9 - Personal Traces in the Soviet Industrial Aftermath: Pavel Otdelnov’s Promzona and Haim Sokol’s Paper Memory Exhibitions in Moscow

Summary

Abstract

The chapter explores distinct creative approaches to Soviet industrial heritage taken by Pavel Otdelnov and Haim Sokol in their respective research-based exhibitions “Promzona” (2019) and “Paper Memory” (2017). Otdelnov's large museum show narrated the detail-rich story of his industrial hometown of Dzerzhinsk while focusing on the modern-day ruins of its former chemical plants. Contrastingly, Sokol's was an intimate archival installation, staged on the premises of a factory of technical paper in Moscow and dedicated to the people employed there in the 1930s–1950s. As we demonstrate by a critical ekphrasis of the projects, the artists assume divergent positions regarding the relationship between the documentary and the poetical, the ethical and the aesthetic, the notion of testimony, and crucially, the philosophy of history.

Keywords: USSR; Russia; archive; ruins; testimony; ecology; working class; painting; installation

The Soviet industrial heritage that continues to significantly define the contours of contemporary Russian economy also haunts the collective memory and creative imagination of the country. This retrospective trend found a culminating expression in one of the longest-running and most remarkable cultural projects in Russia—the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art. Launched in 2010, it has taken place in the city of Ekaterinburg, its vicinity, and other towns of the wider Ural region. Already a major metallurgical centre since the early eighteenth century, in the Soviet era the region was transformed into an industrial powerhouse with heavy machine building among its primary sectors. Despite the economic downturn of the 1990s, it still functions today. The Biennial's exhibitions, artistic residencies, and public events inhabit both the derelict and the still active industrial infrastructure of the Urals, thus turning the local economy into an internationally recognizable cultural brand. The works and ideas of artists, curators, and researchers, brought together with the material production of goods, celebrate the “the industry of meanings.” It might be argued that this example of cultural gentrification, along with numerous cases of converting imperial and Soviet factories’ into leisure, office, and service facilities in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and elsewhere, agrees with the expansionist logic of the post-industrial turn.

Still, Russia essentially remains a country of industry, with a significant part of its gross domestic product provided by the extraction, processing, and exporting of natural resources, largely dependent on Soviet-period developments and production sites.