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Lin Yilin
The Result of a lot of Pieces, 1998, courtesy: Ural Biennial
the Mobile Image. Snyder’s work was paradigmatic for the show’s
deconstructionist approach, its thematic focus and the emphasis on
works in reproducible media. The curators, Ekaterina Degot, Cosmin
Costinaø and David Riff, are conscious of the potential role of art and
events like biennials in propping up the self-understanding of the
international art system as well as spurring on regional development
and self-definition. “Of course”, they write in their introduction to
the catalogue, “art is (still) a propaganda machine, and its biennials
are temporary agitprop factories” 1 – factories that tend to spring into
action wherever there is a vacuum, as in Ekaterinburg, formerly
Sverdlovsk, which in Soviet times was the pride of USSR’s industrial
heartland but now is facing decline.
The exhibition revolved around the notion of the “shockworkers”
– especially productive Soviet labourers of the 1930s who played
a leading role in the development of industry and were a recurring
motif in the art of the time, for example in Dutch filmmaker Joris
Ivens Song of Heroes (1932), or in Amshei Nuerenberg’s painting
Makarov, Shockworker and Inventor (early 1930s), a depiction of the
shockworker as an intellectual – a rather uncommon representation
in its time of origin; situated in the entrance hall of the exhibition
venue, these works functioned as the show’s thematic offbeat.
In the exhibition, the idea of “shockwork” was used to refer to the
production and distribution of increasingly mobile images in the age
of post-Fordism – which assigns art a role that is certainly ambiguous:
We’re well acquainted with the role immaterial creative work
can play in the deregulation of labour. By shifting the concept of the
shockworker, the show pulled off a clever gambit, connecting the art
on view with a historical and concrete local context even as it facilitated
a critical reflection on contemporary (and not only artistic)
image production as well as the idea of labour. Also spot-on was the
venue, the Constructivist building of the former Ural Worker Printing
Press, where in Soviet times all the newspapers east of Moscow were
printed – i.e. where the politically desired “image” of the Soviet
Union was generated.
The works on display included contemporary interpretations of shockwork,
for instance Yael Bartana’s two-channel video installation
Summer Camp (2007) which plays with elements of Zionist propaganda
films from the 1930s while documenting the actual rebuilding
of a Palestinian house demolished by the Israeli authorities; and
Ciprian Mureøan’s painting Miners planting flowers in University
Square (2005) which questions the hegemonic representation of the
“working class” as “reactionary” in today’s Romania through the tactical
deployment of socialist realist language while making reference
to President Iliescu’s infamous thanks to the violent intervention
of miners at the Bucharest’s University Square during the Romanian
Revolution in 1989.
Deimantas Narkevicius’s video Energy Lithuania (2001) explores the
architecture of a power plant, examining responses to the residues
of bygone forms of production and life long after the workers have
left their factories, while Harun Farocki’s video installation Workers
Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006) traces the iconic motif
of workers streaming out of a factory over many decades as it was
shown in one of the first films by the Lumière brothers (1895). There
were also investigations of the synchronicity of various forms of
labour and their representation, as in Praneet Soi’s slide installation
Notes on Underdevelopment. Part 1, showing shots of the routine
hand movements of a printer from Kumartuli in India along with
drawings and collages; of the question of how imaging technologies
influence our perceptions, and what social and political implications
are bound to their use, as in Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor’s installation
Production Line of the Future (2010); and of the virtual-artificial
embellishment respectively the disguise of labour and
exploitation behind the veil of a luxurious leisure world, as in Christian
von Börries’s film The Dubai in Me (both 2010). The assertiveness
of capitalist economy, it seems, depends more than ever before
on the images it creates and distributes – an observation which
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