From Closed City to Center of the World
Modern art is being used as a springboard for Yekaterinburg’s bid for the 2020 World Expo.
Published: September 26, 2012 (Issue # 1728)
SHURA COLLINSON / SPT
‘Bit:Fall,’ Julius Popp’s special Expo project for the industrial biennale.
The Urals city of Yekaterinburg is embracing its industrial heritage as it goes all out in its bid to host the 2020 World Expo.
For the next month, former printing presses, heavy machinery factories and other industrial spaces — both operating and obsolete — around the city are hosting work by contemporary artists from all over the world for the second Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, one of several stages in Yekaterinburg’s bid to host the World Expo.
The biennale is the brainchild of Alisa Prudnikova, a native of Yekaterinburg, who says the idea was born out of the desire to forge a new identity for her hometown, Russia’s fourth largest city, which has a rich history as a center of machinery production, metal processing and metallurgy.
“As an art historian and curator, I travel a lot, and I discovered that people rarely knew much about Yekaterinburg,” Prudnikova said on Sept. 12, a few hours ahead of the biennale’s opening.
“I was tired of telling people ‘it’s where the tsar was murdered and where the president was born, it’s the border between Europe and Asia’ etc., and decided it should be known for something else — a biennale. But to differentiate it from other biennales, I decided it should be industrial. That way, people get to see a different side to the city, different industrial districts.”
The biennale opened on Sept. 12 at the Uralsky Rabochy (Ural Worker) printing press, which occupies one of the many Constructivist buildings for which Yekaterinburg is famed. One of the main installations was absent, having somehow been rerouted to — and detained in — Bishkek.
MORE THAN ART
This time around, however, the biennale — which features the work of about 80 artists from more than 20 countries — is about more than contemporary art: Prudnikova is also one of the ambassadors for the city’s bid for World Expo 2020.
“These are like little Olympic Games for us,” said biennale director Natalya Balabanova. “We are really pleased to help people to see Yekaterinburg through the prism of contemporary art, but also understand how important it is to show people Yekaterinburg — that was our main task.”
“Bit:Fall,” a special Expo project within the biennale by German artist Julius Popp, stands alone on Oktyabrskaya Ploshchad and is designed to reflect the theme of Yekaterinburg’s Expo bid, “Global Mind.” Drops of water fall from a frame and are lit up to spell different words for less than a second before they plunge into a pool below, creating what the artist describes as a “waterfall of words.” The words — in both Latin and Cyrillic letters — are the most popular search terms on the Internet at that moment. The installation reflects the information people are bombarded with every day and how we interpret that information, according to Popp.
“They appear in water — not for long — before dissolving again in the wind,” he explained.
THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD
Although most of the artwork itself, like Popp’s installation, is not industrial-themed, some of the biennale events embrace the theme wholeheartedly. Paintings depicting heroic workers with sooty faces against the background of inferno-like interiors of plant workshops, complete with red-hot tongues of steel, make up the “Planned Exploit” exhibit at a branch of the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts. The paintings, executed from the 1920s to the 1980s and chosen from the museum’s permanent collection, include a somewhat ironic-seeming depiction from 1974 of a young girl in a short skirt and high heels walking past the belching chimneys of an Uralmash factory. The painting, by Boris Semyonov, is titled “Factory Spring.” Other works by the artist on show include a painting of a young woman with her hair covered by both a hard hat and a headscarf, titled “Little Mistress of a Big Workshop.”
SHURA COLLINSON / SPT
Ivan Plusch’s ‘The Passage of Things.’
A few blocks away, in the Architector upscale interior boutique mall, the Belaya Gallery has put together an exhibit titled “The Artist Valentin Novichenko and the End of Industrial Art,” showcasing the artist’s etchings that focus on Uralkhimmash — the Ural Chemical Machine-Building Plant. Unlike the paintings of “Planned Exploit” that focus on the figure of the worker against a factory background, in the dazzling etchings on zinc and linoleum of Novichenko, who died in 2010, human figures appear as tiny dots against the awesome might of machinery.
“Industrial art began in the 1930s as propaganda to promote Stalin’s industrialization campaign,” said Marina Dashevskaya, director of the gallery and the exhibit’s curator. “To enter the Artists’ Union and get state orders, artists had to create industrial landscapes, and this led to some really good art right through the ‘90s, when some of the factories closed. In the 21st century, we are now seeing nostalgia. Many countries miss industry — it has largely disappeared from Europe to the southeast, for example to China,” she said.
Some biennale events, such as a performance of jazz music in the Kamvolny plant set to footage of factories being built and harassed-looking engineers (a machine in the room downstairs had been turned on especially to add to the ‘industrial’ atmosphere), make it hard to tell how ironic the industrial theme is.
“Now people are making [industrial art] with irony,” said Dashevskaya. “They’re looking at it from the outside; these people have never been inside a factory. For those who grew up here in the Soviet era, their attitude to it is totally different. It was the meaning of life for some people, and 30 years later, people are making music to it.
