Katya Ev I Axe de Révolution, performance, streets of Moscow, 2014

Axe de Révolution

score (statement) for live performance Axe de Révolution,

email,

2017

2 + 2 AP

courtesy of Katya Ev & Hanna Zubkova

ph Katya Ev, Galerie Mansart

The live performance Axe de Révolution has expanded into a homologue body of works, sharing the same title (2014/2019) incl. film, photographs, sculpture, email, neon, print editions.

Images 1, 2: View of the exhibition Persistent in changing nothing: revolution by political profanes, Galerie Mansart, Paris (Fr), 2017; curator Azad Asifovich

"Found" digital object, the email serves as an edition for the presentation and conservation of the work Axe de Révolution (2014) —a unique live event that took place in Moscow in August 2014, closely tied to the political contexts and urban architectural setting of a specific moment in Russian modern history. As a communicative semantic container, it gathers all the structural components of the work, including its statement, protocol, video documentation, research materials, along with their contextualization.

Organized as a “catalogue” with hyperlinks, it offers the viewer an open-ended, layered navigation through the performance’s context, drifting and echoing the experience of a walking dérive. It serves as a means to collect a live performance—an almost-material object that embodies a banal form of written communication. This digital edition allows for a wide variety of presentation modalities (e.g., laptop, personal phones of the visitors, wall projection), each implying a form of communicative engagement. Katya Ev

"Axe de Révolution serves as a powerful example of an abstract performance [...] a pure semantic entity, that originated in the specific context and only gains its emotional intensity and meaning in relation to it. After extreme tightening of the internal politics, and return of state violence in 2011, 2014 became the point of no return in the contemporary Russian history. In the heat of war in Ukraine, it became clear that the country has taken the direction of repressive state, the beginning of return to the USSR’s politics of propaganda, state lies, blindness, isolation and nationalism. At this moment in history, two women, carrying a heavy iron beam through the streets of the Russian capital reference at once several layers of political, historical and cultural reality: a famous episode of Vladimir Lenin’s biography — carrying a beam together with the workers on the 1st May, 1920; the routine of construction works in contemporary Moscow landscape; the power relations structured by the city planning. [...]". Katya Krupennikova, The End of the World, Centro Pecci, Prato (It), 2016, p. 352-353