Utopia and Tragedy: Discrepancy/Convergence in Hanna Zubkova's Project "False Sun. The Catcher"
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
October 26 – January 30, 2024
Curator: Alexandra Obukhova
Lera Kononchuk
Hanna Zubkova, "False Sun. The Catcher." Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2023. Installation view. Photo by Alexey Naroditsky. Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
In 2015, artist Hanna Zubkova discovered a small archive belonging to Soviet bureaucratic philosopher Georgy Kursanov (1914–1977). Like most self-organized archives, it was disorganized and unpolished: it included newspaper clippings mentioning Kursanov, a letter from the Sorbonne to Soviet Minister of Education Zhdanov regarding a possible mission for the Soviet philosopher, his sketches of antique statues, reproductions of famous paintings, and lyrical studies. Kursanov had accumulated these documents into a personal collection using some intuitive method, though two primary focuses can be identified: institutional recognition of his philosophical work on truth (announcements of lectures, newspaper articles) and his efforts to artistically (through painting) process both the fleeting (like the blossoming of flowers) and the enduring (the classical heritage cherished by European culture).
In 2023, thanks to Zubkova, Kursanov's archive became part of the Garage Museum archive. As part of the Garage Archive Commission program, Zubkova presented her own meta-archive, which she had been assembling over several years. For the artist, the philosopher's archive served as a chronotope—a multidimensional space-time map where the coordinates are the time and place of document creation, as well as their connection to what the artist refers to as European and Soviet myths. The starting point for this cartographic process was the building of RSUH (Russian State University for the Humanities) and the branch of the Pushkin Museum—the I.V. Tsvetaev Educational Art Museum, which once housed the Higher Party School. This resonance between a place that once reproduced bureaucratic rhetoric and later the standard of European academic art coincided with the content of Kursanov’s archive, marking the beginning of a long chain of correspondences and coincidences that Zubkova would follow during her six years of research and exploration.
The installation consists of a linear series of photographs and five video screens. The photos—whether archival copies, smartphone images, or screenshots—capture topographical and temporal connections. For example, Zubkova is drawn to Paros, where marble for Greek statues was quarried, through samples of antique sculpture from the Tsvetaev Museum. The peripheral island finds its counterpart in Yekaterinburg, the eastern border of Europe, where marble was also extracted, and where Kursanov gave lectures. The notion of geopolitical borders leads the artist to the North, to Vorkuta, one of the centers of the Gulag system. The journey ends in the ghost town of Rudnik, where Soviet prisoners mined not marble, but coal.
Hanna Zubkova, "False Sun. The Catcher." Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2023. Installation view. Photo by Alexey Naroditsky. Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
While discovering connections, such as the classical order system from Paros to the capital of the Arctic or city plans united by the idea of a happy future, built on the sacrifices of forced laborers, or the optical-meteorological phenomenon called "false sun" and the camera’s failure to capture the sunset, Zubkova doesn’t seek to reveal these with full clarity or present a comprehensive map. For the artist, the exhibition at Garage is just one of the (cognitive) condensations in a long research process, which can be conveniently examined through the medium of the exhibition.
For example, this is not the first time a smartphone photo or screenshot has served as a cartographic tool in Zubkova’s work. In 2014, she and co-author Ekaterina Vasilyeva carried a heavy iron beam from north to south Moscow from early morning until late evening. The performance Revolutionary Axis was a tribute to the contradiction inherent in the concept of "revolution": a sharp change of course and a rotation around an axis. As in the current project, the physical and ideological intersections of borders were explored—not without a sense of overcoming—and a coincidence was documented: the "revolutionary axis" ran precisely through Revolution Square. Zubkova also broadcasted the performance live on her social media page, posting real-time photos and geolocation screenshots. This horizontal journey through Moscow was mirrored by a vertical photo stream, which, on the one hand, added a virtual dimension to the cartographic impulse, and on the other hand, served as (alongside video) a tool for self-archiving.