“This art,” she said, gesturing to Novichenko’s engravings, “this is serious. But that other stuff is not art.”
OPENING UP
A closed city until 1991, Yekaterinburg could not be turning its back on its isolated past more emphatically. It welcomed the BRIC summit in 2009, looks certain to be one of the venues for the 2018 FIFA World Cup that Russia is hosting, and if the city is successful in its bid to host the World Expo 2020, it would attract millions of visitors from all over the world. With a little more than a year to go before the winning Expo venue is announced, the city is using every opportunity it gets —including the industrial biennale — to promote its bid.
“Just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s bad,” smiles Arkady Chernetsky, chairman of the Expo bid committee’s supervisory board. Chernetsky was mayor of the city from 1992 until 2010 and is now a member of the Federation Council.
“We are always looking for ways to move away from our ‘closed city’ past and are always looking for platforms from which to showcase the city,” he said.
Yekaterinburg, which proposes hosting the Expo on a 550-hectare site from May 1 to October 31 2020, is focusing both on its historical role as a center of learning and on the process of globalization in its bid.
“The Internet is already an international platform,” said Chernetsky. “This expo may be less about people bringing products, and more about them bringing ideas — that’s our theme.”
By a strange twist of fate, Chernetsky was once director of the same factory — Khimmash — where the etcher Novichenko worked. He was made mayor of Yekaterinburg by Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president and the city’s most famous son.
Chernetsky cited Yekaterinburg’s numerous Constructivism monuments and, surprisingly, its weather (“Who wants to go to Dubai in summer?”) as the city’s advantages in the bidding war, along with its budding status as a hub: The city is home to more than 20 foreign consulates and diplomatic missions, and its modern airport connects the city and surrounding region with 80 cities around the world.
The former mayor admits, however, that the city’s infrastructure would need to be improved before the Expo could take place. “The most burning issue right now is traffic,” he said.
SHURA COLLINSON / SPT
‘K’ by Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman.
He also cites this as one of the potential benefits to be gained by the citizens of Yekaterinburg from winning the bid.
“The problem of all Russia and all its big cities is infrastructure,” he said. “Solving this problem immediately and everywhere is impossible. Our task is to get first in the line.”
Chernetsky also cited investment in the region and a more confident self-identity as consequences of a successful Expo bid. “We’re not on the edge of the world, we’re at the center of it,” he said.
“It will give rise to commercial projects and bring more people here to start profitable businesses. It will help the Urals as a whole.”
SHARING THE GLORY
The idea of boosting not only the city but the Urals region as a whole was echoed by the biennale, which saw artworks created in other locations in the Sverdlovsk Oblast as part of the Artist in Residence program.
In Uralmash, a suburb of Yekaterinburg built around the heavy machinery factory of the same name, French artist Matthieu Martin repainted the decaying White Tower, a monument of Constructivist architecture, restoring it to its former glory for his project, titled “Refresh the Revolution.”
But at the unveiling of the results of the Artists in Residence program at Yekaterinburg’s refurbished Stalinist Gothic Central Stadium, it was Leonid Tishkov’s series of works devoted to a now-closed ice skate factory in the historical town of Verkhoturye, 300 kilometers north of Yekaterinburg, that stood out.
A video installation and series of photos titled “Derelict Utopias: Skate Producing Plant” portray a melancholy crumbling red brick factory, surrounded by tumbleweed on the outside while the inside resembles the abandoned buildings around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Mountains of rusting ice skates are stacked against a background of peeling paint and industrial debris that contrast sharply and poignantly with cups still containing dregs of tea, and posters congratulating workers on the plant’s anniversary or on the New Year.
In another part of the project, Tishkov has created a vertical wave-like sculpture made from old skate blades, titled “A Tower of Skates: Higher and Higher!”
But while the art biennale reflected nostalgia for the long-gone age of industry, Yekaterinburg is focusing firmly on the future, more specifically, on the year 2020. The city has already fought off competition from other Russian cities such as Nizhny Novgorod to win the right to bid for the Expo for Russia. Now it just needs to convince the International Exhibitions Bureau General Assembly that it is the best choice, above its rivals Ayutthaya (Thailand), Dubai (UAE), Izmir (Turkey) and Sao Paolo (Brazil). Certainly the city is not wanting in the patriotism often lacked by other Russian cities. The pride of Yekaterinburg residents in their city and region is remarkably in evidence, and not only when the bid for the Expo — to which the city plans to attract a total of 30 million visitors — is being discussed.
Dashevskaya, the curator of the Belaya Gallery, who said she had been selling art for 20 years, said there is great demand for local landscapes in the Urals.
“You could offer them a Warhol, and they would say ‘Give us the Urals,’” she said.
The Second Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art runs through Oct. 22 at various locations. For a program of events, visit www.uralbiennale.ru