Monuments / Monumental
Roman Susan at 1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
September 19 - September 23, 2019
Let’s start with a synopsis of your Monuments / Monumental project!
KF: Monuments / Monumental is a silent looped video installation, about 15’00 long. It's composed of a series of tableaux vivants, a mode of working where the camera is still and movement unfolds across the frame. The video image focuses on monument bases across southeastern Ukraine, as well as the capital, Kyiv, in the year 2016.
Installed at Roman Susan, it was part of a series of short exhibitions in the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. It was projected on the wall inside the gallery, and one could view it at night through the large street-level windows, as it played on loop throughout the evenings.
There are a lot of residents from formerly-Soviet countries living in Rogers Park—diverse communities from Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, and others. It was interesting to have the video installed in this neighborhood, where the Ukrainian diaspora is continuously growing. The work itself developed during travel across Ukraine. In 2016, I received a Canada Council production grant for Green Fields, the re-filming of a 1991 archival video I found in the Mennonite Heritage Archives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I'm from, in Treaty 1 Territory. The archival video consists of a Mennonite man giving a kind of auto-ethnographic architectural tour of his village in southeastern Ukraine, speaking in our oral language, Plaut’dietsch (Low German), and in Russian, and speaking with different Mennonites in the village about their lives and histories. So my main purpose for this trip to Ukraine was to re-film this video footage in the small village of Zelene Pole, as it was in that moment. This video work is part of a larger, ongoing project called Tape 158. And on my way to the village, I visited different regions of Ukraine, meeting with cousins and colleagues, visiting archives, and traveling with my father; to Kyiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Molochansk, Kryvyi Rih, and Odesa, as well as many small villages. And so Monuments / Monumental developed along the way, before and after the filming in Zelene Pole; I began filming these monument bases wherever I saw them, as they seemed so profoundly important, their temporality and materiality so specific to that moment.
This was just one year after the 2015 decommunization laws came into effect in Ukraine, and just after the Maidan uprising, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the beginning of the war. And so I was interested in these monument bases as a very simple ; it wasn't a planned project. Everywhere I went, I kept seeing these monument bases with the Lenin figure removed; this was a new image being produced. In the Soviet Union, Ukraine had, I believe, the most Lenin monuments per capita of any Soviet. It was interesting to me that the Lenin figures were being removed, but the bases were remaining—the bases then became the monument themselves. They become a monument to themselves, and a monument to the temporality that a monument usually produces through its figure or a kind of central focal point. The act of removing the figures brought the focal point and the sense of monumentality down, and into, the base itself. And to this feeling of relation to the ground.
And so I was interested to see these monument bases as sculptures themselves. The first one I filmed was in Zaporizhzhia. Just two weeks before I arrived, they had taken the Lenin figure down from the monument. This was a huge conflict in the city; it came to fistfights. People had guns out. It was very tense on the actual day of Lenin’s removal.
And even before that, you can see on the base in the video—it's a bit difficult if you're not familiar with it, but there are stickers, there's paint, and glue from posters all over it. These monument bases became sites of rallying and sites of conflict. They became sites of, in some cases, reclamation, in some cases, reuse. There's one former Lenin monument base in Kryvyi Rih that now has an Orthodox cross installed on top of it. So the bases themselves, I was interested in how they were functioning, how they became very acute sites of conflict and transmission. And in Dnipro, actually, the base of the largest former Lenin monument was fully removed—the only monument I visited where there was barely a trace of it having existed. So I recorded and included this empty space because it was very prominent in Dnipro, and an interesting and prominent counterpoint to the general trend of the bases remaining in place.
I filmed these videos entirely from the ground. The camera is sitting on the ground or angled up a little bit from the ground, using my tiny tripod or a piece of cardboard to prop it up. I often work that way because I'm not planning to produce something specific, and I film as I go. It's also tied to my genetic condition, a kind of dynamic disability that means I can't carry a lot of equipment around. So I often use whatever's around as a kind of base.
To provide a very brief context, one part of the 2015 decommunization laws prescribes the removal of Soviet imagery and monuments from public space, government buildings, etc. The law has been interpreted and utilized in many contested ways, often driven by right-wing or nationalist motivations, without active processes of democratic decision-making and debate. This has led to the removal and destruction of artworks, sculptures, mosaics, and monuments, many of which were made by Ukrainians within the context of Soviet Ukraine. Many Ukrainian artists, intellectuals, and civil society groups continue the struggle to protect, preserve, and recontextualize such works, asserting that the artistic, cultural and monumental production of a seventy year period of Ukrainian history cannot, and should not, be destroyed due to the political context in which it was produced, but rather understood, negotiated, and contextualized in diverse and ongoing ways. The monument bases can be approached as a kind of signpost or marker in the space of this conflict: of erasure versus texture, a temporal cut versus a continual return to temporality itself. The bases are a question of public space and property: who owns these images? Who owns these artworks and monuments? Who owns the structure which supports them?
