Adieu, Utopia
Interview with Diana U
Victoria Kravtsova
23rd July 2020
This interview is a glimpse of Diana U's personal journey through her complex experience of being simultaneously a curator, artist and researcher based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She shares with us her concerns and feelings of affinity toward local present-day issues, which she finds extremely relevant to tackle, that span from feminism to colonial relations. While reflecting on her ways of dealing with them, she emphasizes the approach of looking at the local and incorporating practice-based as opposed to mere theory-based methods of inquiry.
Victoria Kravtsova
As an artist and curator, you combine different approaches and modes of thinking in your practice. How would you define your curatorial practice?
Diana U
It is not an easy question, and to answer it is even more challenging. My response always varies, because there are permanent internal work, transformations and constant questions to myself that relate to the practical modes of work, my mental and emotional reflections of the practice.
Being an artist, curator, and researcher I formulate my approach as constant conceptually developing exploration, focusing on an intelligible, emotional, body experience that I get during the project and search for ways for its sensual, mostly visual, representation. There is a combination of long-term research, narrative-visual linear or non-linear storytelling, and public events (mostly exhibition or installation-based). It is our collective approach either because I am part of it, and each of us put their piece into the whole project.
For now, I am exploring my experience of being a woman, cultural actor with sociological education and experience of female socialization in concrete space and time from the political perspective. I look for ways to develop my practice based on my interests in artistic research, memory studies, feminism, female art, and activist history of Kyrgyzstan, experimental exhibition and publications.
Victoria Kravtsova
How does your feministic vision assist with a way you conceptualize your ideas?
Diana U
Feminism was one of the first concepts with the help of which I began to look at the world more critically. Through feminism, I acquired the skill of reflexivity. I was emancipated by the combination of feminism and contemporary art.
Victoria Kravtsova
Do you identify with any particular current of feminism?
Diana U
No. I am in a constant search. For me, feminism was always linked to leftist politics. But until today I am in a complicated relationship with my leftness, I feel generally uncomfortable with the division into left, right and all that, because this self-dissection cuts out and neglects other important parts of your wholeness, which I want to keep in communication and self-perception. Perhaps in the future, something will happen that will help us leave these narrow categories. I know it is a utopia, and I know I will have to continue living within a capitalist system in any case. Communism might be a good option for utopian visions, but it is not suitable for this life. These days it can only cause schizophrenia. Also, leftist organizations can be very sexist. Although I can’t wrap my head around the fact that, for instance, such a thing as right-wing feminism can exist.
Victoria Kravtsova
As with any theoretical concept, there is a need to analyze it through the lens of the locality. Do you think that the same applies to feminist ideas?
Diana U
You can be familiar with all these currents and understand that this is a Western category, therefore in the local context you have to learn to work with it…not totally rejecting it as something foreign, but rather adapting it to the conditions of the society in which you live. Personally, I have only recently understood that feminism is an ideology. The feminist lens gives you an opportunity to live with less feeling of fragility towards the world, as you understand that it is not solely your individual struggle, it is a dynamic and intertwined system of different lines. It is an instrument that helps you to live in a patriarchal situation.
Also, after we as an art collective had a chance to work on projects in the regions there is a new line of thought I live with. A new point of self-reflection came from speaking to those we generally do not address, like women from the local committee of health who said “sure, you will go now and forget everything”. You understand that in art as well as in feminism your positions derive from theory and your experience of being a Bishkek urban woman who works in the cultural sector for the last 10 years. You begin reflecting on your position, learning more about your own country, advancing your sensitivity and recognition of self in more complex local contemporaneity.
Victoria Kravtsova
From the historical point of view, such localization of liberating ideas wasn’t always possible due to the complex colonial relations between the center and the periphery. How do you think this applies to Kyrgyzstan and feminist ideas you are currently concerned with?
Diana U
The first exhibition I co-curated with my female friends-colleagues revolved around ideas of feminism Art and Emancipation: O. Manuilova and Her Contemporaries about the period of emancipation in the 1920s-30s and representation of women as active society actors later in works of soviet female artists Olga Manuilova and Lydia Ilyina in Kyrgyzstani art history. I invested a lot into this project, and the text I wrote for it and after is still crucial for myself.
I understand how complex, how repressive the soviet legacy was. But I also acknowledge that what I do now as an artist is partly due to that legacy. Russia was the centre, it saw itself as one, it engaged in enlightening and creating infrastructure here, and through this, a lot of Western forms have come – and art as well. Soviet art was different, but its form and medium were still Western.
