What does the Soviet Space program have to do with Yiddish culture? Multidisciplinary artist Yevgeniy Fiks presents Heaven and Earth (Yiddish Cosmos), an exhibition that uncovers the surprising connections between the Eastern-European Jewish experience, futurist utopianism, and the Soviet space program. In this exhibition, Fiks forges a speculative narrative of Yiddish culture based on ideas of daring imagination, universality, and scientific progress.
About the Artist Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced numerous projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West. Fiks’ work has been shown internationally. This includes exhibitions in the United States at Winkleman and Postmasters galleries (both in New York), Mass MoCA, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Marat Guelman Gallery in Moscow; Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, and the Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon.
About the Exhibition Site Stanton Street Shul is one of the few tenement shuls still left of the 700 LES congregations. Stanton Street Shul is the first American home of Congregation Bnai Jacob Anshe Brzezan (“Sons of Jacob, People of Brzezan”). Incorporated in 1893, the community of Jewish immigrants from the town of Brzezan in Southeast Galicia, (formerly Austria-Hungary, then Poland, now Ukraine), created their place of worship from an existing structure on the site in 1913, within a thriving Lower East Side Jewish community. The shul has since changed with the neighborhood, but has struggled to preserve its old country roots.
The ArtsLink Back Apartment Residency program provides opportunities for international artists and curators to conduct research, create new work, collaborate with the local arts community, and create special projects in St. Petersburg, Russia. Each residency is designed to enable visiting artists and curators to learn about the Russian arts community, develop their own work, and share information about their work and other cultures with local audiences.
CEC ArtsLink currently funds residencies for artists and curators from the United States. CEC ArtsLink provides international travel, visa support and insurance if needed, accommodation, and per diem. Artists from other countries are welcome to apply, but need to seek financial support to cover their expenses. CEC ArtsLink will provide free accommodation in the residency space.
For more information, please contact Residency Coordinator Liza Matveeva at Lmatveeva@cecartslink.org.
EXH: PEASANTS, CLANS, AND EFFERVESCENT ABSOLUTISTS!
Tuesday, September 4, 2018 to Thursday, October 18, 2018 Harriman Institute Atrium, 12th Floor International Affairs Building (420 W 118th St) Exhibit runs September 4 – October 18, 2018. Exhibit hours are Monday–Friday, 9:00AM – 5:00PM excluding university holidays.
Artist Anne Bobroff-Hajal has a PhD in Russian History and is the author of the scholarly volume Working Women in Russia Under the Hunger Tsars. Her extensively researched polyptychs are satirical commentaries on how Russia’s ruling elites have historically taken advantage of their unique geographic situation to amass and maintain power. She means for her art to honor and serve the dispossessed and forgotten.
Bobroff-Hajal’s work draws formally on the similarities among icons, political cartoons, animation storyboards, and graphic novels, all of which tell stories in pictures. Her tales are told across centuries to the Infant Stalin by three tsarist godparents: Ivan IV, Catherine the Great, and Peter the Great. Each polyptych is “narrated” via the artist’s original lyrics set to the tune of Kalinka, in a series of tableaux which viewers “read” through numbered frames or simply from left to right. Bobroff-Hajal’s goal is to beguile viewers to identify and engage with forces that have shaped power structures in Russia and other parts of the world.
Intellectually, Bobroff-Hajal’s work brings together disparate fields’ analyses of Russia: historians of ideology who have observed Russian elites’ centuries-old use of the threat of invasion to unify the country behind an autocratic leader; global history scholars like Perry Anderson who wrote that “Eastern Absolutism…was the price of [Russians’] survival in a civilization of unremitting territorial warfare;” geographers who have described Russia as “the least defensible country on earth” because of its vast flatland steppes devoid of natural barriers to invasion. Putin today is only the most recent Russian ruler to manipulate threat of invasion across the plains to support extreme appropriation of wealth and power from the populace for the benefit of ruling elites.
Bobroff-Hajal’s 110-page fully illustrated catalogue is now published online, with extensive historical analysis and info about her artistic process. Please click here to access the catalogue. For best results view using the “full screen” function.
