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<i>Spirit Labor: Duration, Difficulty, and Affect </i>

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<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Vyacheslav-Yura Useinov<br /></strong>(b. 1962, Fergana, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic; lives and works in Tashkent)</p>
<p><strong>Shadow of a Non-Existent House.</strong><br /><strong>1995&ndash;2006</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Oil on canvas, 115&times;100 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>One of the few Uzbekistani artists known outside his country, Vyacheslav-Yura Useinov is a man of many talents. Trained as a stone carver, he makes large installations, objects, paintings, and works on paper, and also writes poetry and philosophical texts. Shadow of a Non-Existent House is one of his most remarkable works and deserves careful study. Using an extremely complex technique that he refers to as fractal realism, Useinov painted this work over 11 years, reconstructing from memory the view of a courtyard that is no longer there. The courtyard was part of the house of the artist&rsquo;s close friend, who at some point emigrated to Canada. For Useinov, his friend&rsquo;s move and the destruction of the house that followed were symbolic: a tragic symptom of a time when a rare and important building in the so-called colonial style could be destroyed without respect for history and a metaphor for the loss of the common home that was the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>The house, which was located in the Fergana region of Uzbekistan, was demolished during the making of the work, turning the reality that had once existed into a dream that became more difficult to recollect with every passing day. Expending the kind of effort that has to do with concentration on a fleeting image, Useinov began an experiment in what he called &ldquo;personal madness.&rdquo; How else can one describe a manic desire to &ldquo;keep the heat of a July afternoon before one&rsquo;s eyes for 11 years, all the while juxtaposing the metaphor of a lost house with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which traumatized an entire generation&rdquo;?</p>
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Vyacheslav-Yura Useinov

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<p><strong>Tehching Hsieh</strong><br />(b. 1950, Nanzhou, Taiwan; lives and works in New York)</p>
<p><strong>Jump.</strong><br /><strong>1973/2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Photograph, 162.5&times;43 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>The legendary performance artist Tehching Hsieh produced less than a dozen works in his entire career. For his first performance, Jump (1973), he jumped onto a concrete floor from the second- floor window of his house in Taiwan, breaking both ankles. The performance was filmed on a Super 8 camera, but Hsieh later destroyed the footage, leaving only six photographs as evidence of the work.</p>
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Tehching Hsieh

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<p><strong>Gino De Dominicis</strong><br />(1947, Ancona, Italy&ndash;1998, Rome)</p>
<p><strong>Square Circles.<br />1970</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Digitized 16mm film, 1&rsquo; 36&rsquo;&rsquo;<br />Courtesy LIMA, Amsterdam</p>
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<p>The famous video Square Circles presents a very simple scene: a man sitting by a river, with his back to the camera, slowly and casually throws stones into the water. However, this uncomplicated action conceals an attempt to overcome the laws of nature. As the title of the work suggests, De Dominicis is waiting for a stone to create a square on the water, which is, of course, impossible. The desperate impossibility of the result he is looking for creates a poetic image defiantly addressed to eternity.</p>
<p>The story of the making of the video shows that it arose from despair. De Dominicis&rsquo; original plan was to film pigeons flying out of the waters of the Tiber. Instead, the birds, unprepared for such treatment, had to be saved from drowning by the artist and the film crew. The idea had to be changed on the spot and that is how De Dominicis created one of his most recognizable images.</p>
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Gino De Dominicis

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<p><strong>Gino De Dominicis</strong></p>
<p><strong>Untitled (Attempt to Fly).</strong><br /><strong>1969 (2021 print)</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Carbon print, 48&times;67 cm<br /> Courtesy Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan</p>
<p>One of the most versatile and complex of the Italian artists of the postwar period, Gino De Dominicis has left an impressive legacy,</p>
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<p>a significant part of which explores questions of eternity, futility, and immortality. Untitled (Attempt to Fly) is an iconic example. The video of a man&rsquo;s futile attempts to take off is accompanied by the artist&rsquo;s comment: &ldquo;For three years I kept repeating the same thing. Imightneverlearntofly,butifIaskmysontodoitandheask his sons, one of my descendants might figure it out.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Although he did not allow his work to be photographed and usually refused to comment on it, in the case of Attempt De Dominicis explained, &ldquo;Maybe because I cannot swim, I have decided to learn to fly.&rdquo; His practice is built on such contradictions, demonstrating that all elements in the world are closely connected. He, better than anyone, understood that immortality&mdash;a key theme in his work&mdash;obviously means a clash with nature itself; with the laws of physics that structure it and crush all human attempts to overcome it. At the same time, Untitled (Attempt to Fly) contains an element inseparably connected to the very substance of time. Realizing the futility of his attempts, the artist delegated the mission to his offspring, directing his performance toward eternity&mdash;an eternity defined by the existence and continuation of the family. Indeed, the only means of overcoming time that is accessible to humans is through our descendants.</p>
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<p><strong>On Kawara</strong><br />(1933, Kariya, Japan&ndash; 2014, New York)</p>
<p><strong>LAT. 31&deg;25&rsquo;N, LONG. 8&deg;41&rsquo;E.</strong><br /><strong>1965</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Acrylic on canvas, 83.5&times;96.3&times;5.3 cm<br />Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven</p>
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<p>This is one of the most enigmatic paintings by artist On Kawara, the only one of its kind containing geographical coordinates. Tracking it on the map will lead us to the middle of the desert in Algeria, a location we might call a non-place. From the Google satellite view, it&rsquo;s a sand dune like any other. In order to speculate on the painting&rsquo;s meaning, however, it might be helpful to consider the equally unique triptych Title, made by the artist in the same year (1965), the year when America bombed Vietnam. Kawara was living in the USA at that point and, like everyone else, could only get news about the situation through the newspapers. As a result, for many, Vietnam became a place to be transported to through mental images and the imagination. It may well be that LAT. 31&deg;25&rsquo;N, LONG. 8&deg;41&rsquo;E is a picture of a state of mind, a mind that is constantly cracking coordinate codes and making leaps to unknown destinations: whether Vietnam or a desert is perhaps beside the point.</p>
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<p>It seems logical that a year later Kawara would begin his most well-known series, Date Paintings, which explore time and temporality, the second element in the space-time continuum theory of the universe, and all of the large, existential questions in which the artist was interested (as we can judge by the texts he included in his catalogues). It also seems natural that many of his works prior to LAT. 31&deg;25&rsquo;N, LONG. 8&deg;41&rsquo;E were concerned with codes and, more generally, with the inefficacy of language. Nevertheless, by using and studying that same language he was essentially studying the most elusive element of the space-time continuum, human consciousness.</p>
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On Kawara

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<p><strong>Elena Kovylina</strong><br />(b. 1971, Moscow; lives and works in Moscow)</p>
<p><strong>Save My Soul.</strong><br /><strong>2000</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Performance documentation, 5&rsquo; 2&rdquo;<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>A key figure in Russian radical performance, Elena Kovylina undertook one of her boldest and most dangerous projects in the city of Sochi in 2000. For the performance Save My Soul, she took a rowing boat and headed out to sea, where a storm was brewing. There was no defined scenario other than pure intention and the clear aim of entrusting oneself to the fate. On this occasion fate appeared in the form of the coastguard, who had been called by Kovylina&rsquo;s friends and colleagues and took the risk of boarding their catamaran to rescue her flimsy boat, thus responding to the call in the work&rsquo;s title and ending the performance.</p>
<p>The historical context of the work is of particular interest. Save My Soul is heir to two extraordinary and tragic twentieth-century biographies. Swiss poet, artist, and boxer Arthur Cravan (1887&ndash; 1918) was known as a talented trickster. He arranged public fights with boxing champions, liked his drink, and often ended up at police stations. Once he decided to sail along the Mexican coast in a small boat, but never arrived at his destination. It is likely that the artist died at sea, although some believe that his disappearance was yet another trick that allowed him to start a new life. In 1975, another exceptional European artist, Bas Jan Ader (1942&ndash;1975), repeated Cravan&rsquo;s sad fate, despite being a professionally trained sailor. Nine months after he set out to single-handedly cross the North Atlantic, his capsized boat was found at sea, sparking numerous legends and speculations. Kovylina&rsquo;s work is a homage to these two remarkable artists and their bold enterprises.</p>
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Elena Kovylina

