Like Bulatov, Rubchinskiy has long included lettering
in his work. For his Yekaterinburg show, he chose
Bulatov’s piece in the Yeltsin Center – the word
‘freedom’ painted across a blue sky – as the backdrop
for his catwalk. ‘It symbolises the things that inspire
me most: the sense of freedom that arrived with
the Yeltsin era, as I was growing up. Suddenly, Western
culture was all around us and, to paraphrase Erik, our
enemy was our friend,’ says Rubchinskiy. Was nostalgia
the reason behind his choice of city for the show?
‘It was a case of stars aligning,’ he answers. ‘Primarily,
I did it for the [soccer] World Cup, which will take
place there this summer.’ But there were also political
connotations. ‘It was there that the Romanov family
were executed. It’s also the home town of Boris Yeltsin,
and happens to be Erik’s birthplace.’
It was the perfect location for Western audiences to
learn more about the inluences behind Rubchinskiy’s
work, which is often dismissed as mere expressions of
nostalgia for the immediate post-Soviet era. ‘I miss the
excitement and energy of that time,’ he says. ‘But I alsothink now is the time to relect on what freedom really
means, and on who is a friend and who is an enemy.’
Having spent more than half of his life in the Soviet
Union – and having co-founded the nonconformist
Sretensky Boulevard Group while ostensibly working as
an illustrator of children’s books – Bulatov’s views on
nostalgia are complex. ‘On one hand, there is the desire
to understand what our Soviet past was like, which can
only be a good thing. At the same time, I’m noticing a
tendency towards the idealisation of that Soviet past,
which is extremely dangerous.’ On the subject of the
Soviet system, the artist is frank – ‘I always hated it and
continue to hate it’ – while of the Yeltsin era, he says
‘there was this illusion of freedom, but it felt real at the
time and it opened up promises of possibility and hope’.
Have those promises been fulilled? ‘Pretty much
like Erik’s Tate Modern sculpture, we think we’re
moving forward, when all we’re doing is going around
in circles,’ says Rubchinskiy. ‘It does seem like people
want to go back to an idealised past. But resistance will
always be there. That’s what my work is about.’
‘I ind what’s going on in Russia, but also in Europe
and in America, horrifying,’ adds Bulatov. ‘But all we
can do when the world seems hopeless and full of
question marks is immerse ourselves in our work, to try
and ind some answers. That’s what we have always
done, and we will continue doing it.’ ∂
gosharubchinskiy.com; a-political.org‘Suddenly, Western culture
was all around us, and
our enemy was our friend’
112 ∑
The New East: Part I
ABOVE LEFT, BULATOV’S
PREPARATORY SKETCH FOR
FRIEND SUDDENLY ENEMY, 2017
ABOVE RIGHT, THE ARTIST’S
DESK AND TOOLS, WITH, IN
THE CENTRE, MEMORY OF KIRA,
2011, BY FELLOW RUSSIAN
ARTIST OLEG VASSILIEV