The Russian Schizorevolution

Joseph Brodsky once said that "...the issue to an artist is to tell the history not on its own but on his own terms".

In 2009, Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture, proposed to organise an exhibition about the avant-garde in St. Petersburg in the 1980s - 1990s of the 20th century. This prompted us to realize a fictional event, which we had already addressed in previous works, in a more monumental way, and thus to take a next step in our artistic practice. Moreover, an additional, interesting topic came into our focus, namely the role of the curator in contemporary art practice. We decided to create a total installation that would portray an exhibition of the avant-garde in St. Petersburg. During the implementation of the project we were engaged in, among other things, selecting artists and artworks, attracting art critics to write texts, and collecting material in film and video archives in St. Petersburg. As curators of this project, we decided to execute and perform all the works in the exhibition ourselves. This was entirely in the spirit of artistic practices in the 1980s and 1990s, when artists often played with authorship. At Marres, stretching out over two floors, we presented a 'reconstruction' of an exhibition that could have been, but in reality never took place.

This project represents our current view of the avant-garde art scene of St. Petersburg in the 1980s and 1990s - complemented by the warm feelings for friends-as-artists, with whom we spent our youth.