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<p><strong>He Yunchang</strong><br />(b. 1967, Kunming, China; lives and works in Chaoyang, Beijing)</p>
<p><strong>Rock in the Niagara Falls.</strong><br /><strong>2005</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">C-print on Dibond, 119.5&times;192.5 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>When the first Apollo mission to the moon in 1961 gave humanity the first photograph of Earth from space, our planet suddenly seemed so small, a glowing sphere in the middle of a dark and unknown universe. One of the enduring, traumatically sad impressions it produced is that of a lonely sailing ship. A similar feeling comes to mind when looking at the beautiful landscape of Niagara Falls after the realization that a small human being is there, in the middle of the water, attempting to stand on a rock at the very edge of the waterfall. Hoping that the rope would hold him, He planned to endure the freezing cold, turbulent water for 24 hours. Ironically, this act of extreme vitality and resistance to external forces, including common sense, was interrupted by the police and the artist was dragged back to shore after a few hours.</p>
<p>An oil painter by education, He turned to performance in the late 1990s and has been at the forefront of contemporary Chinese performance art ever since, producing some of the most challenging, ethically consistent, and life-affirming pieces of endurance art. Using the body as an instrument through which to exert his individual freedom, He&rsquo;s practice is deeply informed by a sense of mistrust not only in the obvious institutions of power but in those ingrained in us since birth&mdash; internalized societal rules, the omnipresent grip of common knowledge, and collective &ldquo;wisdom.&rdquo; His performances become instances of conjuring a timeless drive, a beautifully illogical, unproductive, almost hyper-human determination. &ldquo;The small hero is here,&rdquo; He says jokingly, and points to the to the tiny spot in the water.</p>
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He Yunchang

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<p><strong>Ghenadie Popescu</strong><br />(b. Florești, Moldova; lives and works in Chișinău)</p>
<p><strong>Mine 01.</strong><br /><strong>2009</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Video, 27&rsquo; 15&rdquo;<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>Between 2006 and 2011, Ghenadie Popescu took several trips across Moldova on foot and by bicycle, navigating land and rivers. Choosing slower ways to travel is an important tool for an artist who has decided to explore the intricacies of what constitutes national identity. This video, composed of a long sequence of still images unified by the sound of the artist blowing a whistle, is from a twelve-day trip Popescu made from the north to the south of the country, taking with him only a red and a blue raffia bag on a yellow wheelbarrow (the three colors of the Moldovan flag). The images seem to flicker too rapidly at first, and only around the fourth minute does the journey really begin (as if we have finally caught up with his pace). Occasionally it slows down and some of the images linger a bit longer, especially of children, perhaps marking moments of rest, of socialization or an occasion to grasp the landscape in front of him. Several times we hear excerpts from conversations Popescu has had along the way. We learn that there was heavy rain at one stage of the trip; we hear stories about the Moldovan mentality of judging and watching the other, of migrant work experience in Italy, of the privileges of silence and sobriety in a society that is very quick to label the other.</p>
<p>Throughout the trip we seldom see the artist himself, only in the shadow of his silhouette or reflected in a window and in the few selfie shots near the end. And yet we are presented with everything that he could call &ldquo;mine,&rdquo; as the title of the series suggests, starting from the earth beneath his feet to the wheelbarrow, to the fields, the rivers, and garbage pits, and to the experiences and memories from conversations, children, and animals along the way. Because &ldquo;mine,&rdquo; unlike &ldquo;my,&rdquo; is always used without a noun following it.</p>
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<p><strong>He Yunchang</strong></p>
<p><strong>The Rock Tours Around</strong><br /><strong>Great Britain, 2006&ndash;2007</strong></p>
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<p class="text__muted">Performance documentation (two parts, each 51&rsquo; 30&rsquo;&rsquo;),<br /> C-prints on Dibond, 24 parts, 56.5&times;42.5 cm and 55.5&times;41.5 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>Lasting 112 days, the longest endurance performance He Yunchang has ever undertaken, The Rock Tours Around Great Britain continues his practice of overcoming forces (other than his own will), be they natural, human or mechanical. He accomplishes this through a series of actions whose amplitude, quantity or duration usually dramatically outweigh the alleged &ldquo;goal.&rdquo; In this case, the artist walked 3,500 km along the coast of Great Britain to return a stone to the same place where he took it from at the start of his journey. As in the work where he attempted to stand on a rock at Niagara Falls, a stone is involved. This time it is not immovable, but its shoe-like size suggests that its weight will be felt over time by the person carrying it. A heavy burden after ten hours&rsquo; walking every day, it acquires an agency of its own, changing the artist&rsquo;s body and mind. As the title of the work suggests, neither stone nor man retain the same relationship to each other by the end.</p>
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<p>As with most of his works, the only witnesses are people directly involved in the process, in this case a photographer, a cameraman, and a small crew that followed him in a car in case of emergency and to provide shelter at night. As well as not being at all spectacular, He&rsquo;s performances do not usually involve any physical training during preparation, so when he sets out overtly harsh rules for himself it is pure determination in action that we are witnessing. And this &ldquo;goal&rdquo; is enough.</p>
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<p><strong>Tehching Hsieh</strong></p>
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<p><strong>One Year Performance </strong><br /><strong>1981&ndash;1982, 1981&ndash;1982 (2021)</strong></p>
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<p class="text__muted">Performance documentation: poster, statement, daily map, four black-and-white photographs, Super 8 film transferred to DVD (color, sound, duration 31&rsquo; 50&rdquo;), dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>In his third year-long performance, produced from September 26, 1981 to September 26, 1982, Tehching Hsieh spent twelve months on the street, without entering any buildings or covered spaces (such as cars, trains, boats or tents). He lived on the streets of New York with a sleeping bag and a backpack.</p>
<p>Hsieh produced five one-year performances. For the first one, Cage Piece (1978&ndash;1979), he pledged to spend one year in a self-made cage inside his own home. A lawyer notarized the process and made sure Hsieh did not leave the house, read, speak or watch TV. In one of the most challenging of his durational works, Rope Piece (1983&ndash;1984), he spent a year tied to performance artist Linda Montano, with the two not allowed to touch each other. On his 36th birthday (December 31, 1986), Hsieh announced a fourteen-year plan, declaring, &ldquo;Will make Art during this time. Will not show it publicly.&rdquo; On January 1, 2000, he issued a concluding report, &ldquo;I kept myself alive. I passed the December 31, 1999.&rdquo; After that project, Hsieh &ldquo;retired&rdquo; from art.</p>
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<p><strong>Zhou Bin</strong><br />(B. 1970, Xi&rsquo;an, China; lives and works in Chengdu)</p>
<p><strong>Following.</strong><br /><strong>2009</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Color video with sound, 4&rsquo; 30&rsquo;&rsquo;<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>The story in the videotaped performance is simple as can be. For 90 minutes Zhou Bin follows an ant through Tiananmen Square, trailed by police officers who watch his strange and suspicious movements. During the performance regular and military police squads came to the square, but found no reason to intervene. The work finished when the ant dug a hole in the ground and disappeared into it.</p>
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<p>In this work Zhou assembled a complex system of meanings and historical references. The events in Tiananmen Square had a huge impact on the political development of China, which in its turn influenced the global social situation. In 1989, as China was transitioning to a new economic model and the party leadership was fighting over its course, mass student protests in Tiananmen Square ended in a military intervention that resulted in many deaths. The footage of the military crackdown was shown across the world and became part of the iconic imagery that illustrated the dramatic global changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The act of following that Zhou Bin reproduced in Tiananmen Square is a clever critique of a totalitarian state in which a small human being is watched over by Big Brother, who can crush them in the blink of an eye (with Big Brother, in turn, watched by a different power).</p>
<p>The choice of protagonist is intentional. The ant is a hard-working creature (interestingly, ants never sleep), forever devoted to the common cause, which symbolically relates it to the Chinese worker (the face of the world&rsquo;s second largest economy), whose work ethic requires a similar level of selfless dedication. But Zhou is not just observing a person subject to a repressive regime. Here the ant is also a symbol of living nature and, according to Taoism, contemplation of nature and the flow of life offers a path to happiness contained in the natural order of things.</p>
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<p style="text-align: right;"><i>AM</i></p>
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Zhou Bin

