19/01/2015 Dagestani Artist Taus Makhacheva Maps Her Home, Heritage and History | BLOUIN ARTINFO
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Dagestani Artist Taus Makhacheva Maps Her Home, Heritage and History BBYY AANNANNA KATS,KATS ,MODERN MODERN PAINTERS PAINTER |S JANUARY | JANUA 18,RY 120158, 2015
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A still from Gamsutl, 2012. (Courtesy of Taus Makhacheva)
Unlike the Christopher Wool and Sigmar Polke pieces lining booths at the Cosmoscow art fair, Taus Makhacheva’s contri- bution to the September 2014 event in Moscow was neither bought nor sold but, rather, devoured. Commissioned by the fair’s directors to create a piece for the opening dinner, the Moscow-and Makhachkala-based artist designed (to scale) a monumental cake shaped like the Russian Federation, circa 2013; its chocolate-sponge core was topped with regions, autonomous republics, and land borders outlined in frosting. Guests — many of them prominent members of Russia’s art world elite — divided the country into pieces and ate it up with gleeful irony. Earlier in 2014, Makhacheva staged another pastry performance, during the Friction Festival in Uppsala, Sweden. Presenting a cake of the Caucasus and the Caspian sea — a replica of the torte supposedly offered to Hitler by his generals when he made plans to conquer the oil-rich shores during World War II — the emerging artist cut up and served viewers slices of the provincial region that she is now poised to represent internationally. http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1073186/dagestaniartisttausmakhachevamapsherhomeheritageand 1/4 By articulating, exaggerating, and deconstructing relationships of individual parts to the whole, Makhacheva is putting her native Dagestan on the map. An autonomous republic on the Caspian coast in the north Caucasus mountains, Dagestan is boundaries to address immaterial borders throughout the area, which cannot be demarcated with a simple line: Divides the most ethnically and linguistically diverse region in Russia. Makhacheva’s multidisciplinary practice fixes on geopolitical between cultures, generations, humans, and their various body parts figure prominently in her effort to generate critical localizedreflection oeuvre. on local identity in Dagestan. After group shows in Venice, London, Dubai, Moscow, and beyond, Makhacheva returns to the Uppsala Konstmuseum this month with a solo show that testifies to the increasingly global success of her Born in Moscow in 1983 to an ethnic Avar family, Makhacheva spent her childhood between the Russian capital and Makhachkala, its counterpart in Dagestan. Her grandfather, Rasul Gamzatov, was the southerly republic’s most famous poet and a household name across the soviet Union — meanwhile, her grandmother was a museum director and her mother an art historian — but Makhacheva felt no predisposition toward creative practice as a child. Though she initially pursued an object,”economics her degree thesis projectin Moscow, of puppets she moved based to onLondon Dagestani to study decorative photography arts, assembled at Goldsmiths, in a street-theater University of London,performance. earning her BA in fine arts in 2007. She returned to London for her MFA at the royal College of Art, graduating in 2013 with “Way of an Makhacheva’s layered identity — her Russian citizenship, Western education, Dagestani extraction, and Avar heritage — al- lows the artist to act simultaneously as insider and outsider, participant and observer. Her patent affection and sympathy for Dagestan are compounded by a critical attitude toward the region; Makhacheva seeks to improve, not disparage, its people a second glance at themselves,” she explains. cultural life. “I’m hoping not just to represent Dagestan for the outside but to represent it inside as well. I want to provide Her recent work is an exercise in orienteering through Dagestani landscapes. Makhacheva documents the area’s moun- - eigners to the little-known society. The Caucasus Mountains serve as a backdrop for the 2012 video Gamsutl, set in an tains,abandoned people, Avarian and habits, mountaintop imploring village, locals an to ancientreflect on settlement the balance falling of tradition into decay and where progress a lone while man, also clad introducing in black, performs for a ritual dance amid the former settlement’s crumbling stone. His severe, studied movements appear to be vestiges of the tosame break tradition out suddenly that wrought are a kind the now-destroyedof experiment, anticipatingvillage. As German the point writer at which W.G. Sebaldwe shall asked drop in out his of 1999 what essay we have “Air thought War and forLiterature,” so long to “is be destruction our autonomous not irrefutable history and proof back that into the the catastrophes history of nature?” which develop, Gamsutl so simply to speak, depicts in our the hands natural and beauty seem and collective trauma that ensue with such destruction — overgrown, if picturesque, ruins remain where there was once a flourishing Avar community. carved from molds of noses of the artist’s relatives and friends, play on the Avar language, in which the same word means Makhacheva’s 2013 sculpture series “landscape” expands on the theme. Wooden noses arranged like a mountain range, noses, Makhacheva’s piece celebrates both the human and the topographic landscapes of the region. The series also includesboth “mountain” smaller noses,and “nose.” alluding referencing to an increasingly the stereotype popular in Russia trend: Rhinoplasty.that national With peoples many of thelocal north youths Caucasus eager to have alter large their physical features for the sake of foreign standards of beauty, will traditional culture also be diluted or sacrificed altogether to outside influences? - tive,“Dagestan critical is method facing multiple for delineating pathways,” the tenetsMakhacheva of a distinctly explains. local “There’s contemporary this brand identity. of Islam And that’s while not Makhacheva particularly Dagestani,is quick to there’s this sort of post-soviet secular society, but I think our way should be somewhere in the middle.” Art offers a reflec plan to open an institute of contemporary art in Makhachkala are part and parcel of a commitment to generating discus- sionnote aboutthat she the hasn’t past, foundpresent, the and answer, future either of the — region. “I don’t Uppsala think I ishave likewise a solution,” essential she saysto that — project:her shows By inaddressing Dagestan local and her questions of tradition, culture, and identity preservation in international settings, Makhacheva offers a reminder that their relevance is, in fact, universal.
A version of this article appears in the January 2015 issue of Modern Painters.