CURA.

G.C. I would like to go back to your drawings. One of your latest series is inspired by so-called Soviet Modernism. As you stated in a publication of yours, ‘SovMod’ refers to the Soviet architecture of the 1960–80s that’s being brutally destroyed or reconstructed for commercial purposes in today’s Ukraine. Those who participate in the SovMod movement treat this architecture as if it represented a dead modernity, in a rather historicist way. On a few occasions, you noticed how such an encounter between aesthetics and politics contains something paradoxical. For me, the SovMod you described strongly resonates with the subject of the war, with the monuments in Ukraine, which you’ve often investigated. And this recently resurfaced when the Russian army, which was supposed to “protect” the Soviet legacy destroyed the WWII monument in Kremenets, and Ukrainians protected the monument to painter Ilva Repin in front of the National Museum Kyiv Art Gallery – which in the past was the Kiev National Museum of Russian Art – from iconoclasm.

N.K. Yes, your considerations reflect the complex issues at stake. I’ve been dealing with the paradoxes of the politics of memory since 2004. I pictured modernist skulls by Picasso right after 2015, following the Maidan protests, when President Viktor Yanukovych was removed from office in 2014. The destruction of Soviet monuments and statues gained particular momentum after the destruction of the Kyiv Lenin statue on December 8, 2013. The memory of the Soviet era was erased. I understand this – millions of Ukrainians were either killed or repressed during the Soviet era, which had colonial aspects. To be clear, it’s not my intention to describe the situation through a post-socialist lens, since it’s more complicated than that. I feel though, that we could use decolonial optics here to consider the universalist aspect of the communist project. The paradox stands in the use of the notion of communism. On the one hand, Putin sounds anti-communist himself. His ideology is essentially anti-revolutionary, since he uses certain aspects of the Soviet legacy as well as some of the Stalinist or post-Cold War rhetoric to feed his ideology. On the other hand, Ukrainian authors and artists from the 1960–80s were producing Soviet art and architecture, which was “protected” and supported by the State. This is the case of dissident artist and human rights activist Alla Horska, whose monumental works are in the Museum of Antifascist Resistance in Krasnodon, but who was found murdered under mysterious circumstances in her father-in-law Vasyl Symonenko’s apartment in Vasilkiv, Kyiv. It’s believed that Alla and Vasyl were targeted by the KGB for publishing evidence of mass executions in Bykivnia Forest. But there’s also the case of artist, architect, composer, and critic Florian Yuriev, whose family was oppressed by Stalinism. He made anti-Stalinist and anti-Soviet works throughout the 1960–80s, but he didn’t exhibit them in public. Nonetheless, he was a prominent Soviet architect, who created the Ufo Building, a symbolic monument to Soviet Modernism. These figures were “enemies” of the Soviet system but also somehow part of it. Now their practices fall into what’s called “Soviet Modernism,” but in the Soviet Union, modernism never had a positive connotation. It had rather a pejorative political meaning. In fact, I found plenty of Soviet anti-modernist propaganda books against Western modernism. In particular, they used Picasso’s paintings of skulls as a symbol of modernist ugliness and anti-humanism. I like to think of the skulls as like fetishes, protecting these modernist buildings from destruction. However, while in the past decade the buildings were ruined by Ukrainian State or private developers, now they’re ruined by Russian missiles.
On the night of the Ukrainian invasion, Putin made a sort of historical lecture on Russian TV, stating that Russia should protect the Soviet heritage as well as the WWI commemoration monuments on Ukrainian territory. But in a schizophrenic act of erasing, the Russian army is destroying the same heritage it was supposed to protect. On the other hand, there are many Ukrainians who, despite the campaigns to boycott Russian culture, are in fact preserving their legacy. I have rather a moderate position: I’m for boycotting any collaboration with Russian-state-run institutions and Russian corporate money. Big private art centers in Moscow or San Petersburg are financed from the same the pockets as Putin’s war machines are. I’m calling for a boycott of Russian state institutions and corporate money, but not Russian culture in itself. I fully support Ukrainians who are currently protecting Russian culture from the Russian army and State.

A.L. Thank you for such a strong statement, Nikita. It reverberates your decision to reject the invitation to participate in the exhibition Diversity United, which opened at the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin in 2021, before touring to Moscow and Paris. You refused because it was organized under the patronage of the three presidents Emmanuel Macron, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Vladimir Putin. Your decision resonates strongly in this very moment here in Germany. In fact, the very same group of businessman behind that operation are involved in the unethical operation of Kunsthalle Berlin, at former airport in Berlin. A group of art world figures spoke out against the establishing of the art center and explicitly the cultural consultant Walter Smerling, alarmed as they were by his unethical policy with funding. Your gesture as much as the gesture of those figures says a lot about what an artist can do. What does it mean to be an artist today? Well, it also seems to mean having the right to say no. I would like to ask you something completely different yet connected to such an issue. You used quite often the word ‘protection’ in our conversation. There is a sentence staying with me from AntiGonna’s film Lucid Skin with you as a main character, «I would like to make my borders permeable, to lend its protection to the others. » This quote stayed with me because of the context where is stated, which is the ecstatic stage of the dance floor. Why did you write it? And what did you mean by this? I keep on quoting, «surrendering defenses and lending them over […] if you lose something at one place, it does not mean it appears in another one. » What relationship exists between protection and bodies?
I would like to ask something completely different yet connected to this issue. You quite often use the word “protection” in our conversations. A sentence from AntiGonna’s film Lucid Skin with you as a protagonist sticks with me: “I would like to make my borders permeable, to lend their protection to others.” This quote stayed with me because of the context in which it was stated, which is the ecstatic stage of the dance floor. I’d like to ask you, why did you write this? And what did you mean by it?

