The Gallery Apart hosts the exhibition Bird Works (2018 – 2024) by Chto Delat, the well-known Russian collective made up of philosophers, critics and artists disliked by the Putin regime and now forced into exile in various European cities. With this selection of recent works, corresponding to a period of general authoritarian tightening, the emergence of the environmental crisis in the collective consciousness and the outbreak of the pandemic, twenty years of resistance of the group and ten years since the foundation of the School of Engaged Art in St. Petersburg.
What is Chto Delat
What’s the matter? (“Что делать?”) in Russian means What to do?, and is the title of the pamphlet of the same name published by Lenin in 1902: their answer to this question is an interdisciplinary activism that combines art and political reflection in the name of dissidence and imagination. Because in a time in which biennials and market trends bring out, among critics and the most astute public, the question of a space for political art (and the survival of those who create and disseminate it), art continues to undermine the configurations of reality to which we are accustomed, with an intrinsically revolutionary disruptiveness that the St. Petersburg collective has never attempted to mitigate and which it also advocates in the writings published in Russian and English on the chtodelat.org website.
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The Chto Delat exhibition in Rome
The underlying theme of the exhibition, the third from The Gallery Apart, are birds, which in the common imagination represent, in fact, an irreducible tension towards freedom, even when imprisoned. And like the canary that once warned miners of the danger of a gas leak, we too should always be ready to warn, Chto Delat tells us, of the advance of authoritarianism and injustice. The works presented in Rome therefore illustrate the critical sentinel function of art through prefigurations of the future of humanity (the 2024 series The class of political magic, The class of external environment study, The class of Celestial Hardwood study, After we left), cross-readings of episodes of intellectual resistance and current geopolitics (the extraordinary acrylics on canvas by Nikolay Oleynikov2023-24, and its series Ready meal for Pasolini2022), graphic and performative processing of scientific data on the climate (The screens. On the margins2020) and the recovery of the Byzantine figurative tradition (the enchanting series Canary Archive, 2023, made in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine). All this, with the characteristic expressiveness of this group: puns verbal and conceptual, mnemonic overlaps, compositions of found objectsbanners, videos and a language which in its colors and techniques recalls the naïf but always expresses, in reality, a thoughtful and rigorous political instance.
Mariasole Garacci
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