May 19, 2022
The Art Corner: ‘The future is the saddest thing’
A conversation with Alisa Gorshenina on imagination, surrealism, ritual and resistance in Russia at war.
Suggested soundtrack: Zhilyir Gudyir by Tylobyrdo
Reflective questions: How do we imagine ourselves beyond imperial and closer to earth? How can art splinter open the cracks of power, and offer windows into necessary but seemingly impossible worlds?
In the West, Russia is regularly understood as synonymous with size: might, vastness, the weight of history, the presence of empire. At the time of writing, the Russian army has re-invaded and occupied Ukraine. Thousands, and likely tens of thousands, of people are estimated to have been killed.
There are no words to hold the horror, or easy answers as to how to stop the Russian army’s violence or repair its origin, steeply rooted in Russian colonialism. But in this immense task, the work and imagination of artists and activists spread across the breadth of the territory understood as ‘Russia’ will be crucial.
Alisa Gorshenina is one of Russia’s most renowned young artists. Her work spans textiles, masks, performance, videoart, lace, collages, photography, and much more. From the village of Yakshina, in the region of the Urals, Alisa currently lives in Nizhny Tagil, a city located just a few kilometers away from the ‘border’ between Europe and Asia.
She is currently facing a legal case by the Russian government for ‘discrediting the army’, after an anti-war performance and action which involved holding a white ribbon with ‘No to War’ written in the Tatar and Chuvash languages.
Her artistic landscape may at first glance feel outlandish, bizarre, uncanny and magical. I wanted to better understand the genesis of this relentless inventiveness. Where did Alisa’s prolific, varied, and interdisciplinary creativity stem from? “I grew up in a small village. My first drawings, simple, childish, arose because I had nothing to do. I didn’t have the entertainment, playgrounds, or cinema city kids had. Art was a way to entertain myself.”
She recalls a childhood memory. “I was 5. I went into my room, grabbed a squared notebook, and started drawing some patterns in the squares. I thought: I will never get tired of this. I realized I could always do this, it could also fill my life with interesting things”.
“I was born in a Russian village, where people live in wooden houses. Around me, I had fields, forests, rivers,” she says. Alisa’s curious and discipline-stretching artistic universe — richly populated by symbols — is inextricable from the rural environment that nourished it. “The richest childhood memories took place in this setting. The family leaving to the fields. My sister and father with the cows, while I chase them across the field. My mother would bring us lunch and we would eat in nature. When the whole village would go haymaking, we sat on carts and would head to another field through the Ural forests. These unique experiences narrate themselves through me. When we left for the city, every summer I would return to my relatives. I was unable to cut this relationship. We never left.”
This ecological sensibility is accompanied by a ritualistic overtone. As Alisa says, “I’ve always had something like a mania for creating rituals, for noticing or giving powers to different things. When I walked to school, I would go through a place with many trees, where there was a large stone protruding from the earth. I began to believe that by standing on this rock I would receive a field of protection. Every day I would do this ritual. And over the years, as I walked by, the stone kept sinking into the earth. When we moved from this neighborhood, I wanted to step on this rock a final time; there was only a small fragment left. I found this symbolic — there were many strange stories like this in my life.”
One remarkable part of Alisa’s work is its exploration, acknowledgement and revalidation of Russia’s plurinational nature. Russia is home to hundreds of ethnic groups, Indigenous communities and syncretic cultures. Yet through processes of Russification and Sovietization — land-grabbing, colonialism, deportations and cultural erasure — this diversity and freedom of each group has been actively suppressed and repressed. The Russian empire has been forged through a process of what historian Alexander Etkind calls ‘internal colonisation’.
“In the 5th grade, we had a subject focused on ‘History of the Ural’.” she says, It’s pretty rare for students in a Russian school to be told about the specificity of their own place and tell its own story. Our teacher never hid that there were captures of territories. She told us about the fact that (ethnic) Russians colonised this place…This heavy history, which is across the whole country and all of its coloniser histories, she openly recounted it.’
Family discoveries would push her further towards the theme of national identity.
‘In our family we never knew who my grandfather was. My grandmother did not tell anything about him; it was a mystery, a secret. This hurt me — it felt like a trauma, that she didn’t tell me who he was. A year before her death, she somehow told my mother who he was — she said his name was ‘Gazizov Aiyrat Shakurovich…and he lives in Bashkortostan.”
Alisa tells me that in 2016, her family found him and had a phone conversation. This started her project called ‘Granddaughter of Tamerlan’.
Alisa’s protective principles around her work have put her at odds with a mainstream cultural scene in Russia that often exhibits an extractive, hyper-commercial attitude to artwork.
This project was inspired by Alisa’s fantasties around the possibilities, given her Turkic roots, that she could be the distant relative of Tamerlan, the legendary Turko-Mongol leader. But as Alisa explains, in reality,
‘this project is about my national identity, about the fact that I, to say it crudely, represent a Russia, where many diverse peoples intersect and connect. After a DNA test, I found out I only have 4% Bashkir identity, I can’t call myself Bashkir. I found though I have Komi, Volga-Ural Tatar, Saami, Bashkir, Mari roots: typical of the Urals. A large percentage too was Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian; these groups have very similar DNA.’
