Deimantas Narkevičius, Energy Lithuania, 2000
Artist: Deimantas Narkevičius (born 1964 in Utena, Lithuania; lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania). Materials: Super-8 film, color, 4:3, stereo; 17 min. Description: The film is a portrait of the town Elektrėnai, which was built to support an electric power station in 1960. The station provided the first central electrification of Lithuania and was a modernizing […]
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Palace of Projects, 1995-2001
Artist: Ilya Kabakov (born 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk, USSR; died 2023) and Emilia Kabakov (born 1945 in Dnepropetrovsk; lives and works in Long Island, NY). Description: “The Palace of Projects, created by husband and wife Ilya and Emilia Kabakov is a spiraling architectural structure forty-feet high and eighty feet in diameter. The nautilus-shaped Palace is constructed of […]
IRWIN, Retroavantgarde, 1996
Artist: IRWIN [Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik] (collective founded 1983 in Ljubljana, Slovenia; works in Ljubljana). Materials: Mixed media; 120 x 200 cm. Description: A wall diagram that spoofs Alfred H. Barr’s 1936 diagram of modern art. The IRWIN equivalent extents back from its present day (IRWIN) back to the […]
Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater, Retrogarde Event Baptism under Triglav, 1986
Artist: Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater (founded 1983 by Eda Čufer, Miran Mohar, and Dragan Živadinov in Ljubljana, Slovenia; terminated 1987). Documentation: A group portrait of NSK [Neue Slowenische Kunst] members in front of a model of Tatlin’s tower from the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre production. Photo by Marko Modic. Description: In ‘The Founding Act’ (of 13 October […]
IRWIN, Icons – Retroprincip, 1983 – ongoing
Artist: IRWIN [Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik] (collective 1983 founded in Ljubljana, Slovenia; works in Ljubljana). Description: IRWIN select and remix ideologically specific imagery (rather than the de-hierarchized remixing of forms found in postmodernist architecture, where motifs and styles are divorced from their social and cultural meanings). All imagery can […]
Electroboutique, 3G International, 2010
Artist: Electroboutique [Aristarkh Chernyshev and Alexei Shulgin] (collective, founded in Moscow, 2004; lives and works in Moscow). Materials: Fiberglass, duratrans, and electronics; 240 x 139.7 x 139.7 cm. Description: “A giant distorted iPhone 3G, shaped as Tatlin’s Monument to the [Third] International. Tatlin’s work is considered one of the avant-garde icons, whereas [the] iPhone is a bright […]
Chto Delat, “Debates on the Avant-Garde” cover illustration, 2007
Artist: Chto Delat [What Is to Be Done?] [Tsaplya Olga Egorova, Nina Gasteva, Artiom Magun, Nikolay Oleynikov, Natalia Pershina/Glucklya, Alexey Penzin, David Riff, Alexander Skidan, Oxana Timofeeva, Dmitry Vilensky] (collective founded in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Russia). Description: Illustration by Australian artist Zanny Begg for the front page of the newspaper Chto delat? (What Is to Be Done?), […]
Yuri Avvakumov, Perestroika Tower, 1990
Artist: Yuri Avvakumov (born 1957 in Tiraspol, Moldova; lives and works in Moscow, Russia). Description: In the mid-1980s Avvakumov produced a series of sculptural works titled “Temporary Monuments,” commemorating the constructivist art and architecture of the 1920s. Worker and Farmer International is a reference to Vera Mukhina and Vladimir Tatlin: the skeleton of Mukhina’s Worker and […]
IRWIN and Michael Benson, Black Square on Red Square, 1992
Artist: IRWIN [Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik] (collective founded 1983 in Ljubljana, Slovenia; works in Ljubljana) and Michael Benson (born 1962 in Munich, Germany; lives and works in Brooklyn, USA). Materials: A square of black cloth, 22 meters on each side. Description: Unfurled in Moscow’s Red Square in ironic homage […]
Grzegorz Klaman, Gates II, 2000
Artist: Grzegorz Klaman (born 1959 in Nowy Targ, Poland; lives and works in Gdánsk, Poland). Description: The artist was commissioned by the Gdánsk city government and the Polish trade union “Solidarity” to make a work of public sculpture. Klaman made two sculptures, Gates I and Gates II, the latter quoting Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20). “[The work was […]
