AIDAN SALAHOVA | Articles

DO NOT SHOOT THE WHITE SWANS

What sets a gallerist apart from a critic or a curator is that he sees the works of the artists he represents in their full scope. This internalized knowledge makes it hard not to feel negative emotions upon reading the set of cliches that critics juggle from one article to the next. Oleg Kulik hasn’t bitten anyone in years, yet he continues to be the human dog, a threat to philistines and delicate young ladies. The works of Dubosarsky and Vinogradov, which can be divided into at least three distinct periods, are still labeled “made-to-order.” Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe exists in the framework of his well-chosen pseudonym, while Anatoly Osmolovsky, who has long worked in abstraction, will forever remain in critical literature as the man who spelled a dirty word on Red Square. Perhaps the artist buried deepest in cliche is Aidan Salakhova – a “beauty, society queen and successful gallerist,” who dashes off countless odalisques in her short breaks between society parties, appointments with her beautician and business meetings.

Stop. Let’s put an end to the labels and cliches. The time has come to clean off the tarnished biographies and show that an artist is called a “star” not because of a random decision but as the result of years of intense work. The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and XL Gallery are starting a long-term program nominally called “Moscow Contemporary,” which aims to widen the frames in which the works of Moscow’s best-known artists are viewed. The psychoanalytic goal of this project is to give a full picture of how the artists have developed over the last 10 years and show absolutely new works – not just for the sake of the average viewer, but mainly for the professional community, so critics can forget about press releases and time-worn descriptions and get detailed answers to all their hypothetical questions. And at last the public will have a chance to form its own opinion about the importance of each of the artists presented without imposed definitions.

And maybe then it will become clear that Kulik doesn’t just bite, that Dubosarsky and Vinogradov are not merely executors of potential commissions, that Mamyshev-Monroe’s alter egos are not only female, and that Osmolovsky has worked his way through many discourses to get from a dirty word to total abstraction. We hope that the retrospective of Aidan Salakhova will acquaint the professional community with a “new” artist, only a fraction of whose work is occupied by those notorious odalisques, while the tough questions of mutual influence between the East and West, feminist discourse and the art of past centuries are in a complex state of mutual contamination with the “severe style” of post-war Soviet art, new interpretations and the strong individual personality of one of the most fascinating representatives of contemporary Moscow. And maybe then at least one of the critics will think that the harmless cliche about “her father’s daughter” is not just about kinship – it has a deep artistic subtext.

Elena Selina

With the exhibition “Aidan,” the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and XL Gallery are starting the program “Moscow Contemporary,” a series of retrospectives of masters of contemporary art.
The current exhibition covers a long period and a breadth of genres in the work of Aidan Salakhova – a curator, gallerist and teacher at the Surikov Art Institute. One of the central works at the exhibition, “Golden Mean,” speaks eloquently of the artist’s aspiration to achieve harmony, a state in art where the parts fully fit the whole, and the whole is in accord with its components. Harmony is not only about art’s physical forms, but about the mental content that penetrates form and ultimately becomes an integral part of it. Salakhova achieves this in all her works, be they paintings, drawings, installations or videos. It is significant that her art is clearly built on the struggle and absolute merging of opposites.
Salakhova’s art is about faithfulness to high traditions and flawless mastery of techniques that have been part of art for centuries, and yet it has innovation and technologies that became part of the arsenal of art not long ago.
It is about serenity and anxiety, conflict and peace, provocation and the effacement of contradictions. It is about irony and gravity, cold and heat, clean air and pungent smells. Salakhova’s works paradoxically combine the potentially shocking with beauty in the classical sense. They mix an interest in Eastern traditions with total engagement in the global context.
Naturally, this is the eternal gap between the masculine and the feminine and their ultimate inseparability, in terms of biology, culture, philosophy, or sociology. It is about day and night and the sun and the moon, constantly replacing each other in a revolution that makes possible life, and consequently art.
“Aidan,” which shows early works from the beginning of the 1990s and very recent ones, demonstrates how the artist has stayed true to her chosen path while perfecting her skill in all its manifestations. Her works are made exactly as they should be – it’s impossible to add or remove anything. Yet they do not become monuments to themselves; they live a secret life, they fall asleep and wake up, like the heroine of one of Salakhova’s videos.
Osip Mandelstam once wrote: “Heaviness and tenderness are sisters, their features are alike...” Salakhova’s art, despite all its differences with Mandelstam’s poetry, is about the same thing. It shows that the contradictions between heaviness and tenderness, questions and answers, or the sun and the moon are nothing but an illusion – as long as they are handled by a master.

