The reality of real bodies
Sasha Shestakova
1st July 2020
We're not going away from far east Russia with this article. However, the reason now to stay here is much less entertaining. TransitoryWhite is joining the media strike in support of an artist and sex-educator Yulia Tsvetkova from Komsomolsk-na-Amure who's now awaiting court with a text by Sasha Shestakova and with her personal selection of two artworks by two female artists and one interdisciplinary collective from Russia, who explored the role of a female body in their works.
Artist and educator from Komsomolsk-on-Amur Yulia Tsvetkova is facing the accusation for distribution of pornography for images of vulvas, published in a body-positive online community Monologues of the vagina. The artist is now threatened with up to 6 years in prison. This case poses a threat not only to an individual artist but also to all artists, curators and cultural workers as it can create a precedent of active state censorship and justify self-censorship of individual art-workers as well as of art institutions.
Several media and art-institutions have joined the media-strike, launched by feminist activists. Also Ekaterinburg-based art-criticism community “Kruzhok of art-criticism” has circulated the letter among Ekaterinburg-based art-institutions, asking them to support Yulia Tsvetkova. The ways to support Yulia Tsvetkova for English-speakers include raising awareness about the case, in your social media using hashtags #FreeYuliaTsvetkova signing a petition as well as participating in the solidarity action.
Cyberfemin club
Cyberfemin club was organized by Alla Mitrofanova and Irina Aktuganova in St. Petersburg in the late 1990s. The signifying image of Cyberfemin club was the Venus of Waldorf. Unlike other imaginaries of a female body on the internet at that time, which mostly prioritised “girls” (i.e. young female subjects, fitting in the mainstream understandings of beauty and sexuality), this one represented a mothering body. The Venus of Waldorf’s body, used as a mascot by the Cyberfemin club, firstly empathised the multiplicity of ways a female body can look like, secondly, it highlighted the gendered nature of reproductive labour.
Angelina Merenkova
Angelina Merenkova’s embroideries explore the affective dimensions of the contemporary Russian militarism. They also reveal the ways, in which militarism is interwoven with the control of the bodies. One of the artworks, titled Nouvelle Etiole shows a vagina, partly concealed by a Kremlin-like star on the red background. It feels like a star invades a body. In another artwork from this series “Feeling of SU-27”, airplanes are flying out of a presumably moaning female mouth, violently invading an orgasm scene. Both of the artworks show the way the state annexes not only the territories but also bodies and sexualities.
Irina Nakhova
The artwork Box, first showed in the exhibition Stay with me was a small red space, the entrance to which was made to resemble a vagina. It materialised the concept of hospitality of the matrix ten years before the introduction of the concept by the feminist scholar Irina Aristarkhova. In Hospitality of the matrix: philosophy, biomedicine and culture Irina Aristarkhova describes the process of gestation as the creation of the “nourishing environment”, which requires the labour of multiple participants. In Nakhova’s artwork, the visitors entered the space, resembling a womb, which was available to everyone, yet those who wanted to enter the space had to make an effort of squeezing into space, thus materialising the idea that hospitality is a two-way process, involving both – the one who creates the space and the one who enters it.
Sasha Shestakova is an interdisciplinary researcher currently based in Moscow. She holds an MA Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths UoL. She is a part of research unit Distributed cognition cooperative (with Anna Engelhardt), which aims to disentangle post-soviet space as heterogeneous with specific attention to the materiality of bodies in the work of seemingly abstract machines. DCC projects include lntermodal Terminal, which facilities the dialogue around the possible space of decolonial resistance, using the intermodal terminal in Nakhodka, а port city in Primorsky Krai as an entry point; Caring for the Shaky Ground, performing cognitive cartography of (de) colonial irrigation infrastructures in Crimea. Her other projects include Constructing infrastructures for the futures, the investigation in infrastructures' construction through the agency of material labour; and symposium Alien processes: reproduction and time, which she co-organised as a Certificate student in the New Centre for Research and Practice.