottled the ashes of the burnt portrait and incorporated them into her objects that were being presented alongside her short art film, Putin's Ashes, directed, edited, and scored by Tolokonnikova.

"While working with artifacts, bottling ashes and manufacturing the faux furry frames for the bottles, I used skills that I learned in the sweatshops of my penal colony. I was forced to sew police and army uniforms in a Russian jail. I turned what I learned in my labor camp against those who locked me up. Putin is a danger to the whole world and he has to be stopped immediately," says Tolokonnikova.

In 2012, Tolokonnikova was sentenced to two years imprisonment following an anti-Putin performance. She went through a hunger strike protesting savage prison conditions and ended up being sent far away to a Siberian penal colony, where she managed to maintain her artistic activity and with her prison punk band made toured around Siberian labor camps. Tolokonnikova published a book Read and riot: Pussy Riot's guide to activism in 2018.

Pussy Riot stands for gender fluidity, inclusivity, matriarchy, love, laughter, decentralization, anarchy and anti-authoritarianism.

 
 

A Look Back on Vienna’s “Curated by” Gallery Festival

Ola Vasiljeva
En Rachâchant, installation view Vleeshal Museum (2015)
courtesy the artist
photograph: Leo van Kampen

text by Lara Schoorl


Hope For The Rising Sun of Promise: East not West

Every September, for the past fourteen years, the start of Vienna’s gallery season coincides with Curated by; a monthlong festival that invites international curators to organize exhibitions in the Viennese contemporary art galleries, under an overarching theme. This was the first year that an “impulse provider” was invited to propose said theme to the curators. Elected by twenty-four participating galleries, Dieter Roelstraete, received the inaugural position to present a curatorial and artistic framework for the fourteenth edition of Curated by. 

In the shadow of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the ongoing war, Roelstraete proposed “East” for the theme. More specifically “Kelet,” Hungarian for East, and explicitly the opposite of “Nyugat,” West. Nyugat was the name of a Budapest-originated, avant-garde journal from the early twentieth century; “Nyugat” one word that captured the desire for what was happening culturally in Paris and Munich, in the West. At that time, Budapest was still the second capital alongside Vienna of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, an interesting fact when thinking about cardinal directions now. Austria, and Vienna in particular, has long carried a gateway position (for culture) between East and West. During in the first half of the last century and through the Iron Curtain, and in the past two decades, Austrian art institutions have often gravitated towards the West in terms of who and what was shown. Yet now, as people move from Kyiv to Lviv, flee from East to West and South to North, Roelstraete urged, more than ever it is important to shift our perspective from West to the (expanded) East. And to then not see East as a place of trauma, but of promise, because “Is it not in the East,” he asks, “where the sun rises?” 

The theme, “Kelet,” remains open for interpretation to the gallerists and curators as East, of course, is a relative position or place depending on where one finds themselves. Although one imagines that this year the galleries might have invited curators and the curators in turn artists from the(ir) East. For Roelstraete “Kelet” provided a platform to contemplate a semantic shift for the meaning of East and or versus West through art in the European imagination. Curated by then may have formed a preliminary map of the state of art in the East (which can also be understood as Central or South and East of Vienna all the way to the Pacific). And such was the impression of the twenty-four exhibitions that spanned curators and artists of multiple generations from Ukraine, Slovenia and Georgia, to Kuala Lumpur and Mexico, and many countries in between.

The full-length curatorial essay by Roelstraete can be found here and below are highlights of this year’s Curated by, reflective of the various interpretations of “Kelet.”

SOPHIE TAPPEINER curated by Lukas Hofmann

Anna Zemánková
Untitled, the second half of 1960s
perforated paper, pastel, acrylic, china ink, embossing
60 x 41 (Detail)
Copyright and courtesy: The Artist’s Estate

Spread across two floors, SOPHIE TAPPEINER presented Pollen, a small retrospective of the self-taught Czechoslovakian artist Anna Zemánková (1908-1986). All works are on paper, all as seemingly fragile as their subjects, “my flowers,” as she called them, curator Lukas Hofmann explains. And all made in the twilight hours of dawn, before the rest of the world woke up—an unconscious nod to the East where the sun would rise as she worked. She used various techniques to create the flowers, often perforating the outlines and shapes in the paper and then coloring them with aquarelle paints, but some include stitching, ballpoint, and collage elements. They each required the viewer to take a step closer, especially her last works, which gradually became much smaller (a result of having both legs amputated and working exclusively from a board in her lap), to see the difference between thread and line and light, and then a step back in case the sun passes by or a light is lit behind them (as with the lamps), and their colors change, and shadows dance. Although the organic appearance of flowers, plants, butterflies and birds in the work is recognizable, the still not exactly true to nature imagery oozes a strong sense of elsewhere. Humble in their size and material, they breathe a kind of freedom. 