Nikita Alexeev

... And Woman Created God: Aidan Salakhova’s Video Works
Antonio Geusa

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819

Aidan Salakhova’s first video work, Suspense (1998), marks a momentous instance in the process of institutionalisation of video art in Russia, signalling, about a decade after its birth, the definitive and “official” affirmation of video in the contemporary art exhibition space. In its structural mechanism, Suspense is in fact the first video installation based on the interdependence between two genres, two different approaches to artistic expression, one – painting – that boasts a millenarian tradition and the other – video – that speaks of technological progress and the new. On a large canvas a seated pregnant woman stays frozen in time in the semi-darkness of the exhibition room. The pensive expression of her face, her hands wrapped around her gravid belly, the plainness of her clothes, and the monochromatic texture of the canvas, all convey the eerie sense of waiting and tense expectation of pregnancy. Suddenly, the stillness is broken and the woman unexpectedly comes to life. The canvas is turned into a screen on which the same woman leaves her seat and slowly stands up.
Significantly, notwithstanding the fact that in this work the projected images have to impose their own laws on the painting depriving it of more congenial light conditions, and changing the original visual texture of the painted surface into a bluish variant, the artist avoids whatsoever conflict between the two genres. Painting and video are here perfectly balanced accomplices, flawlessly coordinated allies in creating the dense sense of suspense that the title itself suggests as one of the keywords in the interpretation of the work. The video – the woman slowly standing up – adds to the motionless suspense of the painting an awareness of that discomfort that pregnant women unavoidably feel throughout the period of gestation. This sense of uneasiness legitimate to consider these images carriers of a faint echo of Aidan’s earlier works, such as the series Abortion, focused on the physical and psychological trauma of losing a child before its birth. Just a faint echo though, because there is no aggressive statements here or visceral display of the atrocities of such a pain for a woman. Furthermore, the deliberate absence of sound accrues the sense of disquieting expectation.
Again, painting finds in video the perfect companion to create that full sense of suspension that lies at the core of the work. Notably, the incessant repetition of the gesture of slowly standing up increases this feeling. To a certain extent, it is as if the woman had been cursed by a Greek god to reiterate the same action again and again. One could venture that the crime that she must have committed to deserve such a punishment can be anything in relation to love, the driving force and the leitmotif in Salakhova’s artistic production. However, this is only one of the possible readings. There are many others, all undoubtedly legitimate. It is a constant in Aidan’s video production in fact that her works are always symbolical and never allegorical, engendering a multitude of references. In the specific, here the pregnant woman offers a wide spectre of interpretations ranging from fertility to maternal love, from numbness to discomfort, from challenging death to physical pain.
Ultimately, this woman stands alone as a titanic heroine in the circumscribed space of the canvas/screen in full charge of her own territory. Her simple, almost mechanic, movements deprive the voyeuristic act itself of concessions to lust and sexual gratification. Consequently, the sense of suspense and suspension that both painting and video elicit in the viewers clearly impairs any consideration of the imagery proposed as objectification of the woman.

In a certain sense, this pregnant woman can be considered the primogenitor of all the other female characters who will inhabit in the years to come Aidan’s videography. In her following video installation, Sleeping Beauty (2000), the artist re-enacts the interaction still image-moving images of Suspense. Once again, here at the centre of the stage is placed one single woman. Importantly, the shift from the mother-to-be to the new heroine is of pivotal significance in the alignment of the subject matter of her videos with those who populate her paintings, the genre to which Salakhova belongs by education, and photographs. Here the artist offers the viewers one of the most significant characters from her own mythology, the Odalisque. In Sleeping Beauty Aidan both re-actualises the legacy of her affiliation to Saint Petersburg Neo-Academism and re-presents her Middle East roots. The imperative canon of Beauty of the former is mixed with the exotic corporality of the latter. In this work, Aidan sensually merges together the two traditions. Furthermore, the title itself – one of Charles Perrault’s most famous fairy tales – undoubted testimony of Western culture, pushes this fusion of West and East even further. The tale that Aidan is telling this time, with a woman from the East as main character, seems to belong instead to The Book of the Thousand and One Nights. Sleeping Beauty is undoubtedly a more sensual – carnal would be a better word – work than its predecessor. A direct descendant of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ odalisques, Salakhova’s “animated” half-naked woman, maintaining her role of emissary of physical pleasure and lust, helps the artist to strengthen her programmatic depiction of Beauty as a sublime aesthetical category in art.

