Yevgeniy Fiks. Pas De Trois
The exhibition combines three projects by Yevgeniy Fiks that question commonly accepted historical narratives of Soviet history and dispute or disrupt the post-1991 liberal status quo. Fiks’ projects about Soviet-era Russian gay argot/defense language, the representation of African and African American people in Soviet art, and the story Soviet Union’s Jewish Autonomous Region create a version of history that resists the oversimplification of the Soviet experience and the Soviet subject. The exhibition questions the assumptions about the totality and universality of the Soviet experience and proposes a notion of progressive revisionism as a way to address contemporary issues such as selective memory and nationalism of exclusion, without resorting to uncritical restorative nostalgia on the Left.