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<p><strong>Luchezar Boyadjiev</strong><br />(b. 1957, Sofia; lives and works in Sofia)</p>
<p><strong>Endspiel; or the Good, the Bad, and the Lonely.</strong><br /><strong>2012/2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Wood, metal, veneer, dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>One of the founding fathers of contemporary art in Bulgaria, Luchezar Boyadjiev (like many artists who use conceptualist tools in their practice) works in dialogue with the intellectual legacy of Marcel Duchamp (1887&ndash;1968). As well as laying the foundations of conceptualism, Duchamp was a keen chess player, but he did not become an internationally acclaimed figure in that field. Boyadjiev&rsquo;s extended chessboard continues Duchamp&rsquo;s exploration of the nature of art and its limitations. We know that Duchamp gave up art for chess for over ten years (perhaps a conscious but unannounced performance?). However, to Boyadjiev, Duchamp&rsquo;s eventual return to art was a sign of the everlasting nature of the artistic process, in which there is never an end&mdash;only breaks&mdash;and endless combinations are possible.</p>
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<p>Boyadjiev says that the work was inspired by the 1932 book Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled, which Duchamp co-wrote with the endgame study composer Vitaly Halberstadt. It explores an extremely rare position that can arise in the endgame. A conceptualist with a great interest in mathematical curiosities and rarities, Boyadjiev could not miss the opportunity to present his own version of chess, the game that defies infinity. Scientists have calculated that the number of possible unique chess games is higher than the number of electrons in the universe.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><i>AM</i></p>
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<p><strong>Fiete Stolte</strong><br />(b. 1979, Berlin; lives and works in Berlin)</p>
<p><strong>8 Sunrises / 8 Sunsets.</strong><br /><strong>2007</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">16 Polaroids on cardboard, print on paper, 23&times;19 cm each<br />Courtesy of artist</p>
<p>One of the palpable bodily reactions to the contraction of space into a shorter time is a contemporary physiological condition known as jet lag. In an effort to make the lack of a universal time similarly tangible, artist Fiete Stolte set off on a Sunday in 2007 from Berlin to the east and returned the following Sunday, bringing back with him sixteen polaroids with an equal quantity of sunrises and sunsets. Having proved that the eight- day week really did exist, Stolte went further in his conceptual investigations and, in the next few years, lived according to the alternative time schedule he had discovered: his days were 21 hours long and the week had eight days. Although the artist&rsquo;s week contained the same number of hours as the seven-day week, his daily routine and what he called &ldquo;high noon&rdquo; became out of sync with time in the rest of the world.</p>
<p>Before us we have a proof, but does it mean there is more time out there to take? Does the synchronization of clocks and conformity of calendars mean that if we can cheat our mind, we can also cheat our body? So where is time located, and does it travel with our bodies too?</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><i>SK</i></p>
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<p><strong>Nikita Alexeev</strong></p>
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<p>1953, Moscow&mdash; 2021, Moscow</p>
<p><strong>35.552 Starlings over Rome.</strong></p>
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<p><strong>2020</strong></p>
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<p><strong>17.776 Starlings over Rome.</strong></p>
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<p><strong>2020</strong></p>
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<p><strong>8.888 Starlings over Rome.</strong></p>
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<p><strong>2020</strong></p>
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<p><strong>4.444 Starlings over Rome.</strong></p>
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<p><strong>2020</strong></p>
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<p><strong>Waisting 2 Seconds.</strong><br /><strong>2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Ink on paper, 76.5&times;56.5 cm</p>
<p><strong>Waisting 5.400 Seconds.</strong><br /><strong>2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Ink on paper, 76.5&times;56.5 cm</p>
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<p>In the 1980s, Nikita Alexeev began to work with a motif that he ironically called &ldquo;сrosses.&rdquo; It is based on a seemingly simple device: he slowly and meticulously filled the surface of thick paper with circles and checkmarks, calculated them in his head and writing the number in the corner. At times swarms of signs created compositions, while some sheets were left almost blank.</p>
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<p>Starlings Over Rome was made after Alexeev&rsquo;s journey to Rome in 2004, where he witnessed a natural wonder. Twice a year, loud flocks of starlings cover the Eternal City, at times completely obscuring the sky. It is &ldquo;starlings&rdquo; that fill and then leave the surface of Alexeev&rsquo;s quadriptych, which was inspired by this phenomenon, once described by Nikolai Gogol. In the second series of work from the Crosses cycle&mdash;Waisting 2 Seconds and Waisting 5.400 Seconds&mdash;the artist makes ironic reference to the drawing technique on which the work is based as a pointless activity while also underlining its dramatic nature, that in essence it shortens life.</p>
<p>Alexeev explained that meditative practices like his slow, calming drawing with a technical pen on a blank sheet were processes comparable to thinking and searching for new ideas. But, like a journey, new thoughts take time: the exchange of time for thoughts is what forms the fabric of the life of the artist. Life consists of a particular number of moments, which decreases with every breath and step, just like the number of noisy birds decreases from sheet to sheet. The work, however, hints that even when the flock disappears beyond the horizon, it is not gone forever but will return in accordance with the cycle of nature.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><i>АМ</i></p>
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<div class="page" title="Page 4"><strong>Alexander Yulikov</strong></div>
<div class="page" title="Page 4">(b. 1943, Vyatskie Polyany, Russia; lives and works in Moscow)</div>
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<p><strong>1976</strong></p>
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<p>One of the pioneers of Russian minimalism, Alexander Yulikov began his conscious artistic career very early, producing his first abstract painting at the age of 14 in 1957. Years later, in 1975, he decided to make a visual diary of the following year. In his minimalist style, he divided a 1 x 1 meter canvas into 360 squares, each representing one day in the year, and planned to attach the remaining five &ldquo;day squares&rdquo; at the bottom. On January 1, 1976, Yulikov started filling out the diary, assigning each day one of the three signs he selected: + for a positive day; - for a negative day; and 0 for a neutral one, with the color of the sign conveying the emotional undertones. Accordingly, on every day of the year the painting/diary was completed, and the following day its making continued.</p>
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<p>The diary remained unfinished, as Yulikov took the rare opportunity to show his work in an apartment exhibition. Only state-endorsed art could be displayed publicly in the 1970s, and Yulikov&rsquo;s work was deemed inappropriate for the era of &ldquo;developed socialism&rdquo; and therefore hostile. Work on the painting was interrupted, and Yulikov decided against resuming it, as the empty squares stood for future, unlived days and therefore expressed the fundamental property of time&mdash;to last. That is why the five additional squares were never added to the canvas.</p>
<p>Yulikov is considered to be the first Russian minimalist artist, but this particular work is closer to conceptualism. Explaining his art practice and Diary 1976 in particular, he says, &ldquo;I try to convey the relationship between the individuality of my particular life and objective time, which goes beyond all ideologies and movements.&rdquo;</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">AM</p>
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<p><strong>Tehching Hsieh</strong></p>
<p><strong>One Year Performance 1980&ndash;1981.</strong><br /><strong>1980&ndash;1981 (2021)</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Performanсe documentation: poster, statement, instructions, witnesses&rsquo; accounts, missed punching record, color photograph, time card, 16 mm film transferred to DVD (color, silent, 6&rsquo; 50&rdquo;), dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>For one year, from April 11, 1980 to April 11, 1981, Hsieh punched a time clock every hour and took a shot of himself on a 16mm camera. Later, he assembled the shots into a six-minute film. Before he started the performance, Hsieh shaved his head to make the passing of time better visible on the film.</p>
<p>Born in Taiwan, from an early age Hsieh dreamt of travelling to New York, the international center of art. Without money or connections, he found a way to leave his homeland (which was too conservative for his art) and follow his dream. In 1974, he trained to be a sailor, joined a crew, and sailed to Philadelphia, from where he moved to New York. An illegal immigrant for 14 years, avoiding public transport to minimize encounters with the police, Hsieh washed dishes during the day and searched painfully for ideas for his art at night, until eventually he had an idea that became the foundation of his practice. &ldquo;One day, all of a sudden, I thought: what else am I looking for?&rdquo; Hsieh recounted. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t need to go out to find art, I am already in my work.&rdquo; After that he chose his own life&mdash;a precious and limited resource&mdash;as his medium.</p>
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<p><strong>Roman Opałka</strong><br />(1931, Abbeville-Saint- Lucien, France&ndash;2011, Rome)</p>
<p><strong>OPALKA 1965/1&ndash;&infin;, Detail 5 332 889&mdash;5 346 903.</strong><br /><strong>2000</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Acrylic on canvas, 196&times;135 cm<br />Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź</p>
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<p>In 1965 Roman Opałka embarked on a life-long project to represent one rather simple idea: to paint in ascending sequence the numbers from 1 to infinity. In other words, the task was to represent infinity through the finite tools he had at hand: from his own aging body, which he would photograph at the end of each working day, to the duration of the paint on a brushstroke, and, of course, to the numbers that allowed duration to become visible as he painted and recorded counting them. Although the overall rational path he had calculated for the project never changed, Opałka did adjust his methodology: the background changed from black to gray and became whiter by 1% with each painting, dissolving, ideally at the end of the artist&rsquo;s life, into the blank canvas he had started with.</p>
<p>On this painting, or &ldquo;detail,&rdquo; as he referred to them, the artist counted 14,014 numbers. The year was 2000 and some 260,346 numbers before his final number, painted on the day of his death. Counting backward, to the day he began the Details, if we assume that on average he painted 24,000 numbers per painting, the result would be around 233 paintings in 46 years. If we were to hang them all on one wall, with a 15cm gap between them, they would take up about 550 meters (the paintings were all 196 x 135 cm), the length of the road from Moscow to Voronezh.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SK</em></p>
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<p><strong>André Cadere</strong><br />1934, Warsaw&ndash; 1978, Paris</p>
<p><strong>New York City, November 1975.</strong><br /><strong>1975</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Editioned by the estate in 2012<br />Archival pigment print,<br /> 30 elements, each 18.9&times;24 cm and 24&times;18.9 cm. Edition 3/5<br />Courtesy Succession André Cadere and Galerie Hervé Bize, Nancy</p>
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<p>Between 1971 and his premature death in 1978, André Cadere, a Warsaw-born artist of Romanian descent, made around 200 handcrafted, round, wooden bars of various sizes and color combinations. He would carry them around, placing them so that they performed a sort of cut through the space, leaning them against trees, walls, kiosks, and, most famously, placing them next to the works of other artists at exhibition openings, often when not invited. In the series of photographs from his first visit to New York in 1975 (the only series known to have been made by the artist himself) we can see the different relationships he enacted within the space each time, our eyes wandering in search of the bar in the unfamiliar landscapes, mimicking, in a way, the figure of the wandering stranger with whom Cadere, a Romanian émigré, identified.</p>
<p>Despite the difficulty such a choice of practice entailed, with, at the beginning, the bars often being confiscated and the artist himself ejected from the premises, Cadere persisted in taking his art outside the art circuit wherever he went, thus opening up possibilities for his work to be seen. This expansion of the limits set by museums and galleries regarding where and how art is encountered and experienced is mirrored by the artist&rsquo;s use of circular segments for the bars, meaning they had no top or bottom, back or front and could be put or hung anywhere. Referring to them as Peinture sans fin (Painting Without End), Cadere was attempting to make painting potentially present in literally any corner.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SK</em></p>
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<p><strong>Eugenijus Antanas Cukermanas</strong><br />(b. 1935, Kaunas; lives and works in Vilnius)</p>
<p><br /><strong>FD Flying Dutchman Started January 15.</strong><br /><strong>1978. Work in continuo</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">A two-part work. Replica of a 1978 painting (print on canvas), canvas, projection, computer software. Each part 84 &times; 102.5 cm</p>
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<p class="text__muted">Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>In 1967, in his legendary essay &ldquo;Art and Objecthood,&rdquo; Michael Fried expressed his vehement opposition to the emerging arts, which deviated from art that was manifest in every moment (modernist painting), instead developing in a system or in time (minimalism, performance). In a long-term process that continues to this day, artist Eugenijus Antanas Cukermanas challenges the idea of the fixed work of art, especially that achieved by plastic means. Like the mythical ship the project&rsquo;s title refers to, Cukermanas&rsquo; Flying Dutchman&mdash;a black rectangle&mdash;will never reach port and has been &ldquo;sailing&rdquo; across the field of the canvas in his studio for more than forty years. Its position, which changes anywhere from daily to once a month, is carefully marked on a roll of paper that currently measures more than 200 meters and records around 1,400 positions. Presented here are two elements: a reconstruction of the original canvas with the position of FD on June 14, 2021 and a projection where one can follow the evolving trajectory of its positions according to how the artist moves it in real time on the canvas over the duration of the exhibition.</p>
<p>Since FD&rsquo;s first positioning on January 15, 1978, on Original&mdash;a 84 x 102.5 cm blank canvas divided into 180 cells, which left the artist&rsquo;s studio in Vilnius only twice&mdash;the project has usually been shown with the use of reconstructions on canvas and in metal.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SK</em></p>
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<p><strong>André Cadere</strong></p>
<p><strong>Round Bar of Wood B 12304000 (Barre de bois rond B 12304000).</strong><br /><strong>1976</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Painted wood, 52 segments<br /> Total dimensions 179&times;3.5&times;3.5 cm Centre national des arts plastiques<br /> On deposit at Collection Lambert, Avignon FNAC 2013-0234</p>
<p>At first it may seem paradoxical that André Cadere, who called his series of round bars of wood Peinture sans fin (Painting Without End), would also state that there was no development in his work. However, the system he invented for them using the same two types of permutations (which he called A and B) in the order of colors meant that even before he made it, each series was indeed finite, closed. The implementation of an error in each was an important way to bridge art and life, yet it was neither the craft nor the permutation of colors that constituted development, at least in the artist&rsquo;s understanding: he saw the development or trajectory of his work in its changing position within the art system. Cadere rightly observed that an art that challenges the limits and boundaries of the art system would naturally also keep shifting.</p>
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<p>Although each of the bars was unique, Cadere nevertheless saw them as constellations; part of a single system that was finite yet vast and ongoing, even extending beyond what he was able to do in his lifetime.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SK</em></p>
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<p><strong>On Kawara</strong></p>
<p><strong>One Million Years (Past and Future).</strong><br /><strong>2002</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Audio, total duration 1,920&rsquo;<br />Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven</p>
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<p><strong>One Million Years.</strong><br /><strong>1999</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Book, planography on paper.<br /> Two volumes, each 15 &times; 11.4 &times; 4.2 cm<br />Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven</p>
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<p>Made up of two parts&mdash;One Million Years: Past and One Million Years: Future&mdash;On Kawara&rsquo;s One Million Years consists of 24 discreet works, each comprising a set of ten binders containing 200 pages of text. Twelve of these sets span past millennia and twelve span the future, with the years represented varying from work to work based on the year in which they were assembled. The One Million Years: Past works, made in 1970 and 1971, count back one million years to end with the year prior to their creation&mdash; for example, 998,031 BC through 1969 AD&mdash;and are subtitled &ldquo;For all those who have lived and died.&rdquo; The One Million Years: Future works, which were made from 1980 to 1998, begin with the year following their creation and count forward&mdash;for example, 1999 AD to 1,001,995 AD&mdash;and are subtitled &ldquo;For the last one.&rdquo; The two volumes on view at the exhibition are not included in the body of 24 works. They are edition books published by Éditions Micheline Szwajcer &amp; Michèle Didier, which were made in collaboration with Kawara.</p>
<p>Once we overcome the chilling realization that our lives merely take up a few lines on a single page, we notice that Kawara removed from the flow of time the ten years between the two parts of the work (1971&ndash;1980). This may be intended to highlight that time has a different thickness, which can make it hard to accurately assign a &ldquo;pastness&rdquo; to an event or to pinpoint the moment when the future starts if you have already given birth to it. It may also be a reminder to speculate more about how consciousness exists, from and to which time can be seen to be flowing.</p>
<p>From 1993 onward, Kawara added live and recorded readings to the books. This opened up the project to more dimensions of experience and also allowed it to keep going in time. Every reading is set by a protocol, with clear guidelines issued by the artist. Each session begins where the last one ended. Given that it will take around 200 years to read all the years in the volumes, this project is bound to outlive not only us but also many of the generations to come.</p>
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<p><strong>On Kawara</strong></p>
<p><strong>13 JAN. 1973 &ldquo;Lördag&rdquo;.</strong><br /><strong>1973</strong></p>
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<p class="text__muted">Acrylic on canvas, 26&times;33.3&times;4.4 cm</p>
<p><strong>JULY 4, 1973 &ldquo;Wednesday&rdquo;.</strong><br /><strong>1973</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Acrylic on canvas, 26&times;33.1&times;4.4 cm<br />Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven</p>
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<p>On Kawara started the Date Painting series on January 4, 1966 and continued it throughout his life. Despite their industrial look, Kawara executed these works painstakingly by hand, painting one or more each day, not necessarily every day but always completing works before midnight otherwise he would destroy them. He preferred a nondescript sans-serif font, which he traced with white paint onto canvas of varying colors and sizes. The bigger the painting, the more important the events that took place on that day, its date fixed in the order and language of the country the artist was in at the time. Adding clippings of local newspapers with which he would line the cardboard boxes he constructed for each painting helped him &ldquo;keep time,&rdquo; making what we see a true indexical imprint of that day that is both personal and historical, timeless and finite. It also makes this series a very long sequence of instances of the artist being conscious that day, his &ldquo;today&rdquo; and, ironically, now ours as well.</p>
<p>Until a certain point, he subtitled each Date Painting in a journal, using newspaper headlines or personal notes. Not intended as aids of any kind, these notes nevertheless betray a certain historical development, as the events recorded produce a narrative from the past. On December 28, 1972, we read: &ldquo;Jag vet inte&rdquo; or &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know&rdquo; in Swedish, and from this date on he recorded in his files only the day of the week.</p>
<p>Taken from a newspaper, these words mark a shift in consciousness, the peak of ontological mistrust in, it would seem, a universal logic driven by cause and effect logic, the flow of time and history.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SК</em></p>
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<p><strong>Vyacheslav Akhunov</strong><br />(b. 1948, Osh, Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic; lives and works in Tashkent)</p>
<p><strong>USSR Mantras.</strong><br /><strong>1975&ndash;2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Installation, dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>A major figure in the art of Central Asia, Vyacheslav Akhunov works in a variety of techniques, his practice focused on critique of the state. The absurdity and abnormality of Soviet life are reflected in most of his works. With obsessive meticulousness and dedication, he reproduces and brings into conflict Soviet symbols, from photographs of Soviet leaders and Politburo members to slogans, documents, lyrics, flags, and other communist paraphernalia. His critique of the Soviet Union perhaps reached its highest point in the ongoing project USSR Mantras, which Akhunov started over forty years ago. It is his longest-lasting and best-known work and, essentially, his life- long project.</p>
<p>This is the fifth decade in which Akhunov has covered various objects (newspaper cuttings, handmade books, tickets, cardiograms, sewing patterns, pages from school progress reports, carbon paper, old folders, archival documents, canvases) in tiny handwriting with excerpts from books on scientific communism and dialectical materialism. He has produced thousands of objects over tens of thousands of hours. The repetition of slogans in his work, however, is based on the principle directly opposite to the one behind mantras as formulas of endless worship. Every articulation of USSR Mantras uses reverse power to devalue the Soviet project, hollowing out a meaning in which the population subjected to this ideological experiment lost faith halfway through.</p>
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<p><strong>Yuri Albert</strong><br />(b. 1948, Osh, Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic; lives and works in Tashkent)</p>
<p><strong>I&rsquo;m Still Alive.</strong><br /><strong>2017</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Mirror, breath, screenprint. 365 parts, each 30&times;21 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>For 365 days, exactly the number of mirrors lined up on the wall, Yuri Albert performed a series of monotonous, repetitive acts of breathing onto a mirrored surface, as if checking he was still alive. Each time, he would scan the foggy spot and then print it back onto the mirror using transparent varnish. Albert compared the resulting spot on the mirror to an abstract painting, not so much because of its formal qualities but because of the trust we often need to have in what the artist tells us an abstract painting means. Albert&rsquo;s breath becomes a testimony to honoring that trust by providing an answer about the meaning of the painting again and again each day (I&rsquo;m Still Alive), as if to compensate for the answers of entire generations of other artists.</p>
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<p>In this direct homage to a series of works by On Kawara, in which the artist would send telegrams to his friends around the world with the sole message &ldquo;I am still alive,&rdquo; Albert does not seem to be concerned with phatic communication in the way we might read Kawara&rsquo;s work. In other words, the abstract spot on the glass that is meant to prove (if we are to trust Albert) that the artist is still alive is not a way to continue the conversation or to keep the relationship going but instead points to the relationships that keep him alive&mdash;to other artists and other works&mdash;something that his choice of a mirror surface also betrays through its &ldquo;relational&rdquo; qualities.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SК</em></p>
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Yuri Albert

