Connections between meaning and visual representation can be puzzling, just like the multiple negotiations that occur between science and art, between natural phenomena and human attempts to grasp, control and even reinvent them through craft. Puzzles of this kind intrigue Sergey Katran. The art critic Vitaly Patsukov has defined the artist as the inventor of intricate “mechanisms” because of the complex ways in which he develops ideas integral to our modern civilization. A former graduate in chemistry and biology, Katran likes to experiment with Science Art and Bio Art in a variety of media, such as installation, sculpture, performance, and video. On the occasion of his most recent exhibition in the UK, currently on display in Wolfson College at the University of Oxford until October 2022, Caterina Domeneghini spoke with the artist and his interpreter, Irene Kukota, about the war in Ukraine, Katran’s country of origin. Their conversation also focused on his current situation, the stance of artists in times of war, and the ways in which his work has captured the growing tensions between two countries he has lived in and loved over the past twenty years.
Sergey, let’s start from where you are right now and what you are doing at this critical moment in our history.
I am currently in Moscow. For forty days I couldn’t do anything, the whole situation came as an overwhelming blow. What is happening to me is precisely what you have been describing, almost a split identity . . . I mean, that’s exactly how I feel, split. I’m in this slightly schizophrenic situation where my heart and all these worries that I experience are in Ukraine and at the same time I physically remain in Russia. And this situation continues, because for various reasons it has to remain like this.
I decided to resume my artistic work after a while, even though I might not be feeling entirely up to it. Many artists are leaving the country. I decided I am not going to leave for now. Instead, I am planning to make an artistic project at an independent art platform, dedicated to the current situation. Rather than fearing it, I want to still be able to express what I feel, though I cannot tell you much more for now.
You said that many Russian artists are leaving the country. Many artists, too, have withdrawn their participation from important international events, like the Venice Biennale. Does art still have reasons to exist in times like this?
You know, when the whole thing started, I was talking to some good artists, quite well known, and many of them were expressing different sentiments, emotions, thoughts. Some of them were saying, “What have we done wrong? How could we not prevent this from happening?” A couple of them were saying they didn’t want to be artists anymore.
It’s the usual thing, as clichéd as it may sound: art works with rather fine substances or fine energies, if you like this expression. It works with a certain germination of thought. Do you know the phrase “When the cannons are firing, the Muses are silent?” Art seems irrelevant in situations like this. Artists feel that their voices are not going to be heard, because there are other, more pressing issues of survival on people’s minds. Perhaps art should be using other media in times like these. It might need to be more performative, more poster-like, as it’s closer to action and speaks more directly about the current situation.
On the other hand, when looking at the chronicles of places ravaged by the war, like Mariupol or Kharkiv, such discussions appear nonsensical. It’s a constant struggle that I face as an artist: the futility of my efforts and, on the other hand, the wish to speak up, refusing to be silenced in the face of the atrocity.
Your latest project in Oxford, Until the Word is Gone, is an appeal to human solidarity through a patrimony that we all share, that is, language.
Yes. Until the Word is Gone is a project that lies at the intersection of various disciplines because it touches upon linguistics, art, anthropology, and others. Language is our heritage, as much as other forms of material cultural heritage. It’s just that we do not pay enough attention to it. Language expresses this or that culture or civilization in a condensed form. It is a coded system which contains all the most important notions and encapsulates philosophical theories and ancient mythologies which this or that culture have produced. So, when we are losing a language, we are also losing a certain perception of the world. Our culture forces us to have a certain perception of the world and we think it’s the only one, but when we come into contact with other cultures and languages, we discover there are so many other ways of interpreting this or that phenomenon, even the natural world. And the more languages we speak, the less colonial in our attitudes we end up. As an artist, my major task is to establish connections, to create a dialogue between people, who can at times be radically different from each other. Until the Word is Gone celebrates the immense cultural diversity of the world, in all its fullness and magnificence. Contrary to that, as I have recently stated in my letter to Wolfson College, circulated to the students, the war divides, tears apart, cripples, annihilates, derides, and distorts whatever remains precious in human nature and culture.
Russia and Ukraine have been speaking the language of hostility over the past decade, yet they have never stopped feeding your artistic imagination. Perhaps Russia even more than Ukraine, in a sense? Your career only really started when you moved to Moscow.
It is incredibly complicated for me to answer your question. Perhaps, behind this assumption that I became a more prolific artist after I left Ukraine lie the seeds for an even broader question, one concerned with the necessity to leave one’s country in order to make art freely . . . It is a question that takes us back to the idea that artists should migrate and continue their work elsewhere right now, a point which we were touching upon earlier when you mentioned the Venice Biennale. Yes, in the 1990s and early 2000s, there might have been more opportunities for me artistically in Russia at some stage. But it must be understood that, besides artistic strategies, there is also private life. My early time in Moscow was a happy one, personally and artistically. I expanded my network and managed to find a milieu that nurtured my career and offered me the opportunity to remain financially and artistically independent. At that stage, it was possible to live and work in Moscow, to freely express oneself and feel relatively safe.