Two years later, in 2002 Aidan builds the “House of God” (Kaaba), a massive black cube containing four pairs of female eyes – one on each side – looking from inside their black paranja at the world around them. On the outside, two large projections show two men dressed in traditional costumes performing Sufi dance rituals. In a relatively limited space and with not many components Salakhova manages once again to condense a set of indexes which authorise a variegate range of interpretations. One of the oddest is that the black cube stands both as an artistic re-presentation of the Black Stone of Mecca (in Arabic also called “Kaaba”), worshipped by millions of pilgrims every year; and as a vagina – a legitimate interpretation given that the black construction has four orifices on each side and it is inhabited by women. Ultimately, Aidan’s House of God is the House of Women. Clearly, there is no blasphemy in this appropriation. On the contrary, this is an authoritative stand from the artist herself.
As a matter of fact, such an unconventional combination would not look like an incongruity when taking into consideration Salakhova’s artistic path. Far from being after publicity and scandal, Aidan has never been afraid to set challenges and take risks. Singularly, this side of her artistic persona in the video works is never shouted or displayed as first layer. It comes up instead after a closer examination. Therefore, if at first glance Kaaba seems willing to please and interest the viewers with its ethnographic documents, the magnitude of the installation and the display of technology, an accurate analysis proves that there are many other strata hidden under the captivating surface. First of all, Kaaba appears to be a vehement statement on the cardinal and ruling role of women. Cinema theory, an indispensable instrument in critical study on video art, offers a pertinent source in Laura Mulvey’s pivotal essay “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Here the theorist scrutinises mainstream cinema to isolate the “male gaze” as the dominant recipient dictating the way films should be structured. Women have always been treated by the Hollywood film industry, observes Mulvey, as “objects” to satisfy the voyeuristic needs of men. Clearly, Aidan subverts this attitude and places the “female gaze” at the centre of the House of God. According to psychoanalytical principles, the gaze is a psychological index of power, so that the one who is in control of the gaze (the gazer) holds a superior position over the one who is the object of the gaze. In Salakhova’s Kaaba, women are the gazers. They possess an extra-diegetic gaze – from the inside to the outside – that dominates their surrounding space. They control this space, that is to say the spectators as well. Incidentally, it has to be pointed out that it is for these eyes that the Sufi dancers perform their dance. In other words, men are here “objectified”.

The following year Aidan places two women-warriors at the centre of the stage of her installation Love and Death. Aptly, it is in the video that these women meet. Before their story begins, two large photographs display them standing boldly still richly dressed in Eastern traditional costumes holding daggers and a sword in their hands. After leaving the “ethnographic” space of their photographs, these two women move into the centre and start their fight-dance. They combat cruelly; one would be tempted to say that they fight “like men”. However, such as simile is valid only if it is not misinterpreted as a parody of the act of fight that “by convention” belongs to men. Aidan’s female warriors are not antagonists to men. The warriors are women to whom the artist has given “masculine” strength. As the title suggest, they are visual embodiment of the passion of love bordering with death that a woman feels. To a certain extent, the “exotic” element, a dominant feature in Aidan’s imagery, is brought here to its extreme: the visualization of the intensity of feeling. In its essence, Love and Death is a work about how passionate women can be, because, first of all, the story that Aidan tells here – once again – is about Love. Love intended in its literary Romantic acceptation, Love tainted by Death.

Salakhova’s next video, Habibi (2004), stands out for being her most “Bachtinian” work, given that both the “carnivalesque” and the Other are here represented. Undoubtedly, it also appears to be the most overtly ironic in her videography. It consists of one long close-up of the waist of a professional belly dancer dressed with the traditional dinging costume. Here, Aidan brassily isolates that anatomical part of the female body that exerts an erotic function in the East, whilst in the West is vehemently feared by women and doomed to a secluded life: the “overweight” belly. The artist defiantly makes an Eastern perception of erotica and a Western complex merge together. Once again, she manages to avoid exploitation of the woman body offered for the “visual pleasure” of the “male gaze”. In Habibi the endlessly dancing woman is fully in charge of the action. Taking into consideration that Habibi means in Arabic “the loved one”, Aidan’s ironic take is even more evident. However, beyond this consideration, the artist is also speaking of the incompatibility of two different cultures: what the East appreciates, the West abhors.