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<p><strong>Sun Furong</strong><br />(b. 1961, Handan, China; lives and works in Beijing)</p>
<p><strong>Decade. From the series Nibbling.</strong><br /><strong>2003&ndash;2005</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">100 pieces of cotton clothing, metal hangers, dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artis</p>
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<p>A self-taught artist working with folk art traditions such as paper cutting and sewing, Sun Furong started her first and most iconic series of installations, Nibbling, in 2003. Each installation is an &ldquo;army&rdquo; comprising one hundred sets of Chinese workers&rsquo; and military uniforms, that she, little by little, cuts, snips, and slashes with her dressmaker&rsquo;s scissors, creating a dazzling effect, as if the garments have been nibbled. This work is simultaneously an act of exorcism from the traumatic cultural history the uniforms represent and of bitter remembrance of (and empathy for) those young people</p>
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<p>like herself, who lived with scarcity and famine. However, the longer you look at the silhouettes, the more they resemble not an army but a choir: one that is about to burst into song.</p>
<p>Sun recalls how, as a schoolgirl during the Cultural Revolution, she was reluctant to participate in any revolutionary or political events the school engaged in because each time it meant an enormous effort to borrow the so-called Zhongshan zhuang suit (a tunic that was the uniform of Chinese society at the time) from other families, as it was difficult to obtain. These suits were sewn at home and then patched up again and again over the years. &ldquo;We Chinese,&rdquo; writes Sun, &ldquo;are very hard working, frugal, and very good at surviving. That is, we take off our clothes outside at night, wash them, and put them on again the next day.&rdquo;</p>
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Sun Furong

