ON THE FORM OF RESEARCH ART

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I work with performance, multimedia installation, and text. At the same time, the process and approach in my practice can be called research-based. What is interesting here is the "trace." Jannis Kounellis once said that he works with what comes to him. I want to talk about responsiveness to something accidental, about following it. You could say that such work grows and becomes more precise, emerging in response to contexts. In some way, this refers to ready-made: a chance, a coincedence, a discovery—whether it is an object, a phrase, a gesture, a place, a person, or circumstances—leads to an encounter with something that already exists, prompting a response, a dialogue. This process resists a quick and final transformation into an art object, and it is difficult to display. Perhaps that's why I used to think that my research approach wasn't as important to the canon of contemporary art. It seemed like it wasn’t what a "real artist" does. However, now I want to talk about the artist as a conduit—not only as someone who expresses something, but also as someone who juxtaposes, assembles, and presents that juxtaposition. Here, the dimension of history and the archive also arises: by turning to what already exists, the artist engages with the fabric of events themselves, or more precisely, their traces. In part, the research approach implies documentary qualities. This gap between a document and an art object is also intriguing.

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ART AS DOCUMENT

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Art has the potential to become an archive. My work "The Ideology of the Working Class Doesn't Impose Any Boundaries on Love" (2018) was a performance that lasted five months. The research process, which took almost as long, accompanied it. During a residency at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, I was invited to create a project in an empty brothel in the Red Light District. Perhaps the task of making something "artistic" in such an unusual building could be tempting, but I wanted to understand what led to its abandonment. And what brought the artist there?

Hours of conversations with sex workers, clients, police officers, deputies, real estate agents, retired mafia members, studying sources—both public and those not always easily accessible—a series of field studies, gathering materials, constant transgression of my own beliefs and knowledge, all of this remained "off-screen." A certain reality became clear: the brothel was emptied due to a covert struggle for valuable land intended for the development of a "respectable" district, and artists were supposed to give it a more cultural status at first. The working class, for whom this infrastructure was created, ended up being expelled from it. Reflections on the autonomy of the artist within systems of cultural alibis and on the place of the subject within structures of power in general led to the performance: I removed the red velvet curtains from the brothel—the only sign of a once-living space—and sent them on a VIP journey through the most prestigious venues of international cultural dialogue. Each of these places became a document of the disconnect between political gestures and statements and reality. At the Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam, which Medvedev had once opened as a symbol of Russia's belonging to the European family, I stitched together the brothel curtains during the "Classical Beauties" exhibition. I continued at a conference dedicated to Dutch doctors and scientists who died on flight MH17. I took the fabric to Moscow, to the Museum of Architecture, where there was an exhibition-reflection on the phenomenon of Zaryadye Park, built on the site of the Rossiya Hotel. Afterward, I unraveled the fabric in the reception hall of the Dutch embassy in Moscow and then took it back to Amsterdam, where I hung it in its original place.

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I recall Marina Abramović's work in the same district: the Role Exchange performance from 1975, where the artist switched places with a sex worker for a few hours during the opening of her solo exhibition at the Appel gallery. I don't know if Abramović thought about this, but besides the expressive gesture about women's labor and their position in society, she also created a document of the era, capturing the view of the brothel on camera. Filming there is still forbidden, but nothing is said about filming yourself. Thus, her video is a rare archival record of the sex work infrastructure in the 1970s. Since then, and not only there, everything has changed and will continue to change, perhaps beyond recognition. I too leave a document of 2018 alongside the documentation of the performance. In 2022, the Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam was renamed the H'Art Museum.

ARCHIVE AS A POINT OF ENTRY

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"No archive without outside," says Jacques Derrida in his text Mal d’archive (Archive Fever). Reflecting on etymology, he notes that arché is both a beginning and a command: 'commencement and commandment.' Although the archive is less than the past, it is always more than itself. By its very nature, it is characterized by gaps, while simultaneously promising a coherence that, in the end, can never be fully realized. It is the beginning of a certain knowledge but also a trace that refers to a hidden source. The archive always speaks in accordance with circumstances that occurred long after its creation, and it rarely has an intended recipient.

