Space Love – Weekend – Kommersant

Novosibirsk artist Yanina Boldyreva (b. 1986), doing monumental painting, photography, graphics, poetry and installation, came to the form of a book in which all these media converged and layered on top of each other. Moreover, in her multimedia books of destinies, the Soviet past and the Russian present are so superimposed that the contours of a catastrophic future appear in the palimpsest.

Text: Anna Tolstova

Yanina Boldyreva graduated from the Novosibirsk Academy of Architecture and Art in 2009 with a diploma in muralist, but already in her first year she understood that such a profession no longer exists. That the profession remained in the Soviet past – along with the state order and creations that were created for centuries and full of bright ideological ideals. That a high academic craft, largely based on the cult of the patriarch of the Novosibirsk school of painting, Nikolai Gritsyuk, rarely meets the tastes of a private client, the owner of a cafe, office or luxury apartments. That today’s monumental art in the city is partisan street art. It was a time of fashionable nostalgia for Soviet monumentalism – for mosaics, frescoes and reliefs on the facades of various research institutes and recreation centers, on the ruins of industrial enterprises and bus stops. But Boldyreva and her classmates did not have time for nostalgia – they united in the LyudiSten group, an artel of adventurers who went to the city hall and to developers, because the time of fashion nostalgia coincided with the time of fashionable urbanism and the unemployed muralists decided to provide themselves with city orders.

Over the four years of its life, from 2009 to 2013, LudiSten made more than twenty murals – in Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Tomsk. Participated in festivals and charity projects, drawing together with children from orphanages. They transformed the urban environment: blind fences, firewalls and transformer substations were covered with murals that would look good in Olympic stadiums. When LyudiSten went about their business, Boldyreva continued to paint in the urban space – as an artist and as a curator, for example, in 2017-2019 she was one of the organizers of the Graphite of Science festival of popular science graffiti in Novosibirsk Academgorodok. Coordination of sketches, architectural and security expertise, establishing contacts with local residents, negotiations with an outraged public, vandalism – all this outweighed the love of painting on the wall. The hand of Boldyreva the muralist can also be recognized by the pictorial culture grown on the mixed soil of organic and constructivist trends in the Soviet avant-garde, and by a special attitude to space – shifted in confusion of feelings, striving to break out of the composition. What almost succeeds – due to the violent, expressionistic color that transforms the environment.

The environment also becomes the main subject of photography, which Boldyreva began to study at about the same time she entered the academy to study as a muralist. In part, photography was an escape into the realm of absolute creative freedom – freedom from commission, bureaucratic procedures and decorum conventions. Partly – by the search for expressive means at the other pole of artistic media, where immediacy and mobility are opposed to monumentality “for centuries”. But, paradoxically, the monumental and photographic art of Boldyreva showed similarities. Just as her mural tried to overcome the wall, so her photography struggled with its documentary nature. Shooting through plastic as if through an additional lens, she achieved a strange, pictorialist effect: the image blurred and vibrated, almost losing touch with the referent, reality turned into an illusion. So the Novosibirsk and Siberian landscapes seemed to be the territory of a dream. In addition, this photograph was cramped within the framework of one frame – it aspired to become part of a series, a project, a samizdat photo book, in a word, to become part of a monumental ensemble.

“Index Lost” (2014) and “Rupture Zone” (2015) – two of her first photobooks Yanina Boldyreva made in collaboration with Ukrainian artist Alexander Isaenko (they have been working together on photo and video projects since 2011). In “Rupture Zone” (“Zone gap”) for the first time the theme of war was clearly indicated – broken human bodies, connections and spaces. Moreover, the metaphor of the gap manifested itself both at the level of the image and at the level of the material – in torn, crumpled, mutilated black-and-white photographs. Soon the theme of war will be intertwined with the theme of repression – from reflections on the specifics of the Siberian space, the space of forced labor camps, the great construction projects for defense purposes and nature, conquered at the cost of huge human sacrifices, an image of the earth will be born, which is entangled in barbed wire, forced by camp towers and generously watered with blood . The plastic conflict of environment, structure and figure, on which many of Boldyreva’s fresco compositions were built, will turn into an existential tragedy, landscape dreams into nightmares.

In 2020, Boldyreva ended up in Salekhard, beyond the Arctic Circle, visited the 501st construction site, saw with her own eyes the remains of the Dead Road, the most murderous section of the Transpolar Highway. By 2020, her “black” graphic series, which continues to this day, goes back, where images of Stalinist repressions are superimposed on images of protest actions and military operations. In particular, the “Black Calendar”, made on torn bituminous paper soaked in oil, gunpowder and grief – starting with the military “Breaking Zones”, Boldyreva’s material is metaphorical. Even “Collective Inaction”, reflecting pandemic realities, depicts a disintegrating society, traumatized not so much by the clinic as by prison and learned helplessness. It seems that the “Birch people” also come from Salekhard, representatives of one militant and infinitely unhappy civilization, to which a documentary study released last summer was devoted. However, even before the trip to Salekhard, in 2019, the Teplushka project, an opus magnum, came into being, where everything that the artist has ever done, from mural to poetry, came together.

With all the media diversity of the project, Teplushka is based on a “self-published” book by the artist, in which photography, graphics and poetry form a single text, a surreal story about an attempt to escape from a camp, a military unit, a barracks-camp country that has become the flesh and blood of a hero , or from himself. Drawn fantasies, designed in red, black and white, are complemented by an inverted photograph of an inverted, catastrophic world, as if confirming the veracity of the drawings, and poetry serves as an illustration for graphics. In this case, the book can turn into an installation, if it is an exhibition, or even turn into a mural. Preparing the presentation of “Teplushka” in Novosibirsk, Boldyreva painted the abandoned barracks on Voinskaya Street with a fresco based on drawings from the book – the presentation took place elsewhere, and the painting in the barracks remained an absurdist monument of anti-militarism, reminiscent of the deep affinity of monumental and book art. Today, looking at the sheets of “Teplushka”, “Black Calendar” or “Birch People”, it is impossible to believe that this is not a momentary reaction to the current agenda, but a long-standing foreboding of trouble, based on artistic feeling for space. It is not difficult for a plastically gifted artist to attract the love of space, but few manage to hear the call of the future with such frightening distinctness. Apparently, thinking about the properties of a medium, you yourself become a medium.

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Masterpiece
“Birch people”
Artist’s book (photos, drawings, woodcuts, texts). 2022

The monograph consists of expedition notes, drawings and photographs by the ethnographer Elena Dobrovolskaya, the discoverer of the Land of Birch People. The selfless researcher described the birch man in a variety of aspects, from the anatomical structure (sadness-longing is placed in the core of the annual rings of Homo betulinus) to the linguistic picture of the world (it is, as befits a birch, black and white, the variety of phenomena of reality is expressed in the lexeme “not all so clear”). Without finishing her work, the ethnographer died in the field – due to viral contact with this warlike, deadly and self-destructive civilization. Graphics (drawings and woodcuts, probably made on birch boards) show how the black and white birch world, striving to conquer living space, is gradually turning red. But the photographic series looks much more terrible, where a staged, performative shot cannot always be distinguished from a documentary one. It seems that since the time of Igor Makarevich’s research on Homo lignum, a wooden man, domestic science has not provided such outstanding examples of philosophical anthropology.

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