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The team of the Yekaterinburg artist Tima Radi (b. 1988) over thirteen years of creative activity has become one of the most original phenomena in Russian street art, playing with equal success on several fields, legal and illegal, poetic and political.

Text: Anna Tolstova

In October 2010, the longest bridge in Yekaterinburg, Makarovsky, turned into the largest work of contemporary art in public space: from a certain angle, it suddenly became clear that the entire structure with massive arched spans connecting the banks of the City Pond rests on huge dominoes. It turned out that a group of street artists spent several nights painting the flat concrete pillars of the bridge, so that they became like dice, – as a result, a visual metaphor came out, a poem about heaviness and fragility, an illusion that fits perfectly into the urban environment. A few months earlier in St. Petersburg, the Voina group depicted a giant phallus on the Liteiny bridge being drawn apart, showing the sacramental symbol to the workers of the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt, which action glorified art activists all over the world. After weighing all the pros and cons, the Yekaterinburg administration prudently decided that the art on the foundations of the Makarov Bridge did not undermine the foundations of the state – the domino, which instantly became an important city landmark, remained in its place, the self-proclaimed muralists, who were threatened by the law with a fine, were left alone. A boom in street art began in the industrial giant city: the Long Stories of Yekaterinburg festival, which gave endless concrete fences at the disposal of artists, was replaced by the Stenograffia festival, the idea of ​​branding the metropolis as the “capital of Russian street art” was in the air. “Your Move” was one of the first works of Tima Radi and a kind of manifesto: in nature there is nothing eternal and unshakable, the supports of any bridge will someday fall like dominoes, in the power of man to change the course of things. It was more difficult to understand this poetic gesture in a political sense than the witty and hooligan gesture of the “War” in St. Petersburg.

The team, acting under the name of Tim Radya, was formed in Yekaterinburg in 2010; about its creator, ideologist and artistic director, Timofey (Tim) Rade, it is only known that he is a philosopher by training. However, not only in terms of education, but also in relation to the word, space and time, in terms of the vision of history and politics. According to the German-romantic yearning for the boundless, many of his works are turned to “the starry sky above me.” Street art is generally inclined towards philosophy, and this street guerrilla philosophy usually comes down to a somewhat simplified dualistic picture of the world, where money and capitalism are evil, and freedom and anarchy are good. Tima Radi’s picture of the world is more complex, as is the way of existence in the art system, which allows cooperation with institutions, but requires forever eluding control: most artistic interventions in the urban environment were made at one’s own peril and risk, without any external support; some were created for the biennale, festival, art residence or museum; funds received from the sale of photographs of old works (he is also a talented photographer) went to new independent projects. And although the safety of works in public spaces largely depends on whether they were made legally or illegally, the unauthorized “Your Move” lived for a relatively long time and happily lived up to the major reconstruction of the Makarov Bridge.

The first two projects of Tima Radi date back to the spring of 2010: on the Day of Cosmonautics, on the walls of the buildings of Yekaterinburg, which made a great contribution to the Soviet space program, posters appeared that reproduced the front pages of newspapers from different countries, reporting on the flight of Gagarin; By the Victory Day in the “Town of the Chekists”, where during the war years the registration point for volunteers was located, a photo collage appeared – a mosaic in the form of a multiply enlarged Chaldean “Banner over the Reichstag” was composed of thousands of not so famous, “ordinary” military photographs. At that time, nostalgia for the country that defeated fascism and conquered space was a commonplace of anarchist-leftist street art, but the desire to express the idea of ​​the collectivity of Soviet achievements, labor or military, through a medium, in the very principle of collage, spoke of the originality of artistic style.

Meanwhile, originality is not what Tim Radya strives for: for example, knowing full well that many people arranged actions with the burning of the word “future”, he also sets fire to the word “future”, but the colossal letters burning in the landscape somewhere in outskirts of the Ural capital, read very differently in Russia in the summer of 2020, when a video of a fiery ritual of hopelessness spreads across social networks. The language belongs to everyone, but speech is unique, and the word, spoken out of inner necessity here and now, becomes art due to its special ability to rhyme with a specific place and moment, creating communities of sympathetic listeners – already in 2010, the main genre of Tima Radi’s team became textual intervention, the words of the artist are heard on the walls, roofs and forgotten billboards. “The street is writhing without a tongue – it has nothing to shout and talk with” – the third work by Tima Radi, an installation in the form of a book mosaic that folds into the famous Rodchenkov’s portrait of Mayakovsky with a cigarette, was dedicated to one of his favorite poets – one could say that this is an artist with poetic ambitions guess from the start.

