Approaching the Brink Manifesta 10 and the Standoff Over Crimea

Approaching the Brink Manifesta 10 and the Standoff over Crimea

Agnieszka Gratza

Pavel Braila, Railway Catering at Vitebsk Station and The Golden Snow of Sochi on Palace Square; Kristina Norman, Souvenir on Palace Square; commissioned as part of the Public Program at Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg, Russia, June 28–October 31, 2014.

n route to St. Petersburg on July 17, I heard the news about the Malaysia Airlines plane shot down in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, claim- Eing 298 lives. The tragic incident colored my brief stay in the city and lent an added urgency to the Public Program of Manifesta 10 that brought me there in the first place. The host city funds the roaming European biennial of contem- porary art, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2014. This seriously limited the organizers of the main event—led by veteran curator Kasper König—in their ability to voice criticism over Russia’s role in the 2014 Crimean crisis. As the conflict culminating in the annexation of Crimea in March escalated, the organizers were taken to task for their lack of resolve, amid calls to boycott the event.

IN THE AGE OF GEOPOLITCS: MANIFESTA’S PUBLIC PROGRAM It fell to the somewhat peripheral yet vital Public Program to “respond to the current social-political circumstances, its conflicts and complexities, and the place of art within them.”1 Speaking on the very evening of the plane crash on a panel alongside Russian artists and provocateurs Afrika (Sergei Bugaev) and Pavel Pepperstein at the Anna Nova Gallery, Public Program curator Joanna Warsza bemoaned the lack of discussion surrounding the events in the Ukraine: “It’s business as usual,” she pointed out. No stranger to controversy herself, Warsza was, together with the notorious Russian art group Voina, part of artist Artur Zmijewski’sÆ curatorial team for the unpopular 7th Berlin Biennale in 2012, which, to their credit, did provoke debate.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00297 by guest on 26 September 2021 Facilitating discussion and encouraging the exchange of ideas under politically fraught circumstances is what the Berlin-based Polish curator set out to do in the context of Manifesta 10. As Warsza explained that evening, she felt strongly that the political thing was to carry on, even though she shared some of the reserva- tions made public by Chto Delat?. This locally-based artist collective withdrew their participation from Manifesta 10 in March, after the foundation announced its decision not to cancel or postpone the event, as had been the case with the second Kiev Biennale earlier that year (postponed until 2015); the public program of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, annulled in the wake of the Gezi Park Protests; or indeed Manifesta 6 in Nicosia, Cyprus, which was called off three months prior to the planned opening in 2006.

Designed to foster a sense of collectivity in a place where it is viewed with some suspicion, the context-responsive commissions, time-based events, performances, talks, and discussions staged in public spaces across the city over the biennial’s four-month duration as part of Manifesta’s Public Program, could be viewed as an exercise in “soft power.” Joseph Nye’s influential concept, which in international affairs designates the power to co-opt rather than coerce through cultural and economic clout, as opposed to military might or sanctions, appears in the title of Bucharest-based artist Alexandra Pirici’s Soft Power: Sculptural Additions to Petersburg Monuments (2014)—one of ten projects specifically commissioned for the Public Program.

A counterpoint to the main exhibition, showcasing the work of international artists from anywhere and nowhere, Warsza’s Public Program had a resolutely Eastern European focus. Unlike König’s largely unchanging exhibition, spread across the Winter Palace and the General Staff Building of the Hermitage, the more dynamic Public Program availed itself of various picturesque venues, historic monuments, and public spaces dotted around the city, starting with St. Petersburg’s Vitebsk Station. Inaugurated in 1837, making it Russia’s oldest railway station, the romantic building—with its lavishly decorated Art Nouveau interior, grand staircase, and ornate piano hall—acted as a hub for the Public Program.

More than that, Vitebsk train station’s destination board, indicating daily depar- tures to cities on Russia’s Western periphery—in Central Europe, the Baltic States, Ukraine and Belarus—lay behind the seductive curatorial concept Warsza came up with for the Public Program. Barring one or two exceptions, notably Ragnar Kjartansson, Warsza decided to invite artists who hail from cities that can be reached by train from Vitebsk railway station: Lado Darakhvelidze from Tbilisi, Deimantas Narkevicius from Vilnius, Kristina Norman from Tallinn, Alexan- dra Pirici from Bucharest, Alevtina Kakhidze from Kiev, and Pavel Braila from Chisina* u.¨ These cities are, as Warsza put it in a video introducing the public

72  PAJ 112

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00297 by guest on 26 September 2021 Top: Kristina Norman, Souvenir. Photo: Zagidullin Rustam. © Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg, Russia. Bottom: Alexandra Pirici, Soft Power. Photo: Anna Gruzdeva. © Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg, Russia.

