Chingiz Aidarov

Based between Moscow and Bishkek, Chingiz Aidarov works predominantly with performance and painting to create critical portraits of the sociopolitical situation in the post-Soviet world and thus explore the phenomenon of boundaries, personal as well as social and political. In Snail (Spiral), produced for this exhibition, he revisits his experience as a migrant worker in Russia. For this project, Aidarov exchanged 27 old mattresses belonging to his fellow construction workers for new ones, and sewed them together into a long “bed sheet,” which was essentially a collective image of his colleagues’ fates. He took the “bed sheet” to a field (which may well soon become another construction site) and, with considerable effort, rolled it into a huge roll taller than himself. Aidarov is interested in the particular aspect of migrant life that has to do with the monotonous and predetermined everyday of a human caught in the system of sweatshop exploitation on a construction site, where weekends do not exist and every day starts and ends on the same mattress.

Aidarov explains that he devised the performance when he was a migrant worker, employed as a loader at a confectionery factory and living in what is colloquially known as a “rubber” apartment. These are ordinary apartments adapted for 20 or 30 residents who pay for a bed space, which is essentially a standard mattress (200 x 80 cm or 200 x 90 cm). Living in such conditions, there is no point in making your bed: after sleep the mattress is simply rolled up. The temporal aspect is of equal importance to Aidarov, as such an existence requires a psycho-emotional effort in additional to the physical. He recalls that after three months of working without a day off “time and the experience of time transform; one loses the connection with time, and life is measured by the rolling and unrolling of the mattress.”

AM