There is sex after the Soviet Union!

This text was written in connection with the exhibition "The Border" of the Goethe-Institut Moscow, which was curated by Thibaut de Ruyter and Inke Arns. In this essay, I discuss the works of Ukrainian-Swiss artist Alina Kopytsa (b 1983 in Poliske, Kyiv region, Ukraine), whose work Wedding Dress can be seen in the exhibition.

There is this famous phrase that, before it was taken out of context like many of such sequences, originally meant something else: There is no sex in the Soviet Union Of course, that was not exactly what it meant. Actually, that phrase was the answer to the question of whether sexualized bodies of women are used in the Soviet Union’s advertising, too. It was not only a meaningful answer to Americans watching the program, but also to the many Soviet citizens who related the political system’s stubbornness to an absence of spontaneity, excess and experimentation in their own sex lives. The Soviet media at that time pretended that this did not exist. Almost 30 years after the system collapsed, sex has certainly found its way into advertising, publications and public discussions.

It is often assumed and even proven by various studies that after the collapse of the Soviet Union gender roles were practised in orientation towards traditional manners throughout the whole post-Soviet space. While according to the Soviet ideology the equality between men and women has had actual value, afterwards in the face of the new capitalist order, many institutional and also economic elements in support of the family and education of children have collapsed. Several studies show that men and women nowadays see their roles traditionally divided within their families and in the marketplace. However, as Tanja Rands revealed in her research on the actual division of Russian families, such ideas often were practised in spite of family models that appear as non-coherent to that framework. In almost all the families she interviewed and analyzed, women were employed and also conceived their work not only as a merit but as a necessary part of their individuality in the same way as men did. Almost all men who advocated patriarchal views have self-evidently shared their power with their wives, in spite of their position as heads of the family meanwhile often taking back a seat on certain issues in which they did not feel powerful or even capable. For most men surveyed influencing their wifes’ work life by way of a ban was unthinkable. Thus, at the end of her research, Tanja Rands Lyon states that the patriarchal structures - which are based on the nuclear family and are certainly present in Russia and in the vast post-Soviet space - are not to be equated with Western structures. She calls it "soft patriarchy”, which pretty much describes the state between the sexes in the young states.

Keyword: Nuclear family. In Europe too, this construction is conceived as the supporting element in society. A man and a woman, possibly with children, both clearly heterosexual, monogamous and faithful. When Alina meets her future husband neither she nor he is convinced of the idea of such a make. They both want open relationships but they still want to live together. They want closeness and belonging, and possibly one family – but they want the family of a kind that works on different principles. One that may perhaps embody the only visible results of the 1968 protests. Her partner lives in Switzerland and soon realizes that if both want to live (and experiment) together in this country, they must prove the Swiss authorities that their coexistence is in line with the nuclear family / true love standards. The emails they exchange, which are often sexually charged and contain intimate descriptions must be submitted, documented and archived. Later, Alina Kopytsa creates a work out of those by tailoring a wedding dress out of these countless writings. I ask myself: Did they perform a drama then and hacked the system by showing their love and passion to each other in an exaggerated way? I do not know. A bureaucratic system is one that, triggered through standards conducts automatically, and makes a distinct decision if there are enough matching keywords.

I also ask myself: Does such an imposed exhibitionism have no consequences for the sexuality and the conception of intimacy of the individual? What effect does this transgression of the state border (ie the penetration of an individual of a state) towards the individual have in regards to the private (the penetration of a state into the personal of an individual), in regards to the identity of a woman (a man / a man)? Which effect will it have on her actions, her sexual life and accordingly, on her art?

As a feminist and advocate of open-mindedness, Alina has also done some textile works in Ukraine, which address the promiscuous, negated, hidden, overlooked nature of female sexuality. In the work "Diaries About Berlin", a woman turns from one sexual experience to another, each time more exciting, more unusual than the previous one. She does not always know the names of her lovers, she changes them several times a day, she also enjoys sex with women, gets involved in BDSM and sex in public places, she is erotomaniac, open-minded, enjoys her own objectification, or maybe she is just dreaming about it?

Keyword: Objectivation. I remember Hannah Wilke's famous work "So Help Me Hannah”. A photo series in which she is nude, in sexualized positions, often with her legs spread – quite provocatively at that time. Referring to this series, she said she wanted to "respect the objecthood of a body." Respect objecthood? Someone who is proficient in feminist issues knows that the word object is only used offendlingly in relation to women. An object is something that is not alive, something which has a material condition, but it does not have an actual will on their own, nor the ability to express it. The object as such is associated with the value in the capitalist world, be it symbolic or financial. It can be bought and owned. Hannah Wilke reverses that logic into another one: Object for her means "something that is looking, touching or that is capable of being seen, touched, or otherwise sensed". To her, it is pure existence; the possibility of being perceived, but not in an active, rather in a passive way. This I recall – passivity is not a negative thing per se. It is only becoming a negative thing in a patriarchal paradigm.

Even in Zurich Alina has made some objects which she exhibits under the title Plug It, which he also uses for performances. The eyes of the randomly selected audience members in the performance must be blindfolded and the performers must be undressed as far as possible. They can not see each other, neither visually nor intellectually relate to each other. They can only smell, feel or touch each other - so that they become objects. The sexual connotations of the art objects of Alina become extensions of the bodies and are thus part of a game that overrides sexuality, as well as the concepts of passivity and activity. Everyone is there to be an object of the other. And if all of them are objects, then we finally are all human. I find it interesting on further consideration that Alina in this work is not only taking a stance towards her own sexuality, that she is also letting go of alter-egos, blurring a boundary here between an art object and a sex toy.