I look to Ukrainian artists, activists, historians, and intellectuals who are doing the hard work of fighting for their preservation and narrativization, both from other Ukrainians that want to destroy them, and from Russian bombs and drones. They are negotiating multiple and layered ways of celebrating these intrinsic parts of Ukrainian art history, and the very specific systems of power they were produced within.
Do you anticipate the monument bases being used in the future?
KF: Well, they're being used now. They were being used as soon as their Lenin figures were taken down. The Orthodox cross installed on the one in Kryvyi Rih—a quite contentious gesture—is one example.
There's another one in Kryvyi Rih that people have painted, and written, “This is our home, Kryvyi Rih”, with flowers on it. Many others simply remain empty. In Kyiv, I came across the exhibition and intervention series Social Contract organized by IZOLYATSIA, a cultural platform from Donetsk that relocated to Kyiv in 2014, after the military occupation of their space. The series included interventions working with the base of the largest former Lenin monument in the city.
The practice of leaving these bases in-place is a kind of abstracted but collective decision in a way. I think that this relationship to public space and public memory, who is monumentalized and who is memorialized, is a very important and active question in Ukraine, and it’s clearly a space of intense conflict.
Of course, the context after the full-scale invasion in 2022 changed a lot of things. But at the time I was filming, people were using some of them in different ways. And the decision to leave the base then becomes a kind of monument to what the monument was.
There's also something quite unique about Lenin monuments in that they were extremely serial, they were produced as a series. Whichever Soviet city you went to, even towns and villages, there were Lenin monuments everywhere, and there were only a few approved variations on the Lenin figure itself.
So, in different cities, you would see the same gestures, the same angles of his face, his body, his hands.There's a strange kind of abstraction and familiarity in the seriality of a select few object-images, and the wider cult of Lenin that developed, particularly in the Stalin era. Though the bases themselves are often very unique. And you can see in the video this huge variation—in size, materiality, and site.
I would argue that the decision to leave them in place is itself a kind of reuse, a kind of collective decision—though I don't know who actually decides whether the bases get taken down or not. But there is something unique about that decision. I've traveled in many other formerly-Soviet countries, and if a Lenin monument is removed, usually the whole structure is removed, or the Lenin figure is replaced by another national symbol, and mounted on the old base. This is not the case in Ukraine, though it may be changing now. Some of the bases in the video had been empty for years, while some of them had just had their Lenins removed, in what became known as Leninopad, or the Lenin waterfall, because so many were removed so quickly after the 2015 laws.
Where does this project sit in the context of your greater practice? What did this project come after? What did it come before? Where do you see it resurfacing in your current work?
KF: It's a really important work for me. I didn't plan on making it—it's something that came out of spending time in a place, visiting many different people and places. It was really important for me to trust my intuition that these bases were themselves producing really important images, images that I needed to document in video.
As I mentioned, the main reason I was in Ukraine that year was for production of a new video installation in a tiny village called Zelene Pole, just outside of Kryvyi Rih. The two-channel installation I ended up producing there is called Green Fields. It’s part of a larger ongoing archival project called Tape 158, which is a body of work responding to this one 30-minute videotape I came across in the Mennonite Heritage Archives in 2010.
A lot of my work deals with the archival through the everyday, through unofficial archives and the ways that people, objects, or places collect and gather memory, or assume a kind of space of archive, whether intentional or unintentional.
In a way, everything I do is creating new archives in unofficial modes, or through logics that make sense within the grammar of my practice. I do sometimes work with official archives for research, but I'm more interested in the structure of official archives and that which is unofficial within them.
I made an exhibition in Odesa last year that worked with the history of the state archive building itself in Odesa. The building was built as a synagogue, and then taken over as a Jewish workers' club during the early Soviet era, when all religious buildings were closed. It was then used by the occupying Romanian and NS armies as a storage space for the city’s documents. After the war and genocide, it was slowly transformed and renovated into the state archive.
This was in some ways a very strange decision, as they had to construct a huge five-story concrete vault inside the synagogue's formerly resonant space. I was looking at what this building is made of, and how the building itself could be approached as an archive. How does it also hold all these layers of history and not just Ukrainian history, but diasporic, geological and material, workers, and sonic histories, in one space or site?
So to come back to Monuments / Monumental, I often find myself working in modes of producing new documents, new archives. These documents can be very abstract or they could be quite everyday. And I kind of work to collect, to document, or to collect documents to produce a kind of space where we can reflect on the content of a collection, whatever logic it might produce.
What was your relationship to Roman Susan when you were in Chicago? How do you see Roman Susan functioning in Chicago?