“Let everyone hear my silence”, “I would hug you, but I’m just a text”, “Down with death!”, “Of course I don’t know much about you, and you about me, but now we have something in common”, “The more light, the less you can see” – the meaning of any text is revealed in its entirety only if the context is known, but many of Tima Radi’s sayings have taken on a life of their own, not as knots of verbal-visual synthesis interspersed in the fabric of the city, but as homeless poetry. At first, it seemed that the political platform of this art would be reduced to hail protection performances, attempts to save native ruins from aggressive development. And Lampshades, an installation on Lenin Avenue in Yekaterinburg, which is renewed every winter, at the darkest time of the year, when two lanterns on the boulevard are miraculously transformed into home floor lamps, looked like an application for the appropriation and domestication of urban space. However, the 2013 manifesto “All I Know About Street Art”, which became an exhibit of the Street Art Museum in St. Petersburg, speaks of the importance of saving the ruins of human souls, and this is not a task for abstract poetry alone.

In December 2013, on the walls of the Yekaterinburg ruins, one could read the articles of the Constitution of the Russian Federation guaranteeing democratic freedoms to citizens — riot police shields seemed to serve as stencils for the inscriptions. In March 2014, when the Kremlin solemnly accepted Crimea into Russia, a prophetic “Note to the President” was left on a billboard in front of the plenipotentiary residence in the center of Yekaterinburg, stating that “all the bullets fired by Russians and Ukrainians at each other will fly in a year “. And on August 3, 2016, on the Pirogovskaya embankment in St. Petersburg, the legendary words “You crucify freedom, but the human soul knows no shackles!” appeared! – this is how Tima Radya celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the first political graffiti in the USSR, made by artists Yuli Rybakov and Oleg Volkov on the wall of the Peter and Paul Fortress in protest against the persecution of independent art.

It is characteristic that the works, which initially did not contain any explicit political content, begin their own political career. The neon letters of the question “Who are we, where are we from, where are we going?”, installed on the roof of the Ural Instrument-Making Plant back in 2017, as part of the Ural Industrial Biennale, formed a protest slogan on January 31, 2021, when the police began to force out supporters of Alexei Navalny on the ice of the City Pond—thanks to one mirrored shot taken from the top of a skyscraper, words and people rhymed into an allegory of repressive meaninglessness and absurdity. The poetry of the absurd is close to Tima Rada, this is noticeable in many works, for example, in the text installation “All this is not a dream”, which lights up with neon among a pine thicket in one of the Vyksa public gardens. But politics does not allow one to remain in the realm of pure poetry: “What are we going to do tomorrow if there is no one to trust today?” – the words from the song “Note to the President” by the IFK group, written on a concrete fence in the city center, welcomed Yekaterinburg residents who went out to protest actions in the winter of 2021.

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Masterpiece
“Live in the past!”
2022

It is impossible to find a poetic formula that would more accurately and concisely describe the political and ideological turn that has determined the face of Russia in the last decade. And it would be impossible to find a more precise time and place to install this formula in the space of Yekaterinburg. On June 12, 2022, a huge inscription “Live in the past!” appeared on the roofs of two high-rise buildings on Cosmonauts Avenue! – once upon a time the words “Our goal is communism!” were kept on these same constructions, – the dash and the exclamation mark remained from the old Soviet slogan, dismantled in time immemorial, but not completely, like the outdated ideology, which skillfully covered imperial ambitions progressively -internationalist rhetoric. The message that turned the futurum into a perfect is gradually unfolding before the eyes of the spectator-reader moving along the avenue, and the avenue, which received its romantic name in 1962, at the very beginning of the “space age”, as they used to say in the USSR, becomes a site of the true present. country, forever falling out of reality for the sake of a vague future or an unpredictable past. Two days later, utility workers removed the unauthorized work of art, but it remains on video, photographs and in history as the main artistic statement of 2022.

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