FORGIVEN BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
In my work, I face the complexity of a globalized world through strata of personal memory, from Soviet Kyrgystan to the State of Israel to Italy. Over thirty years I have lived through two uprootings, spoken three languages (Russian, Hebrew and Italian) and taken up three national identities.
I face the tangled identity of my multiple belonging, with an aesthetic that is affected by the cultural patterns of the various territories I have lived in. I play with the icons of utopia, with the imagery of the Russian dusha (soul) and with the vain nostalgia of nationalism; and up from this memory there sometimes comes the exotic and sometimes a forbidden desire: the banana. A desire to eat and consume that is unappeasable in the province of an empire, because Kyrgyzstan is too far away from Moscow, the showcase of the Soviet cosmos, and unspeakable, as it is bourgeois and corrupt. The hammer and sickle are rusty, hung on the face and neck as objects that nobody uses anymore, vitrified by the patina of time.
Behind the simple peasant vanity, which uses beetroot as an innocent cosmetic surrogate, the vegetable hides a fixed idea: the pursuit of individual happiness. These photographs and installations invoke situations that concern both the past and history in general. It is also a history filtered through direct personal experience, a present in which my work opens up to the Other, in this case the audience.
The multiplicity, the result of separation and displacement creates a fracture, which challenges the exclusivism which is the monologic of national identities and group memberships. Recognition of an unavoidable heterogeneity and diversity, gives shape to an idea of identity that lives in the difference and through the difference.
"Identity is not only being, but it is above all a becoming in time, that it continues to emerge in response to different historical circumstances" [Hall 2003]
I face the tangled identity of my multiple belonging, with an aesthetic that is affected by the cultural patterns of the various territories I have lived in. I play with the icons of utopia, with the imagery of the Russian dusha (soul) and with the vain nostalgia of nationalism; and up from this memory there sometimes comes the exotic and sometimes a forbidden desire: the banana. A desire to eat and consume that is unappeasable in the province of an empire, because Kyrgyzstan is too far away from Moscow, the showcase of the Soviet cosmos, and unspeakable, as it is bourgeois and corrupt. The hammer and sickle are rusty, hung on the face and neck as objects that nobody uses anymore, vitrified by the patina of time.
Behind the simple peasant vanity, which uses beetroot as an innocent cosmetic surrogate, the vegetable hides a fixed idea: the pursuit of individual happiness. These photographs and installations invoke situations that concern both the past and history in general. It is also a history filtered through direct personal experience, a present in which my work opens up to the Other, in this case the audience.
The multiplicity, the result of separation and displacement creates a fracture, which challenges the exclusivism which is the monologic of national identities and group memberships. Recognition of an unavoidable heterogeneity and diversity, gives shape to an idea of identity that lives in the difference and through the difference.
"Identity is not only being, but it is above all a becoming in time, that it continues to emerge in response to different historical circumstances" [Hall 2003]
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