Valera and Natasha Cherkashin: Practicing Self-Historicization in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

Despite the ongoing commitment by academics on the matter of compensating the long-standing lack of a systematic art-historical narrative of eastern Europe, still some peripheral stories are left outside, or not properly considered, by some of the most successful attempts regarding the re-construction of an Art History of the East. The purpose of my work is motivated by the will to put the spotlight on one of these excluded stories, that of the duo of artists, as well as partners in life, formed by Valera and Natasha Cherkashin. By doing so, I wish to present the Cherkashins’ case to speak of what seems to be a peculiar phenomenon of art of former Eastern European countries: Self-Historicization. The latter proved to be the response, at times intentional, to an absent institution – the latter meant in full sense – which should have been concerned about art historiography of Soviet and Post-Soviet times. Therefore, the aim of my study is to investigate how the phenomenon of self-historicization reveals itself through the practice of the Cherkashins to the extent that it is almost impossible to consider one without the other. I will argue for their archive and the Cherkashin Conceptual Metropolitan Museum as representing the artists’ ultimate realization of their own historicization, and how their total involvement in the art system eventually helped them to shape their own place within Art History.

Moreover, believing that much more can still be done in terms of critical reception of their work, it is in light of this thought that the final part of my study starts. The latter will be involved in presenting some theoretical notions which hopefully will prove to serve as theoretical background for their work. Concepts such as Nostalgia, Amnesia and Utopia will be presented and discussed throughout my discourse, and hopefully provided as evidence – concerning their early-1990s work – to interpret the artists’ practice in light of some ground-breaking theories such as the Off-Modern perspective theorised by Svetlana Boym. All the above, however, will continue to run parallelly the same line of reasoning of my whole analysis: that is shedding a light of the phenomenon of self-historicization, by means of Valera and Natasha Cherkashin’s early practice, while addressing though in a liminal way the more comprehensive issue of historicizing art of former Eastern European countries.