The theme of personal and collective memory plays a significant role in your work. What brought you specifically to this area?
It wasn’t like I consciously chose the theme. Before someone else labeled me, I didn’t define myself like that. But later it turned out that it was true. This was mainly connected to an “Updated Amber.” Over time, external evaluations of my work began to appear. At first, I thought I was presenting an image of human history through amber. But then I realised that this is an impossible task — every history is deeply subjective. That’s when I reformulated it all into a theme of memory, because when we talk about memory, we immediately acknowledge its inaccuracy. At some point, working in the art world, I accepted the label. But I wouldn’t say I’m a mono-artist with just one theme that triggers me. It’s just that this edge of my artistic personality was the one through which I built a career. But I want to preserve the ability to be an artist in the broadest sense, not just someone delivering an artist statement. I don’t reject labels entirely, but labels can never fully capture my sense of self as a person or an artist.
A large part of your work revolves around the image of Lenin. It visually stands out from your
more dramatic projects due to its meme-like quality. How did you come to this theme, and
why is it so contrasting?
When that series started, I was still figuring out what direction I wanted to take in terms of exhibitions and work. I was under the strong influence of the Novosibirsk artist community, which is closely tied to the Blue Noses art group and Slava Mizin. He has a very distinct style of biting irony. I had a long period where I worked in that same register. Another factor was that Novosibirsk is a very pro-communist city. Our mayor was pro-
communist, the city was full of Lenin statues, and there were constant attempts to revive a cult of Stalin. Obviously, none of that resembles true socialism. We live in more like meta-capitalism now, and it’s hard to understand how it matches with Lenin. But somehow Lenin fits into everything. That was the observation I turned into memes. Later, I learned that Lenin resisted the idea of creating a cult around his figure. But the party, having established atheism, needed a new kind of divinity to control society. So, they turned a man into a god. And that’s really what my project is about — the cult, the hollow shell. The name of the project kept changing as it evolved. At first, it was called “Lenin for the soul” — based on the idea that if every town in Russia has a Lenin statue, why not have your own domestic Lenin — a version with the avatar you like? Then I reached a new conceptual phase — “Crisis of faith.” It focused on how the party built a religious substitute around Lenin. The final stage I titled “Nostalgia for nothing.” That’s how the whole project feels — a longing,
romanticisation of the Soviet past. But that Soviet past didn’t exist as people imagine it. Under the Soviet shell, we had another imperialist structure. And the figure of the “strong leader” is also an empty shell — a nothingness people yearn for. Which just shows how badly memory functions — people forget what that figure really meant, and once again want an image of an artificially constructed strong leader.