CRONE WIEN curated by Eva Kraus & Volo Bevza

In 2022, the works were equally as sharp as the exhibition title. Showing exclusively young artists from Ukraine, curators Eva Kraus and Volo Bevza localized East in one place to inquire about the repercussions of the war (and prior events) that take effect both locally and globally, and how those are experienced. Any type of event, including a war, but also protests and uprisings, can now be witnessed collectively through various instant (social) media outlets. Bevza wrote: “On the ground, you can feel the war, but most importantly, it is ‘experienced’ digitally.” The war takes places in Ukraine, in the East, in our phones all over the world. Reality is stretched into the digital realm, or the digital realm absorbs our reality. Either way, a blurry in between space is created and it is in this liminal space that the artists in 2022 make work. Analog and digital realities bleed into each other in the photography-based works of Victoria Pidust and the paintings of Artem Volokitin of Bevza. A floor to ceiling curtain, also by Bevza, printed with an image of a ruined structure characteristic of his paintings divided the front space of the gallery from the back space. A curatorial intervention gesturing to both roles he occupied in the exhibition. One literally had to walk through or around the edges of the image of destruction enforced by the war in Ukraine. Although dark, the painterly quality and manipulation of the photographic image, as with all of his recent work, softens the harsh visual as it swayed lightly in the gallery space. A contradiction felt also in mediated reality. Not only the image but our sense of reality was distorted moving through the exhibition. Behind the curtain, Yevgenia Belorusets, well-known for her war dairies presented an older work. “Please Don’t Take My Picture Or They’ll Shoot Me Tomorrow” (2015) is part of the series “Victories of the Defeated” which documents the lives of communities during the military conflict in Donbas (indicating too that this war has been ongoing) through photographs and texts. A two-sided sculptural installation, on one side the exaggerated large cover page of a fictional paper Today’s News, and on the other side a portrait of miner a filled up the center of the front space. Through irony—the paper’s subtitle reads “You’re reading a quality-looking newspaper with a seriously dubious name”—Today’s News criticizes the misinformation that the media spreads and how it corrupts the truth, another way in which our reality, be it digital or analog, is distorted.

WONNERTH DEJACO curated by Kilobase Bucharest

Alex Horghidan
Untitled [series Polyamory], 2020
graphite on paper framed
35 x 35 cm
Courtesy of the artist, TRIUMFAMIRIA, Museum of Queer Culture and Family Servais Collection

WONNERTH DEJACO opened its doors two years ago and although this was their first time participating in Curated by, their presence was strong. The group exhibition JOY ~ JOY ~ JOY ON THE PEPPERSIDE OF SUPRANFINITE was one of the few shows where the work completely took over; it was louder than the standard white cube aesthetic of the space, but in a way that was welcoming, meeting the viewers at their frequency. The curators, Dragos Olea and Sandra Demetrescu, who collaborate under the hybrid curatorial practice KILOBASE BUCHAREST, brought us dreams of a future in a utopian queer universe called Suprainfinite. Suprainfinite is a space imagined by the art collective Apparatus 22, which includes Olea, in 2015. It is used here in the fictional locale of Pepperside to contemplate hope and joy, and how those experiences can support our future on Earth. They utilized a science fictional approach to explore the idea of utopia, proposing that in radical imagination we find tools the that can facilitate change and evolution in the present. This attitude was visualized by a curatorial intervention Title for an Exhibition (2021) installed in the window and visible first from outside the gallery. In various languages, an LED loop said: “queer since the dawn of time” and “our queer forefathers” suggesting that queerness has always been present in the world. Inside, the “ultra fragile” Shields (2019-ongoing) adorned with tassels or stitching by Irina Bujor rounded off the corners of the first room. A soft voice seeped from behind them, sharing wishes that would change the violence in the realities of transgender people. In the second adjacent room, Irresistible (2021), a short film by Barbora Kleinhamplová in collaboration with Mistress Velvet, features the late queer dominatrix and their BDSM practice; as with their community organization and activist positions, Mistress Velvet used BDSM as a process to foster systemic change in the form of, for example, reparations by letting their white cis male clients read and study Black Feminist Theory. The curators made a point that queerness can become isolated in a bubble that to other communities is perceived as inaccessible or even violent. JOY ~ JOY ~ JOY aimed to not only leisurely depict joy but also the importance of notions of consent, care and comfort, which are of necessary concern to all people. These acts of care were scattered throughout the exhibition, in particular in the pencil drawings of Alex Horghidan’s Polyamory series (2020) in which groups of people, sometimes dressed sometimes not, but always in the comfort of a soft environment of grass, pillows, plants or a bed, and each other are portrayed at rest.

