"Contested Spaces" at Baruch College and "Into the Future" at Plus Ultra

"Contested Spaces" was an exhibition of post-Soviet art primarily from Russia. Curator Elena Sorokina says that the title refers to the spaces left behind by an empire that no longer exists, spaces that various forces are now vying to control.

In the center of the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College were works by Anatoly Osmolovsky, a major figure of Moscow actionism. Mayakovsky/Osmolovsky (1993) is a photograph of a performance in which Osmolovsky climbed to the top of a monumental statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky and clung to a perch on the poet's shoulder. This is a type of work that speaks plainly to people from the artist's native region but less clearly to the rest of the world. Osmolovsky's ascent of the statue and his identification of himself with it are meant as a symbolic retrieval. Mayakovsky represents the cultural humanism behind the revolution and Osmolovsky is defending the statue in an era when the toppling of monumental statues has become almost an entertainment. In another Osmolovsky work, Reenactment of the Barricade 1968 (1998), a series of photographs records a major demonstration of art activism in Moscow in 1998, for which, in homage to the Paris student revolt of 1968, a barricade of empty boxes was erected some 650 feet from the Kremlin and defended for several hours.

Erbossyn Meldibekov's performance video, Pastan (2005), shows the artist standing near an outdoor market in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Another man wearing the traditional Kyrgyz hat shouts angrily at Meldibekov and repeatedly slaps him in the face. The artist just gazes silently at his attacker, sometimes stepping back a couple of inches after an especially sharp slap, never replying. Passersby seem befuddled; some, seeing the cameraman, realize that somehow this is what Plato called an imitation of an imitation; others, seemingly not aware of the function of the camera, are visibly upset by the repeated slapping as by a social injustice openly performed without shame.

The nomadic aspect of the show's theme was evident in the work of the only non-Russians in the group, Kyrgyz artists Muratbek Dzhumaliev and Gulnara Kasmalieva. In their work Trans-Siberian Amazons (2004), 30 large, suitcaselike "shopping bags" (as the checklist calls them) filled with wadded-up paper are amassed around a video monitor on which a Central Asian woman sings a long song about love. Central Asia has always been associated with nomadic lifestyles. Now the theme is in the foreground again, as people move about the former Soviet republics. When all spaces are contested, all people are fugitives. The suitcases evoke western Chinese and Central Asian women who peddle goods from place to place, always on the move, singing the songs of their homes late at night on rusty trains. Nine other artists and three artist groups participated in this multilayered reverie on "a politics of space," as Sorokina called it, quoting Henri Lefebvre. Many of the works might be described as social sculpture; photography and video were also prominent. The work overall is humanistic, humorous, witty and full of life.

Overlapping this exhibition was another, at Plus Ultra gallery, featuring a video and photographs by Dzhumaliev and Kasmalieva. Nine medium-sized photographs from their "New Menhir" series showed construction sites, some apparently abandoned. The cast-concrete structures in the photos, which were shot in Kyrgyzstan and during a trip to Siberia [see A.i.A., Dec. '05], look like the supportive buttresses that hold up elevated highways, without the highways having been built yet, and they do indeed resemble ancient men hirs in their basic form--a vertical slab topped by a horizontal slab.

In a second room of the gallery one saw the video Into the Future, which Dzhumaliev and Kasmalieva have shown at the most recent Singapore and Moscow biennials. On the left screen of this two-channel projection is a black-and-white record of people boarding a ferry. This footage is slowed way down. On the right screen, in color, is the desolation of Siberia as seen from a ferry crossing Lake Baikal. The channels are delicately and intricately edited to establish contrasting tempos and compositions. This results in a two-track esthetic object that also shows us a great deal about the artists' environment and the changes it is undergoing. Although the works in both these exhibitions were made by former-Soviet artists for an audience of their compatriots, they also speak strongly to those of us on the outside. Get used to four- or five-syllable names. They're coming on fast.

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