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<p><strong>Melati Suryodarmo</strong><br />(b. 1969, Surakarta, Indonesia; lives and works in Surakarta)</p>
<p><strong>Ale Lino.</strong><br /><strong>2003/2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Performance documentation, 15&rsquo; 37&rsquo;&rsquo;<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>In this video documentation of the work Alé Lino we see Melati Suryodarmo standing on a high pedestal, leaning on a long pole that ends at her solar plexus. In the original live performance, she stood in this position for three hours, attempting to &ldquo;reach a kind of complete emptiness between the physical and mental.&rdquo; The solar plexus is a very vulnerable point in the human body, a fact well known not only to medical science but also in martial arts and shamanic practices. By applying pressure to it using the pole, Suryodarmo was hoping to achieve emptiness, which she eventually did after the three-hour performance.</p>
<p>Suryodarmo comes from a family of traditional dancers and movement artists, a legacy she explored further in her studies in performative practices in Germany (where she lived from the 1990s to 2002) under teachers such as Marina Abramović and Anzu Furukawa. Her return to Indonesia pushed her to explore her performative practice in relation to her Javanese origins, as well as how spirituality can be achieved through the body without necessarily appealing to its allegedly wholly transcendent nature. As the artist points out, her practice is not about the spirit itself but about the underlying principle behind the making and performing of some of the works, which reveals a sustained practice of spirit.</p>
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<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SK</em></p>
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Melati Suryodarmo