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A few years ago, a friend gave me a small folder with drawings, notes, and clippings. It was the archive of a little-known Soviet philosopher—my friend had discovered it in an apartment he had just bought in Moscow. The owners had no children—we became heirs by chance. The discovery didn’t seem accidental, because if a person can afford to buy an apartment, they are likely part of a social welfare system comparable to their counterpart from the 1970s. At the same time, the discovery was accidental, since I had no intention of finding anything. This relationship raises an ethical question: "What do you do with a past that comes to you, even though you didn’t ask for it?"

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Any attempt to reconstruct a whole from a series of hints always ends up as speculation. I didn’t want to pull a new hero or antihero from the depths, nor did I want to turn the archive into an art object, despite its aesthetic appeal. I am interested in artists who engage with archives or documents in any form—such as The Atlas Group by Walid Raad, the Agency of Singular Investigations, Alexandra Sukhareva, and Anri Sala; I find myself in an unspoken dialogue with them. However, I wanted to clarify my own relationship with the archive, with the past.

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I created a meta-map, based on the dates and places referenced in the documents. With the strange goal of finding the "end of the world" within this chronotope to capture the most magnificent sunset there, I repeatedly failed in this mission. Every time, due to the mismatch between basic perceptions of the world and what was "actually happening," the sunset had already occurred by the time I attempted to witness it—tomorrow or the day after. In the end, I decided to install a transparent fabric on the ruins of a building at the very edge of the north, assuming that one day it would finally witness the sunset. Among the places of the chronotope was also the philosopher’s grave: at the Kuntsevo Cemetery, I found a large black cubic tombstone with the word "TRUTH" engraved in bold letters.

ON "FALSE SUN"

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Overall, the work False Sun is both a self-confident device—a catcher—and a documentation of its failures. The title is not so much an image as a literal model of the "witness dilemma." You become a witness to a "false sun" or "parhelion," but it only exists for the observer in that specific moment and place. It's hard to even say whether it exists on its own or in relation to the sun. And why is it false at all? At what point do I have to trust the witness who was present? Why can't I also believe it's a sign or an angelic effect? I'm interested in how the experience of an event operates in relation to its representation and the established mythologies.

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The archive flickers between experience and myth. In the chronotope of False Sun, the failures took shape in seven chapters, each corresponding to one of the myths I managed to formulate: about origins, borders, the grandeur of the city, the North, the end of the world, and the history. For example, the archive leads me to the myth of white antiquity. Today we know for certain that marble statues and architecture were originally colored. Both at the Paris Academy of Fine Arts and the Pushkin Museum, as well as in most peripheral museums, only plaster copies are kept. This reproduction technology allowed the canon to spread in its white form and be marketed simultaneously. Even though there were articles in the 18th and 19th centuries that mentioned the presence of pigment on original Greek statues, they drowned in the hyper-narrative of the white Greece myth. Reflecting on the canon, I decided to transfer the philosopher's archive to the archive of the contemporary art museum. The archive of a Marxist philosopher, a Soviet bureaucrat, ends up among the collections of non-conformists. In the dates of the archive, we see that until 1937 he drew—perhaps an alternative version of art history was cut short?

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NOTES

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(1) Ekaterina Vasilyeva (b. 1983) — since graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2012, she has been engaged in performative practices.  
(2) The program includes artists working with the museum’s archival collection and organizing an exhibition at the Garage site, dedicated to the results of their research.  
(3) Chronotope — the interconnectedness of spatial and temporal coordinates, a term popularized in the humanities by Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975).  
(4) Paros — a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, where two fragments of a marble tablet, the so-called Parian Chronicle, were found. It contains ancient Greek chronology from 895 to 299 BCE. According to Pliny, the purest marble for creating statues was quarried here.  
(5) Jannis Kounellis — an Italian artist of Greek origin, one of the founders and main representatives of Arte Povera.  
(6) Ready-made — a concept introduced by Marcel Duchamp in 1913. Broadly speaking, it refers to the transfer of an everyday object from its usual context into an artistic one.  
(7) "The Ideology of the Working Class Doesn't Impose Any Boundaries On Love" — a phrase from Alexandra Kollontai's article "Let the Winged Eros Soar! A Letter to Working Youth" (1923). 
(8) Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) — a French philosopher who, in his book Archive Fever (1995), explores the essence and function of the archive through the Freudian lens of the death drive.