The element of self-archiving also drives and organizes False Sun. The Catcher, recording the path and branching intuitions, layering them onto the coordinates set by the archive. In this sense, the work is naturally reminiscent of Tacita Dean’s practice. One can’t help but recall Girl Stowaway (1994), in which Dean also starts from a document—a found photograph of a girl who stowed away on a ship from Australia to England in the 1920s. Dean’s investigation incorporates her own search, thereby inserting herself into the archive. At the corresponding exhibition, she amusingly includes false coincidences, like David Bowie’s record The Jean Genie (an homage to Jean Genet, whose name is homonymous with the girl’s) and the cover of Genet’s own book Deathwatch. Dean was one of the first in the 1990s to actively explore new ways of creating and working with archives, in some sense materializing what Fredric Jameson called "cognitive mapping"—not simply presenting the archive, but revealing the ideologically (politically, culturally) conditioned neural specificity of our relationship with the archive and data in a broader sense. In this context, Zubkova’s sequence of images without captions (only numbered) also represents both the path and the second memory most of us now possess—the smartphone’s photo cloud.
Zubkova’s journey is not just a chain of coincidences establishing (within the chronotope initiated by Kursanov’s archive) ideological connections between eras and corners of the European continent through the prism of individual, technically mediated cognitive possibilities. False Sun. Catcher is built on a purposeless teleology (the oxymoron is intentional): attempts to capture a sunset. However, the sunset, in my opinion, is not a metaphor for the "decline of Europe" or any of the hundreds of meanings attributed to it in poetry. Rather, if one were to choose a literary device, it would be a metonym for poetry itself—a purposeless poetic gesture, valuable in and of itself. False Sun refers not only to the optical effect that creates the illusion of a doubled sun in the sky, but also to the impossibility of capturing the sun on camera. The time indicated by the app in the border locations selected by Zubkova constantly misleads her. On four screens arranged diagonally to each other (so that they don’t block one another’s light), static videos display unsuccessful attempts to film the sunset, including one shot from a mine that resembles Richter’s abstract animation. In other words, dissonance here represents the poetic, which, being tragic, is dissonant by nature (we can recall the desynchronization of Romeo and Juliet at the end of Shakespeare’s play, or Aegeus’s suicide after seeing Theseus’s ship with black sails on the horizon, mistaking it for doom).
Hanna Zubkova, "False Sun. The Catcher." Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2023. Installation view. Photo by Alexey Naroditsky. Courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
Zubkova’s project balances on the boundary between utopia and tragedy. This can be understood not only as the collapse of projects in the modern world reminiscent of the Renaissance ideas of Tommaso Campanella but also as the eternal tension between knowledge/philosophy and poetry, a theme often problematized in discussions of "artistic research." What role does the poetic/tragic play in this research journey? In my view, it interrupts the flow of information, providing cohesion and form while simultaneously granting access to formlessness. Or, in Simon O’Sullivan’s words, it offers a productive encounter with chaos.
In any case, Hanna Zubkova’s latest iteration of her work is notable for the precise interconnection between subject, methodology, and (interim) result, all of which are conditioned by contemporary socio-material circumstances—a quality I consider essential in artistic research. Her methods can indeed be described as cartography and journeying (the artist humbly, not without self-criticism, calls herself a "tourist"). At the same time, her medium (in the sense that Rosalind Krauss understands it—a post-medium medium) can be described as non-coincidence, which links the subject, method, and material expression of her research. The starting point and driver of her mapping—the archive of the party philosopher Kursanov—is interesting, on the one hand, because it does not align with the specificity of the Garage archive that houses it, which is focused on nonconformists. On the other hand, as a repository of individual theorization of truth tied to institutions of its production (newspapers, journals, conferences), juxtaposed with the results of purposeless artistic impulses (still lifes and reproductions), it initiates a chain of mirrored reflections in how the artist operates and what she uncovers. Coincidence corresponds to utopia (with its tarnished reputation), while non-coincidence, as mentioned earlier, corresponds to tragedy. Yet they are intertwined in such a way that the culmination of her journey—the unfinished kindergarten on the outskirts of Rudnik, a failed promise of the future—both coincides and does not coincide with the promise at the site of failure, where a ray of sunlight is captured by fabric in the absence of the artist.
The pressing question of the relationship between research and truth is resolved by the artist in her own way. Zubkova does not deny or reject the Soviet philosopher’s pursuit of truth, though she exposes the material-ideological foundation on which it grows, tracing its brutal and absurd spatial-temporal distortions. This pursuit of truth, in her case, transforms into a defense of the fragmentary nature of knowledge and experience, and the performative character of the utopian cognitive movement, which requires moments of concentration: poetic purposelessness, tragic rupture, and a nod to chaos.