Contemporary feminist art in Russia: tensions, contexts, and relations

Abstract

From the editors
In contrast to the diffculties Gender Studies has encountered
in post-socialist academia, discussed extensively in this volume,
contemporary art in Eastern Europe can seem to have emerged
as a rather bright and lively alternative. For it is a field in which
feminist and gender-oriented art, ideas, artists, activists and curators
have had a profound, albeit varied and sometimes explosive,
influence. Although not without conflicts, scandals and gendered
power hierarchies, contemporary art across the region in the period
since the fall of communism has developed as a field where
the intersectionality between the personal and politics, between
ideas, affect and aesthetics, between the body, subjectivity and
technology, or between western influence and local specificity have
all been energetically explored and exhibited. The varieties and
commonalities in how this has occurred have been documented
in such art/research projects as Gender-Check: Femininity and
Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (http://gender-check.
erstestiftung.net).
This is not to suggest contemporary art as a remedy for all
that is wrong in post-socialist academia. Questions about the facilitating
role of western funding and of the ambivalent impact the region go at least as deep as they do with regard to gender studies. There are farreaching
questions to be asked when institutions of contemporary art emerge as hotbeds
of radical political ideas at a moment when this art has little meaningful impact
on societies (outside the gender or religious taboo-related scandals through which a
wider public generally now becomes excited about contemporary art). Moreover, the
intersection between gender activism and contemporary art is an area where meaningful
protest is, as Nadia Plungian comments, or as examples such as Femen or Pussy
Riot illustrate, often diffcult to distinguish from a gesture of attention seeking.
It was in order to gauge something of the specificity of how gender studies emerges
in, and in relation to, the field of contemporary art, that we invited Nadia Plungian to
discuss the connections and conflicts between gender studies and art in the specific
context of the Russian art field. This single interview by no means offers a full picture
of the relations between art and gender across the region, but we hope that the range
of issues Nadia touches on open up interesting avenues for reflection on the development
of art and gender studies in the region. The interview facilitates a clearer view
of what connects and distinguishes these inter-connected but distinct fields, and how
both are implicated in and divorced from the societies which they reflect and on which
they seek to impact. It is in keeping with the tone of the volume as a whole that the
interview enables a critical retrospective reflection on what has been achieved, and offers
pointers for potential ways forward.