2024-01-08 05:07:07
It’s not a hip loft in a chic artists’ district where Austria’s representative at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale is preparing her appearance. The factory area in Vienna-Simmering, where Anna Jermolaewa has had her studio for two years, is located directly on the southeast tangent and has clearly seen better days. But once you find your way past the warehouse of a dealer selling traditional Middle Eastern foods to her workspace, you enter a different world.
Although: It’s not that different. Markets are one of the things that have been a fixed point in the catalog of interests of the artist, who was born in Leningrad (USSR) and has lived in Vienna since 1989, for many years. This is evidenced by her exhibition at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, which runs until April 1st and shows photos from her series “Markets” as well as her video work “back to the silk routes”, in which she traveled to the home of Viennese flea market dealers in 2010 drove to fulfill their wishes. Jermolaewa counts this work as one of her most successful.
“What hardly anyone knows: One of the largest diasporas of Bukharian Jews from Uzbekistan is in Vienna. Many of them have stalls at the flea market here. I told them: I’ll go to Samarkand for you and fulfill your every wish. When I drove, I had a long list of tasks, from visiting the Jewish cemetery or the former home to things I should bring with me. I worked through this list and made a video of it. I showed it on the big screen at Dr. Falafel. The people were seized and cried,” says Jermolaewa during the APA studio visit.
“My wishful thinking is that you can achieve something with art,” she says. That’s why the orange dance, which she organized in a former studio at a singles party she organized and which she showed as a video in 2022 at her big exhibition at the Linz Castle Museum, is one of her absolute favorites: The party resulted in a number of affairs and some long-lasting relationships. These couples are her actual artistic work, the video is just documentation, she grins. She shares the view of the German conceptual artist Hans Haacke, according to which all art is political in itself, but there is also art that is politically committed and tries to intervene in society. Anyone who knows Jermolaewa’s work knows where the artist stands. Not only biographically does she seem to fit ideally into the general theme of the 2024 Art Biennale: “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere”.
“The amazing thing is: When we were selected by a jury from among 37 applications, this topic was not yet known,” says curator Gabriele Spindler. She was also responsible for the large Jermolaewa show in the Linz Castle Museum, the spatial model of which is installed in the studio. You will look in vain for a model of the Hoffmann Pavilion on the Biennale grounds. The duo doesn’t want to reveal much in concrete terms yet. But there will be little intervention in the original space. “It’s great architecture – it’s just not easy to use,” says Spindler and promises “a very logical tour that has a common thread.” Videos, installations, light objects are shown, but also sounds and performative elements are included.
A large number of photos of ballet rehearsals are spread out on a work table. “Rehearsal for Swan Lake” will be the name of Jermolaewa’s central work for Venice. It is proof that the artist has overcome her paralysis following the Russian attack on Ukraine. “I felt like art had lost all relevance. I no longer felt the need to make art. I just wanted to help people directly.” The artist, who fled the Soviet Union as co-founder of the first opposition party and co-editor of a newspaper critical of the government and received political asylum in Austria, has many friends and relatives in Ukraine. For “Rehearsal for Swan Lake” she is working with the Ukrainian ballet dancer and choreographer Oksana Serheieva, who ran a ballet school in Cherkassy and fled to Austria with her family in 2022.
Extensive video material was created during rehearsals in a rented ballet studio in Vienna and is waiting to be edited. What will be seen in Venice should act “like a code” that anyone who experienced the Soviet era can decipher immediately, explains Anna Jermolaewa: “It’s part of a collective cultural memory: when Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’ is in the loop was on Soviet television, everyone knew that something important was happening.” This was the case with the death of party leaders such as Brezhnev and Andropov as well as with the August coup in Moscow in 1991. Rehearsing “Swan Lake” today means getting ready for day X, which means the next upheaval: away from Putin. “I hope we can dance ‘Swan Lake’ in 2024!”
The artist admits that it is difficult to assess how justified this hope is. She also no longer has as many contacts with Russia as she used to. The art scene there has changed radically. Many institutional leaders have been replaced and many artists have fled. But optimism is always better than fatalism. Anna Yermolaewa hopes to have more staying power. Then perhaps it will one day be possible to do long-term works like her “Five Year Plan,” which she began in 1996, in which she films the same escalator in the St. Petersburg subway every five years, or her “Chernobyl Safari,” which began in 2014 to continue taking photos with wildlife cameras in the exclusion zone.
After the Biennale she will move to a new studio. This is between Vienna and Linz, where she has been Professor of Experimental Design at the Art University since 2019. Then the six payphones from the Soviet era come along, which she discovered at an antique dealer in Tallinn and which are now waiting to become part of an installation. She can’t yet say what it will look like, but one thought won’t let her go, she explains with a smile: “In the film ‘The Matrix’, phone booths are the only places where you can leave the Matrix…”
(The interview was conducted by Wolfgang Huber-Lang/APA)
(SERVICE – 60th Venice Biennale, April 20 to November 24, 2024; https://biennalearte.at/de/)
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