Industry of Images and the Image of the Industrial: Practices of Conceiving Industrial Urban Space in Contemporary Art

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

In the article the author analyses theoretical approaches to
the phenomena of industrial study and analysis of practices of
working with industrial space that determines self-identiFIcation
and image-creating process in a city. Industry played the leading
role in the Soviet economic system, industrial discourse was allabsorbing
in Soviet culture and factory space was almost sacral.
A lot of !lms, songs, TV-reports, performances were devoted to
industrialization, power of industry, workers and their heroism.
Being sacral for the Soviet era, today the industrial space have
become Terra incognita, a heroic image of working men and industry
have changed into a negative image, Russia is associated
with an idle factory and romantic and nostalgic attitude to industrial
culture and spatiality is not typical for contemporary culture
and for citizens.
Post-soviet city space tends to be a space of post-fordism,
the industrial areas are hidden by the city maps and ejected from
post-soviet citizens’ mental maps. Currently there is an increasing
interest to the industrial culture revealed in different ways of
working with industrial space: from revitalization to deindustrialization,
from functional renewal to rethinking of cultural sense
of industry. Art practices of working with industrial areas became
the subject of the analysis in this article. The contemporary art’s
meditations and representations on industry and its place in city
image and city geography are analyzed as a fixation of dichotomy
of industrial/postindustrial and connected contradictions.