Yevgeniy Fiks
Conference program
Program 1
Queering The Lenin Museum
Conference in English
September 23, 2015, 6pm
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
Yevgeniy Fiks will discuss his recent projects that address Soviet LGBT history as part of a larger Soviet narrative. He will specifically focus on his project "The Lenin Museum" which reflects on the historical contradictions and complexities of intersections between Communism and anti-Communism as well as ideology and sexual identity. The project acknowledges the Lenin Museum as a site for memorialization not only of Lenin, but of the fate of free expression of sexual identity in Russia during periods of homosexuality's criminalization between 1933 and 1993, after its decriminalization by Lenin in 1917. It reflects on how Cold War forces of anti-Communism in the West instrumentalized homophobic sentiments as a weapon in the struggle against the Soviet Union, and how today anti-Communist discourse contributes to the construction of political homophobia in post-Soviet Russia.
Program 2
Post-Soviet Without Shores
Conference in English
September 24, 2015 at 12:30 PM
Programme ICI (Intervenants culturels internationaux) at Université du Québec à Montréal
J-7130, Pavillon Judith Jasmin
ici.uqam.ca
Yevgeniy Fiks will discuss several of his projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, focusing on the issues of internationalism and solidarity. This will include “The Wayland Rudd Collection,” a collaborative project organized by Fiks that focuses on the representation of Africans and African-Americans in Soviet visual culture; and “A Gift to Birobidzhan,” a reenactment of the 1936 gesture of a gift of art by American artists to USSR’s Jewish Autonomous Region.
Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, among them: “Lenin for Your Library?” in which he mailed V.I. Lenin’s text "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” to one hundred global corporations as a donation for their corporate libraries; “Communist Party USA,” a series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA, painted from life in the Party’s national headquarters in New York City; and “Communist Guide to New York City,” a series of photographs of buildings and public places in New York City that are connected to the history of the American Communist movement.
Fiks’ work has been shown internationally. This includes exhibitions in the United States at Winkleman and Postmasters galleries (both in New York) Mass MoCA, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Marat Guelman Gallery in Moscow; Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, and the Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon. His work has been included in the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015), Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011), and Biennale of Sydney (2008).
