Tatiana Efrussi
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Tatiana Efrussi
Museum of Alena Arzamasskaia, scale 1:15, 2021
Mixed media
81.5×115×20 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Artist and researcher Tatiana Efrussi often works with the experiences of various communities, from survivalists and the perestroika avant-garde artists of Birobidzhan to “high-voltage tourists” (who follow power lines on foot or on transport). It is hardly surprising that her new project is devoted to Alena Arzamasskaia, the legendary leader of a peasant riot during Stenka Razin’s antifeudal uprising in 1670–1671.
Efrussi presents Alena Arzamasskaia as a conceptual and borderline figure: rather than the military feats of “the Russian Joan of Arc,” the artist is interested in the kaleidoscopic set of identities that the public consciousness has ascribed to Arzamasskaia over the past three-and-a-half centuries. Her figure encompasses protest and emancipatory elements that today we would call feminist and decolonial. In the center of the first gallery in the imaginary museum with dioramas telling the story of the female ataman, we see Alena wearing a torn nun’s habit and chain mail featuring Erzyan ornaments and a Christian cross. Her “cyborganic” image, in which once can see a woman defying gender stereotypes, a runaway nun, a Christian heretic, a witch, a warrior, a Russian, Erzya, or Moksha woman, is pure queer, akin to Ardhanarishvara, the Hindu androgynous deity composed of Shiva and his wife Parvati.
Alena Arzamasskaia Museum, Scale 1:15 is an exercise in speculative museology that raises the question of historical memory and memorial culture in Russia. The “abnormal,” subversive, transgressive image of Alena is close to another example of memorialized female heroism, that of the Soviet partisan Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, whose museum, which opened in the place of her execution in the village of Petrishchevo near Moscow in 2020, offers us a modernized version of patriotism. American Slavist Jonathan Brooks Platt, who studies the iconography of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, interprets her figure as a contradictory mix of courage and heroism, holiness and self-sacrifice, “troubled eroticism” and “ecstasy.” It is hardly surprising that in her 2014 sketch for an imaginary Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya monument, artist Glyuklya (Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya) of the collective Chto Delat chose to avoid portrait or documentary depiction in favour of a sculpture of two giant socks (Kosmodemyanskaya was tortured barefoot in the snow).
Efrussi’s “retrofuturist” projection also poses the question of when such a museum could emerge. Perhaps the right moment was toward the end of the Soviet era of stagnation, in the 1980s, when official culture coexisted with underground art and spiritual practices ranging from yoga and hippie philosophy to alternative medicine.
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