What did the artistic panorama look like in Moscow back then? Was it a fairly open space?
If you read the history of the Russian art market in the early 2000s, Russia offered vast opportunities for artistic development. It was a time when all sorts of galleries sprang up, all kinds of art shows were running without being censored. Even if scandals occasionally occurred, they did not have the same consequences they would have now, leading to arrest and, in some cases, imprisonment. Moscow was the first city in Russia where the first Sotheby’s auction was held, in 1988, and people like Kabakov and Bruskin (his exhibition was recently censored and closed in Moscow) suddenly became the stars of the art scene and moved to the United States. Now, as you know, Sotheby’s has recently closed its office in Russia, putting an end to the whole era . . . It was a time when Russia was hopeful to become a democratic country and the whole world was open to Russian artists, more or less. It was also much easier to find someone to promote or sponsor your exhibition, especially as an emerging artist, as contemporary art was better appreciated and understood in Russia. You can look at the spectacular career of Oleg Kulik, an artist from Kyiv who belongs to an older generation. He teamed up with gallerist Marat Guelman to create ground-breaking and controversial art shows. Guelman has recently been proclaimed a foreign agent and Kulik was questioned and faced possible prosecution for “rehabilitating Nazism” with his sculptural work Big Mother, exhibited at Art Moscow. As for the Ukrainian art scene, it gradually started getting accustomed to the notion of contemporary art around 2004–2005. Prior to that, Ukrainian artists received very traditional training and the public still had little experience in viewing contemporary art and faced difficulties in contextualizing the artworks, because of their lack of fundamental background knowledge. A new era began when Pinchuk opened his foundation in 2006 and started seriously supporting contemporary Ukrainian artists. In Russia, this process began much earlier, and as early as the 1990s one could enroll in various contemporary art schools or study with Joseph Backstein in Moscow.
Anyway, to return to your previous question about having to make art in a different country . . . If you ask me about the present, I think it’s not me, nor any other artist, who should be leaving, but the people who have initiated the whole situation. They should be the ones to leave! I realize that it’s a utopia, but perhaps as an artist I have a license to create utopias and this is how it would look in my ideal world.
Can “storytelling” be another word for “creating utopias”? You use narrative to shape alternative worlds that bind people together in an attempt to work out the meaning of your art. The Saga of the Tin Soldiers was inspired by Andersen’s homonymous fairy tale, Until the Word is Gone by Tolkien’s linguistic trees.
Yes. I think that the fairy tales, legends, and traditions we learn during our childhood become part of the inner landscape of our soul for good. They enter our unconscious and then we act them out without even noticing. I recollect coming up with an action that consisted in writing the word “happiness” on a watery surface with a pitchfork. It corresponded to a common proverb shared by Ukrainians and Russians: “It is written with a pitchfork on the waters” [corresponding to the saying “it is still in the air” in English.] Overall, the proverb refers to something vague, tentative, or even dubious. I came up with an idea of this performance all of a sudden; it occurred to me one morning during spring, right after I woke up. We managed to stage this performance right beside the Hermitage on the Neva River, in the very heart of St. Petersburg, during Manifesta 10 in 2014.
This leads us to the question of what the mission of art, the justification of its existence, is. For me, it’s a paramount question. In my mind, the artist is the person who creates alternative universes, these possibilities that do not yet exist but have the potential to become reality. It’s the array of possibilities that the artist creates in their narrative through an artwork. This is what I consider the mission of art, because when something is conceived of, you know, mentally, or created as an artwork, it can eventually be brought to life. It can finally happen because people become aware of the possibility of its realization. This is the most important role of art, in my opinion.
Translated from the Russian by Irene Kukota
Watch for the unabridged interview in our Fall 2022 edition.
Caterina Domeneghini is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Oxford and a recent graduate of UCL and Cambridge, where she studied Classics. She is committed to make the Humanities a place for more diverse and inclusive encounters through collaboration with academic and public institutions sharing a similar ethos. A former intern at Thames & Hudson and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Caterina writes freelance for literary and cultural magazines in Italy and the UK. Her work has appeared in, or is forthcoming for, Artribune, theWise Magazine, the Oxford Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Asymptote, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has also published poetry in the Oxonian Review and Lucent Dreaming.
Irene Kukota holds a master’s degree from the University of Oxford, where she studied art and literature of Late Antique Syria and Byzantium, and an M.A. in Fine and Decorative Arts from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She now teaches art history at the University of Glasgow and works as an independent curator and academic researcher. She previously collaborated with the Royal Collection and the Kremlin Museums as a researcher and translator on numerous occasions. After working for five years as a cataloguer, translator and consultant for the Icons and Works of Russian Art Departments at Christie’s, she has recently turned to art journalism. Her work has appeared, among others, in the Art Newspaper Russia and Russian Art and Culture. She is the curator of Sergey Katran’s exhibition at Wolfson College, Oxford, Until the Word is Gone.
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