GRATZA / Approaching the Brink  73

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00297 by guest on 26 September 2021 program, at once geopolitically far away and yet close by—close enough, in any case, to be accessible by train.

OF FRIENDSHIP, OR RAILWAY CATERING Staged inside the beautifully restored Jugendstil piano hall, all mirrors, wooden fittings, and painted panels, Pavel Braila’s Railway Catering “Prietenia” (2014) rested on an elaborate fiction. Prietenia, meaning “friendship” in Romanian, is the name of the overnight sleeper train that arrives into Vitebsk Station from Chisina* u,¨ the capital of Moldova, every day around noon. For Railway Catering . . . Braila got his mother and other relatives to prepare traditional Moldovan dishes, the idea being that these (along with some Moldovan wine) would make their way from Chisina* u¨ to St. Petersburg on the sleeper train, using the restaurant car’s catering facilities.

At 11:56 in the morning, a small group of us gathered on the platform and watched the sleeper train Prietenia pull into the station. Does it matter that the food that was meant to have arrived on the train was actually prepared locally in a St. Petersburg restaurant, rather than by Braila’s relatives in his hometown? Be that as it may, appearances were kept up. The train did arrive on schedule. The artist then made his way with a bag full of provisions across the station and into the piano hall, in which an expectant crowd was gathered.

Inside the lavish interior of the piano hall that used to be a waiting room for first-class passengers, a table had been laid out and women in fetching colorful headscarves that could pass as Moldovan dress were standing behind it, ready to serve the food. A speech or two later, we were feasting on delicious placinte cakes stuffed with cabbage and carrots, as well as sermale cabbage rolls, served warm and washed down with red Moldovan wine (which may have actually arrived on the “Prietenia” train). As if to dispel any lingering doubts as to the food’s provenance, a video showing the artist’s mother rolling out the placinte dough to the sound of Europop and world music was projected on a loop. Intended for all the senses, the performance went down well with the public.

An older work by the Chisina* u-based¨ artist, Eurolines Catering or Homesick Cuisine (2006), anticipated the Manifesta 10 commission and explored similar themes, albeit using a different mode of transport. It too involved the preparation of typical dishes from Braila’s hometown, subjected to a nomadic regime on a trans- European bus journey. For Braila, whose parents and relatives studied in Russia, food is a way of keeping the vital connection with one’s homeland. Bringing and sending food parcels to Russia, often on the train, was common during the Soviet era, when Moldova was a major supplier of fruit, vegetables, and meat.

74  PAJ 112

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00297 by guest on 26 September 2021 Railway Catering “Prietenia” could not have been more timely. Braila’s performance took place on July 19 as a temporary ban on imports of all plant products from the Republic of Moldova—including those transported in luggage and hand- luggage—was about to come into effect on July 21. This “protective measure” was made in response to the country’s perceived drifting into the sphere of European influence. Two days later, Braila’s piece would have been effectively illegal. As it was, the titular “Prietenia” (“Friendship”) took on an ironic ring.

And yet, as far as the artist is concerned, people will maintain the connection to their country through food, ban or no ban. In this respect, Braila’s piece resonated with the Georgian artist Lado Darakhvelidze’s commission, Transformers Peters- burg (2014), which quite literally mapped out St. Petersburg’s fruit and vegetable markets, from the wholesale markets to the small street markets, charting where their produce came from in the former Soviet republics and at the same time celebrating the resourcefulness of the Caucasian and Central Asian immigrants selling them, in spite of precarious work and living conditions.

WINTER’S TALES: CHRISTMAS TREES AND GOLDEN SNOW No single work commissioned for the Public Program had more incendiary potential than Kristina Norman’s sculptural installation Souvenir and the accompanying video titled Iron Arch (both 2014). In the wake of the fatal shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines plane flying over eastern Ukraine, which marked a new low in Russia-Ukraine relations, the gesture of installing in the midst of Palace Square a Christmas tree that openly alluded to the one erected in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (“Independence Square”) in Kiev on the eve of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution took on a new meaning.