"Having Breakfast With The Family" Is A Portrait Of Displacement In The Face Of War


photographs by Daniel Vaysberg
text by Joshua Poschinski


There are currently millions of stories about people fleeing for their lives under threat of war. Stories about the relentless assault of aerial bombing destroying the place that was once called home. It might not be all of a sudden for those in power, but life shatters in an instant for everyday people. The supermarket where the cashier asks how your kid abroad is doing whenever you enter the building, the neighbor who lends you eggs every once in a while because you forgot to buy some for breakfast, the club where you had your first kiss, or just the unique smell of the house where you have been living for years, maybe decades. All of a sudden, everything you know is reduced to rubble, and you have to leave it all behind due to the perils of a single dictator’s fragile psyche. 

Whether they be in the Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, or Mali—there are millions of people globally who are seeking shelter from a reign of life-threatening terror that is utterly incomprehensible to those who are unfamiliar. One of these stories comes from Berlin-based photographer Daniel Vaysberg, who saw his parents flee his hometown, Kharkiv, after several weeks of mass destruction perpetuated by the Russians. He used to capture people’s daily life in Ukraine whenever he came home to visit. It was his way of bringing a piece of Ukrainian culture to Europe, providing a sometimes lovely, sometimes skewed view of a country that has become more liberal with every passing year. Now it is a war zone where Daniel finds himself facing two generations of trauma and representing a third one himself. Checking his phone incessantly for messages from his parents and friends has become Daniel’s daily routine, and what he’s left behind already feels so far away, as if home has slipped over the edge. 

While watching their hometown die, it took weeks for Daniel’s parents to leave the country. "On the 24th of February, around 5:00 a.m., we woke up to powerful explosions," Daniel’s mother Svetlana says. "We quickly took a look outside and realized that everything was burning and smoking. At that moment, we did not understand the seriousness of the problem. One to three days and it will cool down—that’s what we thought that morning.” 

Ukrainian citizens have lived in a sovereign nation since 1991, and yet they still find themselves seeking true independence from Russia long after the fall of the Soviet Union. They are a society shaped by communism that has managed to gradually inch towards democracy and hasn’t for a moment questioned the need to fight for their freedom at all costs. At the end of 2013, when the corrupt Ukrainian government led by president Viktor Yanukovych was about to push the country into grave dependence on Russia, the people demonstrated. When violence by their own government was used to keep them down, Ukrainians pushed back. They fought for their land and they won. The three months of bloody protest known as Euromaidan led to Parliament to eventually voting to remove Yanukovych from his post followed by his current exile in Southern Russia. However, victory was short lived with Putin’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula taking place only a couple of months later. Since then, Ukrainians have lived under a constant fear of war that is so dominating, a collective numbness has set in for most people living in the Southern region.

 
 

 "Words cannot describe the fear that a human experiences during these types of moments." 

Svetlana sits quietly in a chair now next to her own father in Dusseldorf, Germany, where they arrived five weeks after the Russian invasion started. She spent twenty days on the road and feels lucky to live with family in a place where she doesn’t wake up to sirens in the middle of the night. Now Svetlana’s father takes care of her and her husband, Vyacheslav, as he took care of his grandson, Daniel, when he came to Germany years ago. But as quiet as she seems, her mind is rattled by the experience. "The most frightening part of the war is the aerial bombings. When you sleep at night and have no idea where the next one is going to land. All my friends and family slept in jackets, pants, and boots to be prepared to run to the nearest shelter in case of an emergency. Words cannot describe the fear that a human experiences during these types of moments." 

Both she and her husband made the final decision to leave Ukraine while standing in line at the supermarket. After a three-kilometer walk and four hours of waiting in line, they were uncertain if anything would be left for them at all. They stood in line while "aerial bombs landed around two to three kilometers away. Everybody started to panic, nobody knew what to do. After that moment, we made a final decision to leave our hometown in order to survive." 

Svetlana is having breakfast now with her father, her husband, and her son in a small kitchen somewhere in Dusseldorf, Germany. What they have been through is what they keep. Daniel’s father, Vyacheslav, decided to leave the country with his wife, even though he wasn’t actually allowed to. Men under sixty are required to stay on Ukrainian soil and to be prepared to fight. But who is really charged with forcing citizens to bear arms against their will? 

After a week of travel, the couple reached a small city in the North of Lviv where Svetlana stayed while Vyacheslav went on in search of a way to leave the country. Five days passed before Svetlana received his call—he made it to Poland. But what happened during these five days is not what they talk about. Vyacheslav manages a chain of local storage units throughout Kharkiv and its surroundings. Svetlana used to work as a hair dresser in Kharkiv. She ran her own business for eighteen years. The building where her salon was located is now damaged and needs to be renovated, but the war rages on and most of their friends, family, and customers have left at this point. Nevertheless, they both want to get back. 

They feel blessed to have family and people who care in Germany, and as much as they are both enjoying time with their father and son, there’s a haunting restlessness. Svetlana and Vyacheslav are more than two thousand kilometers away from the place that they long for—a place that has endured heavy aerial bombing for over one hundred days and counting. They seek peace for themselves and for all the refugees who are currently experiencing this unbearable trauma. They want to have breakfast with their family in Kharkiv again. Kharkiv is home. It’s where they belong.

 
 

Arts Aid Fundraiser, Artists Donating Artworks To Support Ukrainians People

 
A buff model flexing his upper body while holding a shell and silver chains. The background appears to be a farm, with a garden and a container in the back.

Dmytro Zubytskyi
Bodybuilder Series with Sally von Rosen, (2020)
Pigment Print
40 x 60 cm
250 €
Artwork location: Berlin
(Ukrainian artists receive 100% of their sales)

 

The living conditions of Ukrainian society have become dire given the Russian military invasion. Thousands of people of all ages have lost their lives or are being injured by the continuous shelling of residential areas, schools, hospitals, and all types of civilian buildings. Millions of people are evacuating to border towns to cross as war refugees searching for asylum in neighboring countries. Other Ukrainians have decided to help resist by generating local communities and reinforcing the defense of the military corps. The situation is devastating for Ukrainians and the whole world.

Arts Aid was born as a community of international artists to create a support network for Ukrainian people who are trying to resist the invasion, seek refuge outside the country, or are vulnerable due to the war. The artworks donated by artists are posted on Instagram. Interested people can acquire the works once they have donated the same amount in the fundraiser on GoFundMe. This funding is sent based on the donations collected to carefully selected projects with the guidance of Ukrainian cultural workers to meet three main themes: advocacy, protection of vulnerable groups, and fleeing, with Ukrainian artists receiving 100% of their sale. These projects include the Ukrainian Emergency Arts Fund established by (MOCA) Museum of Contemporary Art NGO in partnership with Zaborona, The Naked Room and Mystetskyi Arsenal; Bridges Over Borders, a community-based collective aiming to support BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalized individuals fleeing Ukraine; and UNICEF, which has been working tirelessly to keep children safe since this conflict began eight years ago, and is determined to remain in Ukraine to reach the most vulnerable children and families.

If you would like to collect artworks, simple follow these instructions:

  • Choose an artwork you would like to acquire on Arts Aid and check the price on the post.

  • Donate the amount at the GoFundMe campaign and specify the artwork you chose (Artwork’s location is written in their respective post; transport costs run on the acquirer side).

  • Contact Arts Aid to arrange the delivery of your new artwork.

Participating artists include: Ana Jikia, Andy Medina, Arto, Aaron Schneer, Adam Varab, Andrew Rutherdale, Alyona Grekova, Archive Of Forms (Anna Maria Kucherenko), Billie Clarken, Céline Struder, Crosslucid, Constance Tenvik, Constantin Hartenstein, Crosslucid, Danielle Magee, David Rank, Dmytro Zubytskyi, Don Elektro, Eefje Stenfert, Eetu Sihvonen, Emma Pidré, Euthanasia Sport, Evelyn Bencicova, Isabel Cavenecia, Janne Schimmel, Jeronim Horvat, Jakub Kubica, Julie Maurin,  Katya Quel, Love Curly, Luiz Enrique Zela Koort, Kotz, Lisa Jäger, Lucas Hadjam, Lukas Liese, Magda Frauenberg, Manuel Resch & Maximilian Maria Willeit, Marianita Roma, Mary Audrey Ramirez, Masha Silchenko, Maya Hottarek, Norbert Stefan, Nadiia Rohozhyna, Nik Kosmas, Paul Ferens, Petja Ivanova, Ryo Koike, Sally Von Rosen, Sara Blosseville & Johanna Blank, Spaceheadtr & Dawsh, Sofia Stepanova, Ștefan Tănase, Tissue Hunter, Tom Esam, Tom Putman, Tudor Ciurescu, Urban Zellweger, Victor Payares, Victoria Pidus, Volo Bevza, Hannah Rose Steward, Kris Bekker, Zwyrtek Dominik, Victor Manuel Payares, Lukas Stoever and Georg Nordmark.

This initiative is organized by artist Emmanuel Pidré with support from artists Sally Von Rosen and Don Elektro.