how the last Soviet political emigrant turned her experience into art
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This year, “Swan Lake,” a project by Austrian artist Anna Ermolaeva, will be shown in the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. At the age of 18, she fled to Austria from the USSR, becoming one of the last Soviet political emigrants. The theme of forced emigration is one of the most important in her art.
Anna Ermolaeva became involved in politics when she was at school. Perhaps it was the time of perestroika. Perhaps the school was something special: the Secondary Art School at the Academy of Arts, for artistically gifted children. The Leningrad School of Art was actually famous for its freedom of morals and dissident spirit. However, the most freedom-loving and dissident people were still expelled from there: Alexander Arefyev, Vladimir Shagin, Oleg Grigoriev, Mikhail Shemyakin, Gennady Ustyugov – all the heroes of the Leningrad underground did not receive a SHS certificate. Ermolaeva could add to this list.
She got involved in politics not in the sense that she read samizdat and tamizdat, hung out in Saigon, listened to Kino and waited for changes. She participated in real political life. She became an activist of the pacifist movement “Trust”, which joined the Democratic Union, the first opposition party in the USSR, was present at the founding congress of the Democratic Union, helped human rights activists, organized demonstrations, published, together with her husband and friends, the party newspaper “Democratic Opposition” – the editorial board of the weekly was placed directly in her Leningrad apartment. At first there was a letter from the KGB to the secondary school with a demand to expel the politically unreliable schoolgirl – a rally was held in Moscow in her support, so Ermolaeva, who was an excellent student, was nevertheless given a certificate. And then there was the last case in the Soviet Union under Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR on “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” which was opened at the end of 1988: Ermolaeva and her husband were threatened with arrest and imprisonment, but they managed to escape abroad – the Poles from Solidarity helped. They thought of hitchhiking to Paris – they were arrested on the border of Salzburg with Bavaria, they were going to be sent back to the USSR, they sorted it out, they were sent to a refugee camp and eight months later they were given political asylum in Austria. Since 1989, Ermolaeva has lived and worked in Vienna.
The SHS certificate came in handy – to enter the University of Vienna and receive a diploma in art historian. What she was taught at the Secondary Art School was of no use at all: Ermolaeva was not accepted into the Vienna Academy of Arts; late Soviet painting did not impress anyone – later she would cut her large, clumsy canvases into puzzle pieces so that all this pictorial heritage of the past would fit into one bag. And then a department of new media was opened at the academy – Ermolaeva brought photographs, she was accepted on the spot, and even into the class of the famous media artist Peter Kogler. At the Vienna Academy, she began working with video – her first video experiments attracted the attention of the famous curator Harald Szeemann, and in 1999, “Chicken Triptych” by sophomore Ermolaeva was exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Her artistic career began to develop as rapidly as her political career had in her youth. From her first minimalist videos, which often featured toys, it would have been impossible to guess that the camera was in the hands of a person with such extensive and early political experience. Her classmates at the academy played politics and the political consciousness of the artist – she photographed wind-up dogs, rubber monkeys and tumblers, well understanding the difference between play and reality. Her art began to take on a distinctly political dimension only in the mid-2000s, when she began to more often turn to her emigrant, refugee experience.
For example, returning to Vienna West Station – in May 1989, when she and her husband reached Austria, they had to live here for several days, awaiting the decision of the American embassy regarding their future fate, and, oddly enough, not a refugee camp, namely Westbahnhof became a symbol of exile in her personal mythology. In 1989, station benches were more comfortable; you could sleep on them, stretched out to your full height, but now, as part of the implicit urban fight against illegal migration and homelessness, the benches are partitioned off with armrests: in the video “Study of Sleeping Positions” (2006) we We will watch for a long time the torment of the artist, who is trying to take a lying position where from now on one can only sit – and preferably not for long. Urban research will be continued in the photo series “Hostile Architecture” (started in 2019). Traveling around the world, Ermolaeva collects a collection of design tricks, all kinds of decorative spikes, intricate pins, ribbed textures of concrete, which turn the horizontal surfaces of small architectural forms unsuitable for unauthorized recreation and pastime: one photograph captures an example of aggressive design of the urban environment, the other – traces , which he leaves on the body if the body rashly decides to sit where it is not supposed to. Migrants are universally disliked, just like pigeons: it is no coincidence that the pigeon, an impudent urban beggar who has learned to survive in any conditions, becomes an important character in this art, which tends to be an animalistic metaphor. In the photo triptych “Good Times, Bad Times” (2007), she again takes pictures at the Western Station, noticing that the giant station clock was chosen by pigeons: good times for birds come when the clock shows a quarter to three, so that the hands are in a horizontal position and on a whole flock of them can sit on a roost, and bad times come when the hands stand vertically—closer to five o’clock, only one, probably the strongest pigeon according to Darwin, can sit at the very end of the minute hand. In the sense of social structure, horizontal is preferable to vertical – in fact, these are the ideals she defended during the time of her Leningrad political activism.
