Between Malevic and the Revolution ¬_ displaced reality _ searching for the black square _ irony of history _ finding a nostalgically utopian picture of a protest _ fluid interspaces _ seizing counterpoints with camera _beautiful/spiritual _ absurd/bizarre _ looking for an inside perspective _ postcommunist subjects walking around _ acceleration _ claustrophobia _ Lenin is holding me _ experience means art _ an archetypal amalgam of the familiar and the unlived _ conquering space _ happiness _ amazement as a permanent state _ reality is staged.
Ana Bilankov
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
„…You soon realize that your preconceptions really belong to picture-books, films, stories; that Moscow, as it is today, is something completely different. That you really don\’t have a clue about this hypercomplex, vast culture and history. Then you start collecting the pieces of the puzzle, slowly at first, then faster and faster, without being able to compose the final picture, because even the puzzle pieces are changing their own constellation all the time…“ (*)
Without knowledge of the real context, history, political and artistic situation in present Russia, i.e. Moscow, it is hard to deal with the works, or the entire exhibition, which uses the above stated notions as its main field of reference. It is necessary to acknowledge in advance that the composition of a culturological jigsaw puzzle out of the presented material (from second hand, that is), although challenging, shouldn\’t be directed towards defining some kind of a tangible metaphor for a specific, in every sense of the word distant, different environment. „The Moscow Fragments“ by Ana Bilankov themselves do not impose such a deduction – they are simply „fragments“: several pieces of the puzzle whose joints, at the first glance, do not fit, withdrawn from the big jigsaw puzzle box with the picture of a multicolored urban and cultural complex called Moscow. Once immersed in this complex, Ana Bilankov focuses on its margins, scenes which would, in any other case, be erased, because they might be irrelevant in the context of the whole. After a several-month long stay in Moscow the artist leaves us to face the documents of her own, unfinished search for the very motifs whose remnants we (also as „postcommunist“ subjects, but in a different context) would so eagerly like to see in postsocialist Russia. What happened to Utopias? Where are the masses of people in squares? What are they looking forward to? Are they thinking about the future? Are they parodying their own past or was that past itself a mere show in which totalitarianism was only an excuse for street theatre? The reality is staged, artificial and, as such, can be bought. For 200 roublas!
Within the search for an authentic Moscow, its present, maybe one needs to become a shadow within a randomly chosen collective, repeat the steps of its members in order to understand and, possibly, appropriate the patterns of their living, cultural, political praxis and their worldviews. Researchers call it shadowing. Judging by the photographs exhibited as part of the shadowing series, a potential future community member would have a hard time dealing with those masses of pockets, jackets and collars, parading on the unnamed sidewalk, aimlessly and chaotically, it seems. The sociological shadowing, deprived of its efficiency, becomes an esthetic shadowing, an ordinary play of photographic shadows. The similar could be said of the video Without title, recorded at the Red Square. In the distance we see people holding flags, „postcommunist subjects“ or maybe a „critical mass“ within the clichéd form. Does Ana Bilankov use the mirror effect in order to conceal their loneliness and smallness in numbers by „doubling“ them, or does she purposely condense the mass on the edges? It\’s impossible to grasp. Without title is more of a poetic, than critical work, a representation of slow exhales and inhales of a politically deeply marked city point, which can end either in a social heart-attack or a euphoric cry for a world revolution. In a short interval (from the opening to the closing of the exhibition) it remains, however, only a slow-motion breathing. The future, as well as the present, as well as the past, as well as the… is uncertain.
by Marko Golub
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Ana Bilankov
Born 1968 in Zagreb, Croatia, lives and works in Berlin and Zagreb. 1999-2002 Postgraduate study “Fine Art in Context“, University of the Arts Berlin (M.A.)
1996-1998 Studied Art Photography at Wiesbadener Freie Kunstschule, Germany.1987-1995 Studied History of Art and German Language and Literature at the Universities in Zagreb, Croatia and Mainz, Germany (graduated in Zagreb)
Contact:
abilankov@web.de