KF: I think Roman Susan is unique. It's unique because, as an art space, the architecture of the space itself is quite awkward and strange to work with. I think it has produced some really amazing projects and work because of that. As a storefront, it's immediately very present—from its street-level site and its place in the neighborhood.
I think there's a lot of vision behind thinking about RS as a space for artists to respond to and make work in as a community-driven/community-driving kind of space.
I think Roman Susan has done an amazing job of being very self-critical, critical of the context they're working in, and being very conscious of whose work they're showing, and how they’re showing it.
They're extremely involved in the neighborhood, and that's always important to me, especially when I'm living somewhere that I'm not familiar with; to understand the space’s relationship with the neighborhood and really siting themselves in the neighborhood.
I remember when I first found out that they have a community-hosted art collection and I was so excited. At the time, this collection was distributed through different people involved with Roman Susan.
From what I remember, you could also go and borrow those works, or you could also host those works. I think the whole model of Roman Susan is a hyper neighborhood-specific and site-specific model, while it's also really dispersed and horizontal. And one could say that in a political sense, but I find it quite horizontal in its spatial, conceptual, and material sense: they're dealing with the street; they're dealing with a lot of different trajectories to and from the lake, as well as the flagpole project, and the community-dispersed collecting model.
Good segue into your Nieje Täne project with the Woman’s Club and Roman Susan.
KF: Roman Susan invited me to make a work for the Woman’s Club, which was a series of flagpole commissions for a flagpole in Rogers Park. It was another work that I made through an intuitive process while I was traveling, again, in Ukraine.
I work in a lot of different contexts and I make various kinds of work. The work we're talking about today is specifically focused on Ukraine, which is important in my practice, but it's not my only focus; I work a lot with structures of history, historiography and narrative.
I often work with my own family history, as a way of looking at constructions of ethnocultural histories and identities, and how those structures function, how they get used, how they hold or refuse power.
In the context of the Woman’s Club work, I was traveling in Ukraine, and I visited my grandfather’s village in Molochansk, in the southeast of the country. I was wandering through this forested area in the village, and came across this disintegrating monument base, and realized it was a former Lenin monument. Its figure had been removed years earlier. The base was very overgrown, it was quite beautiful, and I realized that it must have been a kind of central park in the village at one point. The back of the base was completely falling apart, and I took some stones from the base, just on a whim, I don’t know.. I collect things, I can’t help myself.
Soon after that trip, I had a print residency at Martha Street Studio in Winnipeg, and I just started scanning objects that I had brought back with me. I started scanning these rocks. And I was really struck by how they scanned; a scanner is like a flat document-shaped camera that apprehends an image through a very small depth of field. That specific scan looked like a flag, because the reflection on the back of the scanner produced this line down the middle. It was an unexpected image.
When Nathan asked me to make the flag work for the Woman’s Club, I made like thirty different designs. I really wanted to bring the oral Mennonite language, Plaut’dietsch, into public space. I was really interested in this at the time. It's an oral language, it's not really written, and it’s spoken by very few people, and I was interested in bringing this aural language to a kind of moving image space, the moving image of a flag.
But as I kept designing and sketching, I came across this image of these scanned stones on my hard drive archive. I thought, this is also part of the alphabet, the materialities through which we build and unbuild ourselves, how stones and bricks get reused over and over in different architectures. I named this flag work Nieje Täne, which means new teeth.
To return to the work Green Fields for a moment—the archival video I re-filmed in the village of Zelene Pole in 2016—there's a part of the video where a building is being taken apart brick by brick, by men with small pickaxes. They’re removing the bricks, loading them onto pallets, and taking them to another place to build another building. My father, who is a historian of Mennonite architecture of the former Russian Empire, told us that the building being dismantled was an old Mennonite factory, built in the 19th century, made of bricks using clay from the nearby river.
We were really interested to watch this 150-year-old building being taken apart brick by brick and systematically moved. I kept thinking about how this happens constantly, across materialities. What is this relationship between solidity and process, permanence and fluidity.
Ethno-nationalism always has to cut something out, or off, to define itself, and so there's often a cut, a rupture, or a violence in defining what the ethno-national is. As I started thinking about representing this language, it's beautiful to represent an oral language in writing, but it can also start to solidify it. I thought about these stones I had carried back, what they had built and unbuilt, and how teeth assist you in making sounds of spoken language.
I was thinking about these stones as kind of a new and difficult teeth, that could stand in for this other way of speaking, to think about rocks in one's mouth, or the refusal of an alphabet, or the refusal of direct text itself. The possibility to grow new forms, to have others shoved into your mouth, to carry pieces of some other construction with you as you build new words, new sounds, new language.
Other artist histories: hiba ali // Tallulah Cartalucca // Julietta Cheung // Steven Husby // Juan Molina Hernández // Kevin Norris // Ruby Que // Olive Stefanski // Chiffon Thomas // Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson