dianadamian.com

Chto Delat? The Urgent Need to Struggle

Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

9^th September-24^th October

‘Contemporary art that is produced as a commodity form or a form of entertainment is not art. It is the conveyor belt manufacture of counterfeits and narcotic and the enjoyment of the ‘creative class’ sated with novelty. One of our most vital tasks today is unmaking the current system of ideological control and manipulation of people.’[i]

A female voice (the audioguide) leads me through the exhibition in a pedagogic explanation of the meaning and context of each display and intervention. She’s interrupted by children’s voices breaking the serious tone of the presentation, mocking, playing and mimicking. I hear about socialist realism and collective struggle whilst one of the children screams ‘my country is a democracy, unlike yours’. With giant red veins bleeding into the gallery space, and a series of quotes and murals lining the walls, this is an assault at my senses- a displayed manifesto of political narratives, an alternative space for protest and critical thought.

Chto Delat? is a Russian collective of cultural workers- artists, philosophers, theorists and activists. Their work is concerned with challenging hegemonic models of social, political and cultural thought, questioning the production and reception of knowledge in contemporary culture. Chto Delat? aim to create a platform of intellectual practice. Their values are centred on self-organization, political and critical engagement as well as self-education. The collective produces interventions, performances, critical theory, political activism as well as publications, seminars and discussions. In their first major UK intervention, they co-curate, together with the ICA, a season of ‘Dissent’ that aims to recontextualize the concept of struggle in contemporary society and culture.

With The Urgent Need to Struggle, the ICA gallery is transformed into a confrontational, didactic space. The exhibition presents previous works by members of the collective, as well as key texts and manifestoes, providing an insight into the theoretical lining of the collective. Centred on the publication of a new edition of the collective’s regular Russian-English newspaper, the gallery becomes host for a series of performative interventions that focus on new models of living and learning.

Chto Delat?’s songspiels, filmed performances responding to social or political issues are a perfect example of the collective’s bleeding of theory and activism into artistic practice. In The Tower, they respond to the conflict around the construction of a new skyscraper by Gazprom corporation in the UNESCO protected St Petersburg in a Brechtian filmed performance with song, monologue and woven symbolism. Exploring the apparatus of power in contemporary Russia, the film bases its plot around an imagined conversation between the patrons of the new tower and the people’s responses to its construction. This is a contemporary parable, lined with hyperbole and underpinned by an eerie and captivating atmosphere.

The ICA has a history of engaging with politically active artistic practice. In 2007, it was home for Tino Sehgal’s This Is Success/This is Failure, which explored the gallery as didactic space and questioned the role of the institution in social change. A group of children occupied the entire gallery space in which they played and explained the success or failure of their work to audience members. In May 2010, the ICA Learning Team organized a live weekend called Fantasy Atelier, in which participants were invited to create and explore real and fantasy worlds through play. Yet Chto Delat?’s work is a step in a slightly different direction. There are no representational models, but forums of theatrical interpretation and social response, guided by Brechtian dialectics, Marxist values and other cultural writings from Ranciere, Freire or Deleuze. The collective are not concerned with engaging with utopicmodes of social and civic transformation through play, but through parables, actionism and discussion.

The Urgent Need to Struggle is an encounter with a network of political projects. It is highly reminiscent of its social origins- a Russia in social, political and cultural transformation, a post-Peterstroika site for ideological turmoil. Eastern Europe is certainly a site for collective activism, with artist groups such as Slovenia’s NSK, for example. In the context of the ICA, the work of the collective become immediately nomadic and historicized, lined with contemporary debates and capitalist critique- fruitful, utopic and engaging critical polemics- but loses concrete models of analysis and cultural operation.

The most powerful element of The Need to Struggle is its reconfiguration of public space as a zone for civic, political and cultural transformation and site for contestation. In a relational, networked society, it is crucial to question the position of dogma and the manifestations of an ideological apparatus. At a time of political transition and financial turmoil, it’s more relevant than ever to question the folds of cultural society, looking at artistic models of production of knowledge.

---

[i] A Declaration on Politics, Knowledge and Art, on the fifth anniversary of the Chto Delat? work group

Tagged: Exhibitions, ICA