This was not lost on the Hermitage’s director Mikhail Piotrovsky, who, two days after Souvenir had been unveiled on July 20, issued a statement warning that “disturbances can be borne out of innocent entertainments.” But the public sculpture, if it stimulated debate on social media, did not result in any disturbances or protests in a square that had witnessed more than its share of political turmoil and bloodshed. Neither is that something to which the artist had aspired. In an interview with Andreas Trossek, Norman voiced her views on the subject: “I do not think the aim of an art event should be organizing revolutions. If there is no potential for revolution in the society, no artist or biennale can instigate it.”

The full implications of Souvenir—a term usually referring to a smaller version of the thing itself that one brings back from travels—as a piece of Maidan surrepti- tiously brought into Palace Square become apparent when watching Norman’s video Iron Arch (2014). On a visit to St. Petersburg, Norman was struck by the

GRATZA / Approaching the Brink  75

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00297 by guest on 26 September 2021 Top: Pavel Braila, Railway Catering “Prietenia.” Bottom: Pavel Braila, The Golden Snow of Sochi. Photos: Zagidullin Rustam. © Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg, Russia.

76  PAJ 112

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00297 by guest on 26 September 2021 visual parallels between the two main squares, both of which are organized around a central column, have a prominent arch in their midst, and a national art museum among their notable buildings. The video was her attempt to make their topographies overlap by grafting an imaginary Maidan onto Palace Square. Maidan is channeled through the sensibility of Kiev-based Alevtina Kakhidze, one of the artists commissioned to make new work for Manifesta’s Public Pro- gram. Kakhidze, who witnessed the public protests of Maidan first hand, gives a tour of the phantom square of her memories by drawing analogies with her immediate surroundings in the deserted Palace Square, where Norman films her walking at dawn.

On its own, the skeletal green metallic structure, etched out against the green- azure exterior of the baroque Winter Palace housing the Hermitage Museum’s collection, was something of a riddle. To overcome bureaucratic hurdles, Warsza had presented the project as a “winter themed sculpture in front of the Winter Palace.” Appended to the tree, a notice penned by the artist explicitly alluded to the “escalating conflict, growing distrust and aggression between Russia and Ukraine,” which turned a tree ordinarily associated with family gatherings, friendship, and love into “a symbol that calls for a cease fire and peaceful negotiation.”

The sheer oddity of a Christmas tree—erected in front of the Winter Palace, admittedly, but at the height of summer—was matched by that of Braila’s The Golden Snow of Sochi (2014). Scheduled to take place shortly after the official unveiling of Souvenir, the performance unfolded against the backdrop of Norman’s Christmas tree. Braila was keen, in fact, to stress the connection between the two “winter-themed” artworks, likening his metaphorical “barricade of snow” to those of Maidan Nezalezhnosti and pointing out that the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi coincided with the events in Kiev.

Billed as a “midsummer action painting outside of the Winter Palace,” the piece was provisionally titled Cold Painting. But the name given to the installation housed in the General Staff Building, the Public Program’s headquarters, stuck. In its static version, The Golden Snow of Sochi consisted of a mini-fridge containing glass pots labeled with the Olympic rings and filled with twenty liters of natural snow brought from Sochi—if we are to believe the artist, that is. The ninety-eight pots stood for the ninety-eight sets of medals that had been won in as many competitions at the Sochi Winter Olympics, in which the host nation topped the medal table.

A large table, supported on wooden trestle legs, had been set up in the middle of Palace Square in preparation for Braila’s performance. Its reflective golden surface kept with the gleaming cupolas and gilded details of the buildings and

GRATZA / Approaching the Brink  77

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00297 by guest on 26 September 2021 monuments in and around the city’s main square. After what seemed like a long wait, with nowhere to seek shelter from the blazing sun, a convoy of four black Mercedes sedans drove across the square and pulled to a stop by the table. Four young men sporting suits, shades, and white gloves in a parody of the slick dress code favored by Russia’s political leaders, stepped out, opened the rear doors of the largest vehicle containing bags of refrigerated snow, and proceeded to discharge their contents onto the golden table. Against the pale gold surface of the table, the “Sochi” snow had momentarily turned to gold. A snowball fight broke out, spontaneously, in which young and old took part, until the last of the snow had melted away.

NOTES 1. As stated on the Manifesta 10 website, see: .

AGNIESZKA GRATZA is a writer living in London. Her written work often stems from live art and performance. She has collected dreams during an artist residency at the Gershwin Hotel in New York, staged tableaux vivants of the Annunciation, and made a series of edible artworks using saffron.

78  PAJ 112

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00297 by guest on 26 September 2021