This screening features archival footage of exhibitions and concerts.
From Gulag to Glasnost by Nina Zaretskaya and Vadim Fomenko is a documentary about nonconformist art in the USSR from 1953 to 1988. It is a comprehensive study of underground art, with retrospective excerpts from footage of art events and interviews with key figures in the art scene, such as Viktor Pivovarov, Ernst Neizvestny, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, and Erik Bulatov.
Kino’s performance at the café Metelitsa in Moscow in 1986 consisted of only a few songs: almost immediately after the musicians appeared on stage, the hall administration cut off the electricity, after which the band were able to perform only one more song «acoustically.» Photographer Sergey Borisov, who was at Metelitsa that night, managed to film part of the performance on a video camera.
Leonid Tishkov is an artist, creator of objects, installations, artist’s books, photo and video works. Snow Angel is the story of a frail unearthly creature—an angel in an ushanka hat—facing the melancholy of a deserted space.
The final piece in the program is the documentation of the huge exhibition In the USSR and Beyond: 77 Russian Artists, 1970–1990—one of the first official exhibitions of unofficial Soviet artists abroad, which took place in 1990 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It was also remarkable for the fact that it included, almost in its entirety, another group exhibition that had been held in Moscow the same year, Toward the Object (curated by Andrei Erofeev, Natalia Tamruchi, and Vladimir Levashov).
From Gulag to Glasnost
Nina Zaretskaya, Vadim Fomenko
Russia, 2001. 38 min
Performance by the band Kino
Sergey Borisov
USSR, 1986. 14 min
Snow Angel
Leonid Tishkov
Russia, 1998. 4 min
In the USSR and Beyond. 77 Russian Artists, 1970–1990
Vadim Zakharov
Netherlands, 1990. 7 min