Victoria Kravtsova
And what kind of coloniality do you feel today?
Diana U
There is self-colonization that happens through Western art, for instance, and references to the actual Western processes and practices. When referring to myself as a contemporary artist, I put myself into a situation where I always try to get rid of this instant looking back on the West, but the language and the categories (contemporary art) I refer to admittedly derive from there (from the west). Regularly we meet people who openly call themselves ‘white’ and say that they have come to teach us. The books we read are all written by Western authors. Unfortunately, those texts will never be able to convey our experiences, including the entire range of post-Soviet studies literature - there are so few people from the region! Maybe we need to turn to ourselves first, keeping in mind our point of action, views, situation and try to recognize others' experiences from this sensitivity.
If one is to understand decolonization as looking at the local, then this is what we try to do here. We attempt to approach this issue not from the side of terminology and desire to see ourselves from a theoretical lens, but rather from the practical one, based on the formation of our vision, voices and voices of people, nature, objects, emotions and ideas we encounter. Two years ago, we started to go out and observed that things do not work as we expected them to. In Osh, we intended to speak about the right to the city, and came to the conclusion that the form that we chose does not work. That instead we need to adapt to the situation.
In 2019 we decided to change our tactic. We went out to regions not to “teach” and practice art, but to speak to people, get acquainted with their life and work experiences, emotional, geographical and knowable landscapes they live in. And created artworks based on these investigations of the country, people and ourselves. Is it colonialism to take this kind of material for your art? The answer for myself today is that here we see ourselves as citizens exploring the environment, speaking the language of art, referring to our research ethic and my feminist sensitivity (as much as I feel it) in communication.
Victoria Kravtsova
How critical is it for you as a collective to engage with the topic of decolonization?
Diana U
It is a crucial inner question for all of us. But at the moment we as a collective do not want to deal with the subject of decolonization as pure theory. We had conversations about this last year during a project on identity when we tried to understand the symbolic significance or not of the several monuments in Bishkek.
In 2018 we did an informal educational elective open for selected participants with reading-sessions on the art history of soviet Kyrgyzstan. After 4 months of sessions, we curated the one-day exhibition Gesture-Gesture where we presented our work material (handmade timeline with important dates, xerox pictures and our collective notes) alongside the collective art gesture - reflections on the material - almost all books on art were soviet and the Soviet ideology was present in the art history. Hence, you clearly see how the understanding of fine art (my area of work) in the region has colonial origins but also carries its internal artistic agency at the same time.
After engaging with local histories, we have turned our gazes onto ourselves. Many of us experienced the existential feeling that stems from our trips to the regions – when we would see how people live there. The exhibition Blue Pass marked a pivotal moment for all of us. The idea was to transform our collected material based on the feelings and stories we got from the local people, nature and situations into a collage landscape that became a research installation.
Victoria Kravtsova
How did your practice evolve after your field research and confronting colonial issues within your own practice as an artist and curator?
Diana U
Following Blue Pass, we slightly changed our direction and created the exhibition-laboratory Death. Sadness. Love. It was a four-day series of artist talks, workshops and performances through the lens of love, sadness and death, conversations focused on the art practices in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. This kind of referring to our feelings and fears grounded in the actual political, economic and social situation, our history, possibly, could be a way for internal liberation and, in a certain way, decolonization as practice.
For now, I describe my artistic and research lines of activity as #фемграфия #femgraphy. It is a construction/imagination of femstory, femmemory, femresearch, with references to the female experiences and my personal agency as an art actor based on the context I live in. As a member of the collective CI as well as an independent practitioner and just a human being, I currently work with memory, female art history of Kyrgyzstan and artistic, activist women approaches. I just completed a guide-zine for the exhibition Images of Emancipation that I did on March 8 of this year, you will be able to find it on our social networks and our website.
Diana U is a cultural actor, curator and researcher who represents the feminist perspective and derives #femgraphy, member of the art collective CI (lab_ci), studied sociology at AUCA, curated and co-curated several exhibitions with feminist agenda, as well as numerous projects as part of the art collective CI (lab_ci).
Art collective CI (lab_ci) seeks to address topics of artistic production and research for understanding contemporary socio-cultural processes. Main directions of activity are exhibitions of contemporary art, research-based exhibitions and art projects, film screenings and informal educational programs on artistic approaches. Collective work experience is related to the themes of city, memory, #femgraphy, critical regional studies, history and practice of Soviet and contemporary art in Kyrgyzstan.
Editors Ira Konyukhova and Tamara Khasanova.