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<p><strong>Yoshiko Shimada</strong><br />(b. 1959, Tachikawa, Japan; lives and works in Chiba, Japan)</p>
<p><strong>Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman.</strong><br /><strong>2012/2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Performance documentation (8&rsquo; 3&rdquo;), C-print on Dibond, dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Only a few passers-by would have noticed the small female figure sitting still with her mouth taped, next to an empty chair, at the entrance to the Japanese Embassy in London in 2012. Camouflaged as a bronze statue, Yoshiko Shimada sat there for an hour dressed in a kimono, a guerrilla performance she would go on to repeat at several locations around Japan and abroad. By becoming a statue, Shimada was allowing a distant, unrelated history to become embodied again and thus more personal, and was making a direct protest against the Japanese government&rsquo;s request to take down the bronze monument erected a year earlier in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, Korea, commemorating the so-called &ldquo;comfort women&rdquo;&mdash;some 200,000 women, mainly from Korea and China, who were coerced into sexual slavery, providing sex for Japanese troops in military brothels across Asia during World War II.</p>
<p>These silent, durational interventions, which Shimada continues to perform today, are an impactful act of resilience to the unbiased prerogative of time, hijacked and made selective by those in power: the ability to blur, disembody, alienate, and erase. Since the 1990s, the artist has critically tackled the issue of Japanese female roles during the war from a feminist perspective and has consistently attempted to make the history of the &ldquo;comfort women&rdquo; of transnational importance. Her efforts to recuperate it from serving solely national political agendas focus on bringing to light the fact that some &ldquo;comfort women&rdquo; were Japanese, something the government and Japanese society prefer to ignore. As Shimada says, this only proves the depth of the social taboo and the stigmatization of women victims of sexual abuse.</p>
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Yoshiko Shimada

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<p><strong>Chingiz Aidarov</strong><br />(b. 1984, Frunze (now Bishkek), Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic; lives and works in Bishkek and Moscow)</p>
<p><strong>Snail (Spiral).</strong><br /><strong>2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Performance documentation, 10&rsquo; 9&rsquo;&rsquo;<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>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 &ldquo;bed sheet,&rdquo; which was essentially a collective image of his colleagues&rsquo; fates. He took the &ldquo;bed sheet&rdquo; 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.</p>
<p>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 &ldquo;rubber&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
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<p><strong>He Yunchang</strong></p>
<p><strong>One Meter of Democracy.</strong><br /><strong>2010</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">C-print on Dibond.<br />Six parts, each 41.5&times;27.5 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>In China, where the government appears to control everything, sometimes the body is the only form of protest one can use. How does politics reflect on a body or through a body? Compressing centuries of human aspirations for democracy, the short yet potent performance One Meter of Democracy is one of the strongest overt expressions in the He Yunchang&rsquo;s oeuvre. On October 10, 2010, the artist arranged to have a one-meter line cut, without anesthetic, from his clavicle down to an area below the knee. It was a choice he had made, but prior to the act, 25 people were given the opportunity to vote for or against it. This line for life (a nod to the line of life) was the result of 12 votes in favor, yet all 25 people, including the ten who voted against, were required to watch. Is it less difficult to watch what you have chosen being enacted? Or less painful if one&rsquo;s pain is enacting a democratic process?</p>
<p>Posing a myriad of difficult questions, the work also leaves us wondering if it is ever possible to be fully ready for the forces enacted by, for, and upon oneself. The reality the artist seems to expose is that often, whether we are ready or not, we are put in the position of taking a difficult decision and making the body visible.</p>
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<p><strong>Andrey Kuzkin</strong><br />(b. 1979, Moscow; lives and works in Moscow)</p>
<p><strong>Main Question.</strong><br /><strong>2013</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Video (26&rsquo; 59&rsquo;&rsquo;), C-print, dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Since the start of his career, Moscow-based artist Andrey Kuzkin has engaged in radical performance, testing his own vitality and ability to concentrate. His explanation of the performance Main Question is as brief as it is impersonal: &ldquo;A person has cut the question &lsquo;What is it?&rsquo; into their body.&rdquo; In describing his work this way, Kuzkin shows that he has no intention of imposing unnecessary readings on the viewer, making the work speak for itself or extending his experience beyond the personal. Every so often all people (here Kuzkin describes himself as &ldquo;a person,&rdquo; choosing not to specify his age or sex) ask themselves &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; when facing circumstances a human is unable to overcome.</p>
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<p>The idea for the performance came to Kuzkin about a year before he presented the work to the public. He spent a long time on the inner work, gathering the psycho-emotional resources required to make the effort. The path that he traveled in that time is probably part of the performance, as inner work and the search for a foundation are part of what sociologists call invisible labor, which is in fact inseparable from production. Another part of the work, Kuzkin argues, is the moment when one has to make a decision and begin. That moment for him is a decisive point beyond which &ldquo;the fear and pain subside.&rdquo;</p>
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<p><strong>Zhou Bin</strong></p>
<p><strong>Diary: 1986-2015.</strong><br /><strong>2015</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Paper, video documentation, 4&rsquo; 50&rdquo;. Total dimensions 150&times;75&times;10 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>A world-famous artist known for his performances and political actions, in 2015 Zhou Bin took all of his diaries dating back to 1986 (with a total weight of 5.25 kg) to a traditional paper workshop in Jiajiang County, Sichuan Province. There he turned them into paper mass and then, after numerous manipulations, into clean paper. The stack of new sheets reminds us that we can always start afresh&mdash;literally with a clean sheet&mdash;and that in the end people do not really leave any trace.</p>
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<p>The horizon of meanings produced by Diaries encompasses a wide range of contexts related to humans&rsquo; experience of time and place. The moment the black ink meets the white paper can be seen as an encounter between presence and absence, a clash between two forces. In other words, a visualization of what in Chinese philosophy is known as the Great Separation (the first stage of cosmogenesis), which is also graphically expressed through yin and yang. The destruction of a diary is also a psychoanalytical way of dealing with past events. In this respect it is important that the artist turns to the traditional method of paper making (or recycling), entrusting years of his life to a particular tradition that has supplied paper to people in search of meaning for thousands of years.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>АМ</em></p>
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<p><strong>Tetsuya Noda</strong><br />(b. 1940, Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan; lives and works in Kashiwa, Japan)</p>
<p><strong>Diary.</strong><br /><strong>1973&ndash;2019</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Woodblock and screenprint on Japanese paper, dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>Tetsuya Noda is one of the most important living contemporary artists in Japan and is often considered the most important. Best known as a printmaker, he produces work that is much more complex and multi-layered than it may seem. Since 1968, he has been writing his own visual biography in the series Diary, which explores everyday objects taken out of context. These visually impeccable works are screenprints produced on handmade Washi paper using a mid-20th century mimeograph machine. Each work in this series of over 500 is a rare type of contemporary still life, capturing stories that convey a sense of the time and make us reflect on the finite nature of every moment as it irreversibly becomes history.</p>
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<p>Noda&rsquo;s visual commentary on the world that surrounds him&mdash;a practice he started as a child&mdash;particularly resonates with the present moment and the global fascination with presenting one&rsquo;s life on social media. His project, however, has no connotations of judgment: his goal does not involve a glamorized or dramatic presentation of his life. Along with people (Noda&rsquo;s children and other relatives), the artist&rsquo;s objects of interest include social and political events and the objects that make up his daily life, such as the fruit that he lovingly grows in his garden. The artist&rsquo;s continuous labor in his garden is also included in the process of making the work, in the same way as the manipulations of the image that follow.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>АМ</em></p>
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Tetsuya Noda

