Further Thoughts: die Studien

Subversion or submission, passive or aggressive, projections versus (self-) protection, (auto-) erotic drive or obsessions or nightmares in the daily habits of a person who has always driven himself into collectivities. Under confinement in the past few months, many were thrown into soliloquy scrutiny of the shrunken borders of their reality, many registered the moment when we started to lose possession of the future.

The recent series of drawings titled Further Thoughts goes along with this ongoing series of posters, a number of sketch boards, study indexes, source collections, things to grasp on. A Durer-like obsessive interrogation of his pillow, pictured again and again until it becomes something else, and of his underwear, pictured again and again, till they transform into masks, and socks into genitals.

These Studien unveil the intimate process of an artist inquiry, mixing visual media footages with poems of Russian futurists as Kruchionykh, or pre-afro-futurist as Langston Hughes in an expanded and distorted temporality when the painful navel-gaze is entangled with witnessing of the real political events out there: the resignation of Bernie Sanders from the US presidential marathon, the commemoration of Lenin’s birthday, the 75^th anniversary of the end of WWII with fellow antifascists, or the dearth of three Group Yorum’s musicians and activists, while on a hunger strike.

All flights are canceled,

the Sun is overthrown by futurists,

the scull is running in a bench allure,

the snake soup is served,

the erection seems permanent-

(-ly lost),

please share your further thoughts with us.

see the poster series battle with Dmitry Vilensky here

and a 6m hight textile object UNTITLED (Shelter piece) made of Camouflage textile to pair with the Museum Songspiel (director Tsaplya)

all textile pieces for the show was produced with participation of the SVEMY cooperative (St Petersburg)

a series of 7 textile works produced for the Chto’s solo at The Gallery Apart, Rome in 2018

all textile pieces for the show was produced with participation of the SVEMY cooperative (St Petersburg)

this piece continues the work Oleynikov started in 2015 in Bosnia\Herzegovina, playing around his obsessions: eroticisms, and historical  sensitivities; oral histories, and urban\rural legends. The story about Tito’s unknown sun now leads us into the mines of Istria, formerly powerful coal industrial area with complex historical background, that Oleynikov won’t even try to untangle. He, instead, weaves more nods, confusing real with a mock, past with now, Tom Waits with late Yugoslav porn magazines, auto-erotic self-ridiculing exercises, and both tragedy and farce.

Oleynikov made a mural as the result of a participatory study on the matter of hospitality. Referring to the classical biblical subject of hospitality of Abraham and to the famous inter-species pedagogical encounters of San Francesco,  re-interpreted in 1968 by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his Uccellini e Uccellacci, the artist will explore the theme together with comrades from GUS\SPRAR (Lecce and Andrano) to build up the narrative of the mural. Conceived as a didactic dictionary chart translating typical italian birds into various African languages and vice versa, participants will consider:

-What does the bird bring to host the stranger?

-What does one need, practically, to be hosted here and now?

-What would you offer as a host to a stranger?

Through a playful and poetic game/ exercise participants will analyse the political and human needs of those in the process of displacement.

this four flags 2×3.5 m each is composed with the quotes from quotes of XX century theater of liberation revolutionaries, such as Augusto Boal, Bert. Brecht, Karolos Koun and others unnamed.

Click to view slideshow.
murals on the walls of the amphitheater at the 1st of May square are based on the quotes from most influential theater and culture figures who resisted fascism and dictatorship. The reference to The Birds by Aristophanes is connected to the play that was staged in the Alsos theater directed by Karolos Koun. In 1942 he founded the experimental Art Theater with Brecht and Pirandello were introduced in their repertoire. Birds were banned by the nazis of course.

Some graffiti works, such as quotes from Brecht that have been present on the walls, sits and stairs of the amphitheater were carefully integrated into the new composition

This piece was made site-specifically and placed in the appartment\studio\institute of Tomislav Gotovac – one of the pillars of the Jugoslav Concept Art. Oleynikov continues his reflections on the daily routine of the artist: solitude, affects, obsessions, transformation(s), and daily politics.

Bathers-1 is a beginning of a series.

The materials for this work are used bed sheets and towels that have preserved traces of life lived – some­one’s wishes, nightmares, impulses, dreams and bodily fluids. Actually, the theme of sleep has been present in Oleynikov’s previous work. In 2005 he created his monumental mural “Sleeping worker”, and in 2007 the graphic series “Heroes”. If the first thematized the political sleep of the modern working class, then the second, who portrayed indifferent young people sunbathing on the beach, spoke to the civil passivity of the contemporary intellectual class.

In his new work the artist returns to the theme of sleep and yet again interprets it politically. The protagonist of this work, “waking up in cold sweat”, realizes that his beloved “left him before the dawn” (classical motif for the blues song), but his conscious still lives the thought that tortured him in his sleep, “insurrection is impossible”. Thus the artist connects the loss of his partner to the impossibility of civil political action. In other words, to him love is rebel­lion, and the excitement of revolution is akin to sensu­al excitement. Love and political revolt are also com­parable in the fact once materialized they make old life impossible and open a door into something new and uncharted and what in the moment seems to be definitely glorious.

As he often  does, Oleynikov gives this piece a structure of a ballade, or even collection of songs, a pod-cast sometimes quoting sometimes referring to existing songs from The Sparks (Rock!) to Meredith Monk (Last Song), to the late soviet punk (Zvuki Mu, Grazhdanskaya Oborona, Zdob Si Zdub). Or reciting some poems (in italian) like fragment of Mayakovsky’s Cloud in Trousers where he describes his state of anxiety of the lover as his nerves would jump out of his body to run crazily on the floor of his bedroom. And one of the major pieces of this series is Oleynikov’s own poem:

IL MIO COMMUNIQUE

In every curl on your pelvis – Lenin
In every new sip of your saliva – Gramsci
In your left armpit – Angela Davis in ferrocious leap
In every scratch-hatch-crack-fold – Virno/Agamben/Negri and their comrades-in-melancholy
On this and on this nipple – Luxemburg and Aliende
In amber of your jet – poor Benjamin
On a single hair – our Pier-Paolo collapsed on the send
That’s why in each splash and every slap of my sperm there is 0.01% average concentration of your tears, and unless 1 drop of my menstrual blood
QUESTO E’ PERCHE

This piece was carried out with the help of sewing cooperative “Shvemy” (Anna Tereshkina, Olesya Zamojskaya)

Background murals are by Gabriella Ciancimino