The main works of Anna Ermolaeva are one way or another dedicated to the time of global change, the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. This is the film “Alexandra Vysokinskaya. Twenty Years Later” (2009) is a tribute to her Polish savior, who selflessly helped the young fugitive, and at the same time a reflection on the collapse of revolutionary illusions. Ermolaeva repeats the route of her escape – by train from St. Petersburg to Krakow, by bus from Krakow to Vienna – in order to again meet and hug Alexandra Wysokinskaya, the organizer of that risky enterprise, at the Krakow Main Station. In 1989, Wysokinskaya, a young architect from Krakow, inspired by the pan-European rise and the impending fall of all borders, sheltered and looked after yesterday’s Soviet schoolgirl, who was running away from arrest wherever she looked – with a small backpack over her shoulders, without any plan of action. In 2009, the social roles changed: now Ermolaeva is a famous artist, and Vysokinskaya is a modest social worker who went to work in Paris and was forced to leave architecture. Over a table conversation in her Krakow house, a strange property of migrant memory is revealed: Vysokinskaya remembers in the smallest detail the details of Ermolaeva’s escape, which she had forgotten a long time ago, but she poorly remembers her departure and the emigration ordeal in Paris – traumatic memories are repressed. At the end of the film, she says that in her old age she would like to return from France to her homeland, Poland. Ermolaeva, in her art, constantly returns to her homeland – the USSR, whose collapse and phantom pains radically changed the political map of the world.
Having accidentally discovered that traders from the Naschmarkt for some reason easily switch to Russian, Ermolaeva conducts a small investigation: it turns out that they are all Bukharian Jews from Samarkand, who left Uzbekistan for the sake of the Promised Land and got stuck in Vienna, where there is now the world’s second largest ( after Israel) community of Bukharian Jews. In the film “Returning to the Silk Road” (2010), the artist undertakes to play for them the role of a kind of genie from a Persian fairy tale: she travels to Samarkand, where her Naschmarkt interlocutors cannot return for various political or economic reasons, in order to fulfill their cherished desires – to photograph their native a house where strangers have now settled, visit family graves in the old Jewish cemetery, say hello to your beloved teacher. This is Ermolaeva’s most touching and sentimental film – condensed nostalgia, packed into an hour of screen time, an odyssey in search of a lost or never-existed golden age. Ghosts of the past, bright or dark – depending on the political position of those looking at the vague yesterday from the unclear today – have inhabited the post-Soviet space and stubbornly refuse to leave it, so the wars of memory here are always ready to move from the cold stage to the hot one. This was discussed in many of Ermolaeva’s works: in “GULAG” (2012), video materials of which were collected during a trip to the Perm Territory, where her dispossessed grandfathers were sent; in Leninopad (2016), made during a large research trip to Ukraine shortly after the decommunization laws were passed; in “Doubles” (2021), psychological portraits of amateur political theater actors daily portraying Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev and Putin on Red Square.
The performance “Political Extras” (2015), shown at the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, was dedicated to the ambivalence of the director’s political theater, where a cheap actor turns into a real actor, and the scenery turns into reality. Ermolaeva recruited 120 extras on a website that usually recruits participants in paid rallies, gave them slogans for and against contemporary art, taken from the press writing about the persecution of Pussy Riot and Pyotr Pavlensky, and staged a fake demonstration in the USSR pavilion at VDNKh, which was the main venue of the biennale. . The video, filmed during the performance, reveals simple mechanisms of political manipulation that seem to form a popular demand for a conservative turn. The hooligan provocation turns into a sad spectacle by the end of the film: a long line of poorly dressed people line up to see the artist portraying the organizer of the demonstration – their standard fee is 500 rubles. However, political theater is not hopeless if it is based not on a totalitarian vertical, but on a democratic horizontal one. In the grandiose video triptych “Singing Revolution” (2023), Ermolaeva asks three amateur choirs – from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – to sing the songs that were heard during the song revolutions of 1987–1991: the viewer, caught between three colossal screens, “Estonian” “Latvian” and “Lithuanian”, which are included alternately, involuntarily ends up in a choir competition. And he’s probably trying to find a correlation between coherence, inspiration and the results of peaceful protests. Unlike the Baltic republics, the musical symbol of the perestroika revolution in Russia was not a song, but a dance: “Swan Lake”, frozen on television screens during the days of the August 1991 putsch. But classical ballet does not imply collective participation – in the performative installation “Swan Lake” for the Austrian pavilion in Venice, Anna Ermolaeva asks the question of how to move from passive contemplation to a revolutionary gesture.
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