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<p><strong>Mihai Stanescu</strong><br />(1939, Grădiștea, Romania&ndash;2018, Bucharest)</p>
<p><strong>Daiana.</strong><br /><strong>1980&ndash;2003</strong></p>
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<p class="text__muted">Carbon print on acrylic, cotton dress, dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of Daiana Stanescu</p>
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<p>Pictured wearing the same dress from childhood to motherhood, when it no longer fit due to her pregnant belly, is Daiana Stanescu, the daughter of Mihai Stanescu, who kept this photographic diary of his daughter for 23 years. This is a unique series within the oeuvre of the artist, one of the most renowned cartoonists in Romania. It is a series that some of the younger generation of cultural practitioners in Bucharest grew up with, seeing it every day in the window of the small store Stanescu opened after the fall of communism. A bonding moment for father and daughter, a constant&mdash;just like the dress&mdash;within the flow of life, these yearly photographs are timeless little monuments to the powerful act of witnessing; the witnessing of his adored daughter distancing into her own adult life.</p>
<p>Stanescu graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest in 1966 and began work at the Ministry of Tourism before resigning and becoming a freelance cartoonist. In the 1970s and 1980s he won numerous awards, including, in 1982, a gold medal in a cartoon competition organized by the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, which resulted in international fame and some security at home, since he had been written about in the international press. Highly respected in his country for being the only cartoonist to opening criticize the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Stanescu remained active and critical of the political situation in Romania even after the fall of communism.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SK</em></p>
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Mihai Stanescu

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<p><strong>Vitaly Komar</strong><br />(b. 1943, Moscow; lives and works in New York)</p>
<p><strong>The Swish of Sand.</strong><br /><strong>2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Polyptych, C-print on Dibond. Overall dimensions 40&times;240 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>The Swish of Sand continues Komar&rsquo;s long-term exploration of the themes of fate and ritual. Responding to the focus of the exhibition, the project explores the inescapable dramatic ending of every life and the transformation of living matter into dust, which nevertheless always precedes a new life in a new form. Having made a will specifying that he be buried with a radio transmitter and an hourglass, Komar has extended his creative activity beyond his own existence, inserting himself into the baroque tradition of vanitas and reminding the viewer that in this world we are all transit passengers.</p>
<p>The subject of life and death appeared in the work of Komar &amp; Melamid at different stages of their collaborative career. Shortly after they emigrated to Israel in 1977, the duo organized a subversive performance, in which they placed an aluminum, pyramid-shaped structure with a five-pointed star on top of Mount Zion. Behind this &ldquo;temple&rdquo; they burnt their suitcases, thus symbolically sacrificing to the fire their ties with the motherland. After moving to the United States in 1978, Komar &amp; Melamid established a company that traded in human souls. The end result was an auction, which included the sale of the soul of Andy Warhol for 30 rubles. Another symbol connected to the afterlife that recurs in their work is Lenin&rsquo;s Mausoleum. In 1993, during the wave of the de-Sovietization of the Russian state, the artists devised a project for a news ticker to be added to the mausoleum as an attempt to revive the aging monument in the new, post-Soviet world.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>AM</em></p>
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Vitaly Komar

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<p><strong>Duan Yingmei</strong><br />(b. 1969, Heilongjiang, China;<br />lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany)</p>
<p><strong>I Would Like to Know You.</strong><br /><strong>September 10, 2021&ndash;January 30, 2022</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Performance<br />Courtesy of artist</p>
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<p>Behind the laconic presentation&mdash;a QR code which leads to an Instagram account&mdash;is a durational process of communication to which Duan Yingmei has committed herself for the entire length of the exhibition, for at least an hour a day. Anyone can write and set a date and time for a chat (via text, video or audiomessage) through her account, where you can also see a growing album of images, videos and texts&mdash;her interpretations of the chat(s) she had the day before. She explains that during the isolation of the pandemic, online communication gained many layers of complexity and affects us all in various way. Often exploring the unpredictable domain of human relations in her performances and video installations, their psychic and subliminal undercurrents, in I Would Like to Know You Duan highlights the deeply communicative nature of human experience.</p>
<p>In Duan&rsquo;s earlier works, going back to her iconic performances as part of the East Village community of artists in Beijing in the 1990s, she consistently employed fewer verbal and more bodily and spiritual forms of communication, a choice that is perhaps rooted in her experience as a child. She was born with a cleft palate, which impeded her speech, something that has left a traumatic mark. However, true to her investigative practice into the depths of the human psyche, Duan has chosen to spend five months talking, to share part of her time with viewers as a form of curiosity, care, and utmost attention.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SK</em></p>
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<p><strong>He Yunchang</strong></p>
<p><strong>Caochangdi&mdash;The Tenth Generation.</strong><br /><strong>2012</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">C-print on Dibond, 250&times;59.5 cm, 89.5&times;59.5 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>Over the years since his first performance in 1993, He Yunchang&rsquo;s practice has naturally changed and transformed, along with his sensitivities. Caochangdi&mdash;The Tenth Generation can to some degree be considered a transitional piece toward the gentler approach that can be discerned in He&rsquo;s more recent works. In an interview in 2015, the artist mentioned that &ldquo;this transition also relates to my age, my experience, and the condition of my body,&rdquo; something we can see through analyzing the grammar of his movements. In his nearly three decades of artistic practice, we rarely see He lying down (and then only where he is on an operating table waiting to be cut). Yet in early spring 2012 he lay down for 28 days to watch the grass grow in front of his studio. Although the self-imposed harsh conditions of sleeping outdoors on a hard surface do involve a certain violence (as usual, oriented toward himself), another dimension opens up in which nature can be simply observed and contemplated whilst steadily and quietly changing.</p>
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<p>From the pictures of the performance we can see that there was a more &ldquo;solemn&rdquo; public moment marking the beginning of the artist&rsquo;s cohabitation with the as yet invisible seeds planted in the soil around him. At times engaged in interactions with artist friends and visitors to Caochangdi, an artists&rsquo; village in the north-east of Beijing, he is nevertheless literally &ldquo;grounded&rdquo; at all times, as if careful not to miss anything in the attentive act of grass-watching.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>SK</em></p>
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<p><strong>Nikita Alexeev</strong></p>
<p><strong>Stories 53&ndash;20.</strong><br /><strong>2020</strong></p>
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<p class="text__muted">Colored pencil on paper, 70 &times; 3700 cm</p>
<p><strong>Video of Stories 53-20 by Nikita Alexeev.</strong><br /><strong>2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">9&rsquo; 12&rdquo;<br /> Video: Anastasia Soboleva<br />Courtesy Iragui Gallery, Moscow</p>
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<p>Nikita Alexeev was always fascinated by the existential experience of his own life and his place in the world. The very shape of the scroll in his last large work, Stories 53&ndash;20, is a metaphor of life as a sequence of events unfolding in time and space. Scrolls are a recurrent image in Nikita Alexeev&rsquo;s art. In 1986 he exhibited the emakimono (a Japanese type of scroll) A Brief History of Contemporary Art, or The Life and Death of the Black Square at the spontaneous exhibition Bittsa for Art. The scroll told the story in comic-book form of the journey of Malevich&rsquo;s painting through the history of art and specific exhibitions.</p>
<p>Stories 53&ndash;20 is 37-meter-long scroll about the life of a snail that moves through landscapes which are at times unassuming, at times fantastic and surreal, accompanied by the occasional snippet of news: &ldquo;1953. The death of Stalin,&rdquo; &ldquo;1957. The death of Francisco Franco,&rdquo; &ldquo;1996. Boris Yeltsin is elected for a second term;&rdquo; &ldquo;2020. COVID-19. Amendments to the Russian constitution...&rdquo; The choice of a snail as protagonist is far from accidental. It is a very ordinary creature that does little during its lifetime, a small life form that slowly moves through life, barely leaving a trace. We might, however, consider this as a metaphor for Alexeev&rsquo;s own story, as the dates on the sheets match the dates in his life.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><i>AM</i></p>
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<p><strong>Hamlet Hovsepian</strong><br />(b. 1950, Ashnak, Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic;<br />lives and works in Ashnak)</p>
<p><strong>Untitled.</strong><br /><strong>1976</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Digitized 16mm film, 4&rsquo; 30&rdquo;<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Hamlet Hovsepian is one of the key figures in Armenian contemporary art and one of the first artists in the USSR to have worked with video art. He says that he finds inspiration in the insignificant, in things that have no historical or social importance and normally escape our attention as completely unmemorable. The black-and-white, mundane, eventless life captured in the looped and simple story of Untitled is a metaphor of the era of stagnation in the Soviet Union, which coincided with the best years of Hovsepian&rsquo;s life and those of his generation.</p>
<p>Hovsepian&rsquo;s early video works consist of non-narrative footage of people and objects around him (a girl biting her nails, a yawning boy scratching his back, electrical cables). A similar genre and aesthetic can be found in Andy Warhol&rsquo;s work (for example Sleep (1963), featuring sleeping poet John Giorno), which was obviously inaccessible to Hovsepian, who had only heard about it from others. But if Warhol wanted to capture the new everyday&mdash; the beauty and simplicity of mass consumption, as we can see in Chelsea Girls (1966), which follows 12 protagonists living a leisurely life&mdash;Hovsepian is focused on existential questions such as &ldquo;Where are we going?&rdquo; and &ldquo;Is life static or does it have a purpose?&rdquo; ultimately returning to the eternal and unavoidable truth of &ldquo;What has been will be again.&rdquo;</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><i>AM</i></p>
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Hamlet Hovsepian

