Artist tour and workshop with Yevgeniy Fiks
21.07 18:00 and 22.07 18:00
Please join us on Wednesday, July 21st and Thursday, July 22 nd, from 18:00 for an artist tour and workshop with Yevgeniy Fiks. The event on July 21st will be in English, and on July 22nd in Russian. Yevgeniy will introduce his exhibition “Pas de trois” at Tallinn City Gallery and give more insight into his artistic practice. The exhibition combines for the first time three of the artist’s major projects, completed over the last decade: about the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, the Soviet-era proto-queer culture, and an African American expat in the USSR. Together these projects question assumptions about the totality and universality of the Soviet experience. The exhibition proposes the notion of “progressive revisionism” as a way to address contemporary issues, such as selective memory and nationalism of exclusion, without resorting to uncritical restorative nostalgia on the Left. After the artist tour, Yevgeniy will offer an interactive workshop around his project “Mother Tongue,” which reclaims and celebrates Soviet-era Russian gay slang as a unique cultural phenomenon and gives a historical context to today’s post-Soviet LGBTQ+ community whose language partially evolved from it.
The events are free and open to the public.
Yevgeniy Fiks is an artist born in Moscow in 1972, who has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialogue in the West, among them: ‘Lenin for Your Library?’ in which he mailed V.I. Lenin’s text ‘Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism’ to one hundred global corporations as a donation to their corporate libraries; ‘Communist Party USA’, a series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA, painted from life in the Party’s national headquarters in New York City; and ‘Communist Guide to New York City’, a series of photographs of buildings and public places in New York City that are connected to the history of the American Communist movement. Fiks’ work has been shown in the United States at Winkleman and Postmasters galleries, Mass MoCA, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; in Moscow at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Marat Guelman Gallery; as well as at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, and the Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon. His work has been included in the Biennale of Sydney (2008), Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011), and Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015).