Last week I caught the tail-end of a
photography exhibition at the Calvert 22 Foundation’s gallery in London devoted
to Post-Soviet Visions: Image and Identity in the New Eastern Europe,
curated by Ekow Eshun and Anastasiia Fedorova.
The accompanying leaflet and booklet describe it as ‘A group show of
photography from the New East’, and the text accurately talks about the display
‘exploring new visual representations of lifestyle and landscape in Eastern
Europe’ by younger artists ‘a quarter century after the end of Communism’.
In
the show were 14 photographers (two working collaboratively) from Azerbaijan,
Georgia (x2), Germany (x2), Latvia, Poland (x3), Russia (x3), Ukraine (the
introduction in the booklet states Ukraine, though the gallery caption
diplomatically refers only to ‘Crimea’, where the photographer lives), and
Uzbekistan – the last an honorary addition to Eastern Europe. The pair working together hail from Munich,
which doesn’t sound like the New East, or the Old East for that matter. These geographical confusions proved to be
significant.
I enjoyed the exhibition greatly but
found myself, as an outsider, questioning the emphasis on post-Soviet, and the
bracketing together of photographers who come from widely differing
backgrounds. The press release confidently
declares that the show ‘takes place at a time when the term “post-Soviet” has
become a byword for bold, innovative creativity in cultural fields from high
fashion to film,’ and the booklet tells us ‘In recent years, the rise of the
so-called post-Soviet aesthetic has turned a historical term into a trendy buzz
word.’ I do not mean to criticise the
curators who are to be applauded for promoting this impressive work to a
British audience in an energetic way, but I have to take issue with the use of ‘post-Soviet’.
It may be a handy label for curators,
but it does not help artists trying to break free of the constraints of the
past, even if they are happy to deal with certain aspects of that past, such as
its architecture. Using post-Soviet as a
catch-all links photographers who are mainly joined by accidents of geography
and the shared history of their forebears, but whose futures will increasingly
diverge. As that happens, this emphasis
on the past will become increasingly unhelpful.
After all, these are young photographers who will probably have only
vague memories, or perhaps no memories at all, of the Soviet era.
The use of the alternative expression ‘New
East’, which Calvert 22 defines as ‘Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Russia and
Central Asia’, also strikes me as problematic.
Apart from possible confusion with the established Near/Middle/Far East
trichotomy, it too lumps countries widely separated geographically and
culturally. It is still defining the
‘new’ east against the ‘old’, i.e. the ex-Soviet bloc, though it has to be
better than post-Soviet, with a more positive ring to it.
The curators themselves note how
technology is erasing the old borders as the world becomes increasingly
interconnected (four of the 14 photographers work in a different country to the
one they were born in). The present is
certainly affected by the past history, as can be seen in many of the
photographs in the exhibition, but these are photographers who in various ways
want to get away from it, not be defined by it.
As the leaflet concludes, ‘Instead of
old binaries of East vs West, socialist vs capitalist, their images capture a
generation shaped by issues that are personal rather than political; by
questions of sexuality, gender and style.’
It also refers to ‘new identities emerging across the region.’ The probing of issues of sexuality, gender
and style may have reasonably common roots in the past as their home countries
were constituents of the USSR, though they had their differences even then, but
enough time has elapsed to diminish the Soviet Union’s relevance and allow the
foregrounding of more contemporary concerns.
To
illustrate this point, Turkina Faso is a Russian-born but London-based
photographer, a background which says much about the international perspectives
of young artists today. She participated
in the panel discussion to launch the exhibition and gave a brief interview to
the website Russian Art + Culture. In her interview she stated ‘I am not a
post-Soviet photographer – this is just a tag that people put on me.’ Quite.
I wonder how many of the others represented in the exhibition would say
that the label is irrelevant to their practice and merely a marketing tool.
She
was not able, or willing, to define what post-Soviet meant in this context,
even though she was specifically asked; the closest she could get was to
suggest that for her, ‘Soviet photography is associated with something worn out
and awkward’, and all she wanted to do was take photographs and be recognised
for that. She ended with a plea not to
be pigeonholed and categorised, which surely undermines the use of the term
Post-Soviet.
In a factual sense, to describe those
countries which made up the Soviet Union and its satellites as post-Soviet is
relevant, but when it comes to the cultures of those countries as they forge
their own identities, it is hard to see how it is helpful. As Anastasiia Fedorova says in her
introductory essay in the exhibition booklet, ‘Former East, New East, Former
West, Post-Soviet – none of these terms offer (sic) a liberation from the Cold
War narrative’.
Why use them then? Like the Soviet Union itself, such phrases
may have had their day. Perhaps it is
time to focus on the countries the individuals come from, not what bound them
at an increasingly remote point in the past.
I enjoyed the photographs, which were well selected, but grouping them
according to the criterion that they were post-Soviet added nothing to them.
