Issue 22, May 2008

Bereznitsky, Berlin
8 March - 13 April

Review by Sarah James

Many critics have written about the post-Soviet condition of contemporary art, but what does it really mean? And is it still relevant in today's increasingly homogeneous artworld? This show at Berlin's relatively new Bereznitsky gallery suggests it is, bringing together a selection of some of the Ukraine's most significant contemporary painters, photographers and installation artists – Boris Mikhailov, Ilya Chichkan, Alexander Hnilitsky, REVISION Group, Andrei Loginov and Julia Kissina – some already well known, others much neglected. The work and its curatorial framing reopen many questions about the issues which defined, and continue to influence, contemporary practices in the former Eastern Bloc. The show also reminds us of the tendency of the Western artworld to confine the term 'post-Soviet art' to contemporary Russian practice.

The first gallery is home to Hnilitsky and Lesia Zaiats's fascinating project Media Comfort (2007), which reimagines a domestic setting as art. Beautifully literal paintings of radios and bookcases recreate the functional as the aesthetic, mimicking the banal or utilitarian. Lamp (2007) is illuminated from behind by a lightbox, giving the twodimensional canvas a warming domestic glow. In the corner of the space sits a sort of ur-form TV sculpture, its musty golden screen still and opaque. By contrast, on the wall an anonymous found object – a decorative floral painting, typical of 1950s Soviet kitsch – occupies the place of art proper. The two artists (Ukraine's representatives at last year's Venice Biennale) founded the Institute of Unstable Thoughts in Kiev in 1996. As the title suggests, their practice turns on the interrogation of art's powers of visual deception and imitation, and the point where realism and illusion meet. All these themes are deeply indebted to – and embedded in – a Soviet past in which the symbolisation of ideology was art's daily task, and the system of disembodied symbols often associated with the immaterialism of communism was ranged against the material consumption of the West.

Next door, large photos by Chichkan share the space with Mikhailov. Like the latter's dark documentary works, Chichkan's images are indebted to the visual culture that defined Soviet and postcommunist Ukraine, while playing ironically with staged photography and film. Two works from the cycle Obvious Unbelievable (2004) depict the artist and a partner dressed in large furry alien costumes, frolicking and copulating in dark woodland. Chichkan's surreal picture worlds – unlike the tired postmodern staged photoworks of Cindy Sherman – ask questions about the modes of documentary production, the nature of capitalist consumption, the paradoxical nature of nostalgia and the antagonisms that emerge between tangible, material recollection and traditional symbolic memory. Next is a large glossy photomontage by the REVISION Group, Revision of Museum (2005). The work – a return to the genre of history painting – self-consciously critiques and pokes fun at the bizarre revision of art history and artistic practice that ensued after the collapse of communism. The artists are presented looting a museum, dropping Jeff Koons and juggling Warhols. Today it's sometimes too easy to forget that the Cold War ever existed, but its influence still plays a crucial role in Ukrainian art production, its retrospective history and the intriguing aesthetic and ideological investigations being made by its contemporary practitioners.