Anne Bobroff-Hajal’s art combines deep historical knowledge with humor and artistic talent that speaks to audiences ranging from school children to professors. I cannot imagine a more distinctive and iconoclastic combination. In her formidable painting of Ivan IV, his stern face conveys a series of meanings, and the postures of his underlings depict patronage and clan relationships that reflect the latest historical research on the 16th century. Her paintings of Stalin with Bolshevik patronage clans show a similar skill and informed artistry that also capture recent research. Her Catherine the Great, who ‘flies’ by means of stilt-walking serfs hoisting her and her heavy decorative gold wings, does more, and more vividly than many books on Catherine. The whimsical style of her work allows it (like icons of old) to tell stories on many levels, ranging from the nearly comic to an accomplished complexity. Her work is truly unique and deserves a wide audience.
“I’ve been asked how I can bear to spend so much time painting brutality and horrors. I do it because art—with its color, beauty, satire, story, whimsy—is the tool we humans have to lift us from despair as we investigate the sources of atrocities so as to combat them in the future.
How do elites—not only in Russia, but the world over—amass the power to do such terrible things to less powerful people? What are the resources rulers use to accumulate power? How do they exploit those resources to maintain their omnipotence? How have some some regions of the world been able to wield dominion over other regions?
Russian absolutism, as historian Perry Anderson observed, not only began earlier than in Europe, it “outlived all its contemporaries, to become the only Absolutist State in the continent to survive intact into the 20th century.” The 1917 collapse of the Tsarist autocracy was followed a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution by the rising Joseph Stalin’s “Communist” autocracy. That in turn collapsed in the 1990s, to be followed a decade later by the rise of a new autocrat-in-the-making, Vladimir Putin. Why do distinctive historic cycles recur in each region of the globe, and how can they be broken?
I believe that each land’s distinct geography presents singular opportunities for elites to build and sustain power. In particular, Russia is by far the planet’s largest flat landscape. Geographers have called Russia the least defensible terrain on earth because of its lack of natural barriers against hugely powerful neighbors. My art explores the web of interconnections between Russia’s unique geography—both natural and human—and its rulers, clans, and laboring classes. I paint the social system Russia’s geography gives rise to, the elites it empowers, and hundreds of tiny portraits of individual people straining to achieve their goals within that system.
Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection at Hebrew Home at Riverdale is pleased to announce its latest exhibition, Erosion: Works by Leonard Ursachi on view from July 15–November 18, 2018. In this exhibition featuring an outdoor sculpture, installation work, and related maquettes and drawings, Leonard Ursachi addresses themes of environmental and social crises caused by manmade events and reflects on how the destruction of natural resources is intimately interconnected with the effacement of human history and culture. What a Wonderful World (2018), a large-scale sculpture installed in Hebrew Home’s sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades, touches on the inextricable link between profitability and the destruction of the environment. Expanses of 23-karat gold leaf applied to the roughly textured, “tarred” oceans reference a global, often wealth-driven disregard for the impact of environmental choices. The continents, on the other hand, appear vast and devoid of life, signifying a stripping away of natural resources. Still, Ursachi’s vision implies hope: the sculpture’s egg shape may be read as the enduring, if fragile, potential for life.
Also included in the exhibition is Rise and Shine (2010), a multi-media work that addresses the disappearance of the Romanian island of Ada Kaleh, which was submerged in the Danube River in 1970 by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in order to build a hydroelectric plant. Inside an aquarium-like receptacle, a model of the island cast from translucent urethane resin is lit from below, alternately drowned and resuscitated as water continuously rises and falls. The work addresses the disastrous effect such industrial projects have on human culture, displacing entire populations and literally washing away layers of history. The piece engages environmental themes and reflects the unchecked destruction that can occur under tyranny. Ceaușescu’s rule was one of the most brutal in the Eastern Bloc, with his secret police force routinely torturing and imprisoning suspected dissenters and political enemies. Ursachi was arrested for attempting to escape Romania by swimming across the Danube—near the spot where Ada Kaleh once stood—to reach Yugoslavia in 1978. His second attempt to defect, in 1980, was successful, and he was granted political asylum in France where he spent five years. He came to the United States via Canada and settled in New York in 1987.