One year later, in My Bride Salakhova comes back to the depiction of the Western world adding a new heroine, the one of the wife-to-be, to her rich kaleidoscope of female characters. On a black background, a young attractive girl stands dressed in her white wedding dress smiling and holding a bouquet. Suddenly, the photography comes to life and the bride slowly turns around showing her back superimposed on the smiling image. The effect is here not dissimilar to the one of Suspense, although there is not such a strong sense of suspension and the bride’s happiness seems to be under no menace. However, the work still contains an eerie feeling of the unpredictable – although feeble – considering that the bride showing the audience her back may be interpreted as visualisation of what she does not – and can not – see, a hidden peril that her future life hides. Whatever the new life that awaits her ahead will be, she is going to be in charge of it. She delivers this statement with a simple gesture: throwing her bouquet on the floor. There is no aggression or rage in her behaviour. She lets the flowers slip off her hand and fall down. With her gesture, delicate and at the same time resolute, Aidan’s bride places herself on a high pedestal from which she dominates the viewers, fencing off any attempt to be a dull beautiful stereotype destined to be the wife of some mister Smith.

In MMS (2005) Salakhova investigates the links between mass technology and art communication. This video installation attempts to deconstruct Marshall McLuhan’s notorious axiom “The medium is the message”. Here, the artist proposes her own version: The message is in the medium. Clearly, in MMS there is no emphasis on technology as self-sufficient medium to make art. Aidan does not in fact celebrate mobile phones as an art instrument just because it is possible to send photographs and videos with them. It is only when they are “empowered” with a message that is art that they become media useful to art – in the specific case of MMS, a convenient vehicle to diffuse Beauty: a short clip of the eyes of one of the artist’s painted “goddesses”.

Tatiana (2006) comes after a one-year study on the women surrounding Aidan in her domestic life. Discreetly scrutinising her friends, relatives, neighbours and all the female characters with whom she got in contact, Aidan found in the middle-aged woman living in the flat next to hers the new heroine for her mythology. Three large photographs present Tatiana’s naked face boldly looking ahead. On each of them a video projection displays her applying makeup on her face. Tatiana’s hands move accurately, almost mechanically, on her lips and around her eyes showing one after the other three different moods that she is feeling in such a pregnant moment in a woman’s day. The inner world of feelings is here candidly offered to the viewer, without loud statements – deliberately the work is soundless. All the same, Tatiana is not a tragic figure similar to the old lady in Luigi Pirandello’s essay “On Humour”, who, for heavily making up her face in her desperate attempt to gain back an appearance of youth, is laughed at by her neighbours. On the contrary, like all other Aidan’s heroines, she is in control of her territory.
Furthermore, Tatiana, although simple in structure, is a complex work for what concerns the interaction between two media, Aidan’s “trademark” projections on still images. The video itself is used in fact as a layer of makeup applied on the surface of the photograph.

In conclusion, like the verses of the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho, Salakhova’s video works are a meditated investigation on the relative principle of sensual love and artistic immortal principles. Smoothly playing with the boundaries of voyeurism, Aidan parades a group of women who are independent, strong, self-assured. Women, who do not let anybody exploit them, but, on the other hand, are in complete charge of their destinies and follow their passions according to their own will. These women are all goddesses resembling the Graces from Greek mythology, goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity, fertility, and above all goddesses of love, because love – in its wide spectre of variations, from erotic to maternal – is by far one of the imperative keywords in Aidan’s artistic world. At the same time, taking into consideration the incidence of Muslim iconography, it can be concluded that in her videos the artist makes Greek mythology melt with the Eastern one, with particular introspective concessions to the mystic tradition of Sufism and its notions of direct perception of God (Truth) through the cognition of divine love.
Singularly, Salakhova is not an artist-activist fighting for women’s rights. She is well beyond that point in which women feel the need of explaining themselves, of claiming equality and asking to be heard. There is not fight over genres in her video works. Men are not ridiculed. Very often they are not even represented. Although, very cleverly, Aidan activates the Derridean strategy of absence as a token of presence, because men are implied, albeit not physically present: the pregnant woman, the bride, the belly dancer are all in direct relation to a man.
Again, Aidan Salakhova is not a suffragette or a hardcore feminist attacking the status quo of patriarchal society, where men rule and women are objectified. On the contrary, she gives to her heroines their own independent space, a territory of complete freedom where even God is under their constant gaze.