Treating a virus: Russian dissident art in exile4 min read
The DeBalie Arts Centre’s decision to integrate its cafe-restaurant right into its gallery area makes for an interesting experience. Never before had I seen Amsterdam’s trendy art enthusiasts, politely enjoying their lunch and sipping on coffee with Russian state television’s arch-propagandist, Vladimir Solovyev, murmuring in the background about the subjugation of Europe to Russia’s will and the imminent downfall of Western civilisation.
The scene is somewhat unsettling. But, for the Russian dissident artists contributing to the Artists Against the Kremlin exhibition hosted by DeBalie, there’s nothing strange about it at all. For them, it has been too difficult to separate the everyday from the shadow of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the political exile they have been forced into. This infection of everyday life by the Kremlin is reflected in the exhibition’s theme, “VIRUS”, one to which the artists feel their work can serve as an antibody.
In the three and a half years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the nature of Russian protest art has changed somewhat. Vladimir Shalamov, the exhibition’s curator, tells me that wartime Russian protest art was initially angrier and focused on the depravity of specific events in the war, recalling an image of Vladimir Putin eating Ukrainian children. While this anger hasn’t abated, the war’s persistence has meant that they have had to come to terms with its broader impact on everyday life.
Artisterror’s work “Out of Each and Every Iron” consists of banal household objects, such as irons and kettles, with speakers playing Russian propaganda calling for an intensification of war efforts and the death of European civilisation. BFMTH’s “Squint” is simply a blank canvas with the blurred words “THE WAR IS STILL ON”, protesting the political apathy normalising the war by demanding viewers stop and squint to read it. Shalamov argues that this shift to “more philosophical” themes was necessary to make their work more relevant for a broader European audience in the long term, rather than focusing on specific events that, unfortunately, “in a few years nobody will care about”.
Despite being painfully aware of the Kremlin “virus”, these artists are by no means immune to its adverse effects. Protesting injustice in Russia and Ukraine has forced the vast majority of these artists into political exile, an exile which Shalamov believes makes them “victims” of the war. They have continued to protest in exile, but their opposition has had little impact on the political situation in Russia, where the Kremlin has continually strengthened its grip on power.
This situation has, understandably, had a toll on many of the artists, one which the exhibition provides a opportunity to explore. One of the artists exhibited, Daria Apakhonchich, was the first Russian artist to be labelled a “foreign agent” by the government and, as a result, has to send yearly dispatches to the Russian government detailing her activities. Protesting this requirement, Apakhonchich has transformed these dispatches into artwork for the exhibition, depicting her life outside Russia across nine sheets.
It seems odd that a dissident artist would seek to retain contact with a government seeking their arrest, but Apakhonchich tells me that she has repurposed this contact as a “kind of therapy”. Apakhonchich describes it as a kind of “Stockholm syndrome”, one in which she explores her desire to retain contact with her homeland despite her mistreatment by its government.
Recalling the exhibition’s pathological theme, Apakhonchich states that the “cancer” of Putin’s ideology is “also inside of us […] you cannot touch it without being damaged somehow”. By examining her own experience of exile, Apakhonchich points out that her work is a therapeutic “screening” for the Kremlin’s virus, one that enables her to remain emotionally aware of the nature of her fight against the Kremlin.
Given the stringent penalties for accessing dissident content in Russia, however, this exhibition will struggle to reach a domestic Russian audience. According to Shalamov, the artists are aware that they are “making this more for Europeans than for Russians”, estimating that 90% of the exhibition’s visitors were from EU countries. The exhibition’s broad thematic focus is a recognition of this.
In absence of this domestic Russian audience, another audience for much of this art then appears to be the artists themselves. These exhibitions provide a valuable opportunity for them to therapeutically confront their largely overlooked standing in Russian politics, and the trauma of the exile it has entailed.