This hybridity, as Alisa reflects, leads to messy historical realizations and relationships to the past.
‘It turns out I have the blood of those who grabbed and captured these local lands, and I am also of those who lived here from the beginning…Knowing that I am descended from aggressors and the aggressed,” she tells me, “it’s important for me to somehow come to terms with it internally.”
She defines the fierce intimacy of her creative process as ‘samoiskusstvlenie’ (translatable as self-art, or self-art-ing).
“The philosophy behind my art is this closening between me and the work. I’m always in this intimate contact. It’s very important for me to show the work through me. That’s why I make a lot of masks, costumes, things that you can put on your body. Even if I make some sculptures, I’m still always mutually interacting with them. If I sew a new item, I need to touch it, engage with it as a living thing. These works only work in tandem with me; as soon as they lose that connection, they become things, turning from art into decoration.’
Alisa’s protective principles around her work have put her at odds with a mainstream cultural scene in Russia that often exhibits an extractive, hyper-commercial attitude to artwork. She has rejected multiple opportunities to showcase her work, or lend embroideries to models or photographers, out of a fear of breaching that intimacy. Just like her unshakeable relationship to the landscapes of her childhood, she relates similarly to her pieces; they are embodied memories, formed in collaboration with her body at that time.
“We have a sad reality here in Russia…art does not influence the government; if anything it just annoys it.”
“With time I will age”, Alisa says. “My own bodily form won’t be the way it is now. Now, I work with this body and my artwork. Later, I will be changing, I’m already changing. It’s important for me, that over the course of my life, the association between my artworks is between them and me.” To lose them would be losing parts of her.
I ask Alisa about the social and political meaning of art in the Russian context.
‘We have a sad reality here in Russia…art does not influence the government; if anything it just annoys it. We don’t have the power or sway to show through our work how we might be able to live, how things could be better, to present some fantasies on a better future or something like that…We are always existing in parallel, or not even in parallel, but reproached…Now [after the 24th of February] I don’t even know how we’re going to be existing here.’
For Alisa, this relegation forces artists to be self-reliant, building grassroots galleries and collaborations without any state support. As she reflects, ‘I think everything that is good in Russia was done just by ordinary people, local private organisations that don’t work mutually with the government.” I speak to Alisa exactly a month after the beginning of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine. Alisa has been among the Russian artists most outspoken in denouncing the war. When I ask her about the invasion, and the role of art in this moment of Russian history, Alisa reflects: “The saddest thing is the future. Not the present, but the future. I joked on Instagram that soon they’ll ban the colour black, and then they detained a girl for wearing black clothes…We are living in a non-reality, a surrealism. I’m very scared, and I understand that Russian artists, those that morally survive this, will be very strong people.”
Alisa pauses, searching and reaching for the right words, in a time without them. “The world is not ready to hear about our problems because there are realities being faced by people in Ukraine that are far more serious. This is obvious and logical. But nonetheless I still speak about the problems of Russian people; they may be invisible, but they are terrifying. We have a phantom-invisible destruction of the country and culture that is unraveling.”
The invasion of Ukraine has been followed with a severe tightening of repression inside of Russia. As Alisa recounts,
‘People that share their opinion on the war are being fired from museums, galleries, libraries. The scythe has started moving. The heads are flying. I don’t know what is ahead for us as artists in Russia. We are not needed in the country or outside.’
Alisa acknowledges how the repression has filled her with fear, at a time when she doesn’t have a single supported project in Russia. But with clear conviction, she reminds there are priorities above fear. “Look,” she affirms, “everything is cancelled. All institutions are stopped. I see an exit in anti-war art, to create exhibitions or events that will look critically on this situation, but that is still a colossal risk. We have to gather our strengths and show our position through art: that we are ready to resist and continue to resist this system. If we all give up, we won’t have absolutely anything. Through art, I need to share that I’m an artist, I have an opinion, I am against the government, and I am against what is happening. We all have to loudly speak out against this. If you’re an artist do it through your work, if you’re an electrician, do it too through your own work. Everyone, in their own place. I just don’t see how else we can live.’
‘This interview will be published outside Russia. It’s important to say that people like me exist in Russia. I want them to be visible, because the world might think the opposite. Maybe we’re not seen enough. There are many people resisting the system. All those I know share my opinion. There is a schism in society but we exist. We are fighting, we will do what we can.
“I have the means to leave the country, but I’m not, she says”. Making and disseminating anti-war artwork publicly puts Alisa at significant risk. “I’m taking this risk because I think the country needs me, and people like me are needed here. If we all leave, Russia doesn’t have a chance at all for a happy future.”
The future is irredeemably uncertain, especially in times of war and fascism. But the possibilities of eroding empire and its violences, rely on an ability to imagine lives beyond it, and the bravery to enact them. In Alisa’s pieces, surprise is relentless; a forest is interrupted by a throng of dancers in the sky; an abandoned village house opens its eyes to look back at the viewer. In this artistic world, certainties lose their footing. In this time of war, may hope to surprise us.
Thank you for reading this month’s Art Corner! This is a monthly column, and a passion project made a reality by New Media Advocacy Project.
You can follow Alisa’s work on her Instagram page.