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<p><strong>RASSIM&reg;</strong><br />(b. 1972, Orehovitsa, Bulgaria; lives and works in Sofia)</p>
<p><strong>Corrections 2.</strong><br /><strong>2002</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Two-channel video with sound, 17&rsquo; 4&rsquo;&rsquo; each<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>This work is a continuation of the performative series Corrections, the first part of which consisted of Krasimir Krastev (RASSIM&reg;) altering his body over the course of two years through a bodybuilding and protein supplement regime. In the second part, the artist takes the viewer with him during a very intimate and culturally loaded operation: circumcision. The result of a conscious decision beyond religious or cultural imperatives with which RASSIM&reg; does not associate himself, the gesture of permanently altering one&rsquo;s body takes us back to the sacrificial rites or initiations that would psychologically (and socially) mark the passage to a different status. Referencing the multicultural nature of Bulgarian society, RASSIM seems to reject the often short-lived and easily reversible gestures of compromises undertaken for the sake of understanding and peace with the &ldquo;other,&rdquo; and instead becomes the other, slipping into a different body for life and paying the price in blood.</p>
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<p>Many of the works made by RASSIM&reg; in the 1990s, the decade when he came of age, deal with everyday reality in Bulgaria by literally trying out on the artist its most &ldquo;visceral&rdquo; human shapes: bodybuilders, boxers, junkies, muscular machos. In the two-channel video Corrections 2, however, we witness a different body of the artist&mdash;a passive, weak, and vulnerable body exposed in the most delicate process of transformation.</p>
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<p style="text-align: right;"><i>SK</i></p>
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RASSIM®

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<p><strong>Nam June Paik</strong><br />(1932, Keijō, Empire of Japan (now Seoul)&ndash;2006, Miami)</p>
<p><strong>TV Buddha.</strong><br /><strong>1974/2002</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted">Statue of Buddha, 1 CRT TV set,<br /> 1 CCTV camera, dimensions variable<br /> Nam June Paik Art Center, Republic of Korea</p>
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<p>Korean-American artist Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video art. As early as the 1960s he began using video images, CRT TV sets, and video recorders as a means of producing large sculptures and performances. TV Buddha is one of the most recognisable works of twentieth-century multimedia art, seamlessly combining symbols of different traditions (East/ West) and approaches to life (traditional/contemporary). The encounter between two seemingly incompatible objects (an antique sculpture of Buddha demonstrating a gesture (mudra) that signifies tranquillity and absence of fear and a TV with a camera attached to it) creates a looped composition that is an original visualization of infinity stretched between the multimedia future and the Buddhist practice of the contemplation of life, which dates back thousands of years.</p>
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<p>But that is not all. Apart from the clashing of different worldviews, TV Buddha transcends discussions of the issues of its time, bringing to mind the contemporary anxiety caused by the development of surveillance technology and the mass digitization of the everyday life. Paik must have been aware of the prophetic potential of his art, anticipating the radical transformation of the world and its pace thanks to the influence of technology. Although today the technology he chose for his work appears outdated, his ideas (such as his famous phrase &ldquo;the future is now&rdquo;) remain relevant.</p>
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<p style="text-align: right;"><i>AM</i></p>
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Nam June Paik

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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">In memory of Nikita Alexeev</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">The exhibition Spirit Labor brings together artists from a range of geographies and different generations, who at various stages of their careers have engaged in investigating and challenging the most significant and complex substance known to humans&mdash; time. The English title of the exhibition, Spirit Labor, is borrowed from the eponymous video essay by the British performance historian and curator Adrian Heathfield, in which he analyzes a specific type of artist&rsquo;s labor based on overcoming forces such as time or natural phenomena. The Russian title&mdash;In Service to Time&mdash;opens up the theme from a slightly different angle, drawing attention to the extent to which humans are dependent on time, which is, in essence, a non-renewable resource.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">In examining time through the dimension of the spirit, the exhibition explores the many different aspects of what duration(al) can mean, with a special focus on practices from Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. Yet Spirit Labor, as artist Melati Suryodarmo has pointed out, is not about spirit itself (at least not in the religious and transcendental meaning of the word) but about the underlying principle behind the making and performing of some works that betrays a sustained practice of spirit. Thus, the focus on spirit becomes a focus on duration, which in turn often becomes a focus on viscous, problematic, unhistorical time, producing works that are hard to make and live through, regardless of whether they take an hour to create (and even less time to view) or gradually manifest throughout the artist&rsquo;s life.</p>
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<p>A sustained practice of spirit can be seen in the &ldquo;body,&rdquo; which becomes very present in the exhibition. We can see this through the narrative, which starts from endurance and body art and moves back and forth between conceptual and bodily practices. However, the exhibition design encourages the body of the viewer to be in an almost &ldquo;confessional&rdquo; confinement, encountering each artwork within separate cubicles made of concrete (the visual and technical properties of which were originally conceived to be &ldquo;in service to time&rdquo;). This recurring insistence on the &ldquo;presence&rdquo; of the body, even when we are faced with only traces of it, is related to the unique capabilities of human and non-human bodies to affect and be affected, where affect is synonymous with forces of encounter, from the truly &ldquo;forceful&rdquo; to the minuscule, almost molecular &ldquo;shimmer.&rdquo; Affect through a body and its duration is a confirmation of that body&rsquo;s belonging to this world, to the processual, born from inbetweenness, the flow of life. Affect is necessary, to a certain degree, to rescue art from becoming an antonym of life and a powerless agent in the face of economic, ecological, social, and political forces.</p>
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<p>Spirit Labor is an attempt to recuperate difficulty as a productive concept for contemporary art. Some of the works are difficult to endure as a viewer. They can at times be barely tangible (as a work can take a lifetime to manifest or may be too monotonous), visceral, repetitive or simply not visible, thereby encouraging labor as part of the viewing experience by prompting the viewer to reflect on why and how a work is difficult and for whom.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">Snejana Krasteva, Andrey Misiano</p>
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Nam June Paik

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