N.K. I wrote this script in a rather poetic way; there were lots of things behind it. It deals with a feeling of guilt, with privileged position, and with the understanding that despite the fact that you’re in a better position than others, you don’t deserve more than they do. Somehow, it’s also related to the survivor syndrome I’m currently experiencing while in Venice. I wrote these few poetic fragments, and artist AntiGonna built their scenario around them, bringing some stories from their life into it. The result was the scene in a nightclub, where you’re giving your own skin away, trying to allow the other to overcome your protective borders. It could also be interpreted like a body, in which some organs are protected and some exposed, such as the breasts, the testicles, or the eyeballs. They’re vulnerable, fragile, less protected. This body is Europe, and Ukraine is an overexposed part of it, very fragile and unprotected in a situation of external attack.

A.L. The body is at the core of another film featured in the program, which is Yarema Malashchuk’s & Roman Himey’s Dedicated to the Youth of the World II, 2019. It is a journey into an episode of rave culture, but it’s split in two. I felt a strong sensation in that second part when the youth leave the club. It is a kind of collective body stuck in a suspended time of waiting. It’s a kind of terrorizing, a condition that puts you in an uncomfortable situation – which is exactly what I felt you were describing about bodies and protection in the state of separation.

N.K. There are inner cues interlinking the films featured in A Letter from the Front. This is the case with Lucid Skin and Dedicated to the Youth of the World II, which both deal with clubbing. Following the outbreak of the war, there was a strong development of the Kiev techno scene. It was a reaction of society, a statement of “We don’t want to be in a situation when we’re only the victims. We want something more. We’ll defend our right to have a life.” Such a form of hypersensitivity is mirrored in Katya Libkind’s film Where Are Your Big Ears Dear Dead Grandma?, 2021, which reconstructs a nonexistent conversation on her dead grandmother’s birthday, but also in Alina Kleytman’s Responsibility, 2017, where the artist attempt to overcome her traumas by establishing an intimate poetics with the viewer.. The sense of fragility is also found in Yaroslav Futymsky’s Flag is Burning, 2019, and Second Attempt, 2019. As anarchist activist, in his practice he praises the escapism as a matter of struggle yet he is currently supporting Ukrainian cause by cooking for refugees in Lviv. He is now fully engaged in mundane commitments for people who lost their home, supporting with very basic need. Thus, the films explore both the mundane and the catastrophic, manifesting the state of collapse as well as forms of self-recovery.

A.L. This is a question we were often asked during the past few weeks, “Why are these works dated to ten, five, four years ago?” As an institution, we answer that this is an incredible opportunity to check the symptoms, and to acknowledge the intimate territorial representation, the landscape that the artists have been depicting, how important it is to be engaged in witnessing through the work and being aware. Our impression from the selected filmic works is that there’s such a sense of trembling; you can perceive the anticipation of something that may happen – and actually is happening. This aims to be an acknowledgement, and let’s say a sort of inspiration, for all those who don’t necessarily expect to be creators but are making communities, which is definitely what you made with A Letter from the Front in collaboration with Giulia.

G.C. I would like to pick up from Nikita’s considerations on bodily exposure and vulnerability to ask a last question. While we’re considering Europe as a corpse with limbs, I cannot help but think about how marginal areas are the ones most affected by traumatic events, but which will nevertheless eventually necrotize the torso. Thus, for me, this notion of marginality is somehow related to the realm of the catastrophe. In A Letter from the Front, this sphere recurs quite often. While expanding on her work Switch on Red, 2016, Lada Nakonechna suggests that we “place ourselves inside the catastrophe [instead of outside] and to think about finding ways to speak about it from the position of being within.” How do you deal with the notion of the catastrophe?

N.K. With the selected films, I wanted to touch upon different contexts of Ukrainian life. I guess in every war there’s always some grain of catastrophe growing inside, and these films unveil the seeds of this tribulation. In fact, the entity of the catastrophe is pretty ambiguous. On the one hand, it attacks you when you don’t expect it, like a stone falling on your head. On the other hand, it is about finding our real selves; it is a wake-up call from the sleeping mode we go through in everyday life. It’s about realizing that we’re something very different from what we thought we were. Of course, it is shocking. Maybe we’d prefer to keep on sleeping because even if you succeed in overcoming the catastrophe and in surviving, it will never be the same. Thus, the catastrophe is a tremendous transformative process of subjectivity.