Press & Reviews

It’s March 2022. I travel to Berlin for the rare privilege of a conversation with Oxana in person. She is here with Chto Delat to display their recent artwork “The Canary Archives”, begun during the first lockdown and radically altered by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The dreams of Chto Delat members were recorded with the intention of analysing the mechanism of premonitions, but the war played the role of the very catastrophe which brought this work to its logical conclusion.

Oxana Timofeeva – in dialogue with Bergalevitch 2022

Indeed, the notoriety that groups such as Slavs and Tatars and their Russian counterpart Chto Delat? have so speedily earned suggests that even if artists’ collectives are not actually proliferating more than before, they are certainly gaining in traction. Following from the templates of the politicized collectives that came to prominence in the 1980s for their responses to the aids crisis (General Idea and Group Material), gender inequality (Guerrilla Girls), or the meltdown of Communist and totalitarian regimes in the Eastern bloc (Neue Slowenische Kunst), the possibilities afforded by the collective now seem to be as elastic as any given association’s potential membership. The past decade has seen fictitious collectives of one, such as the Atlas Group, and, at the other end of the spectrum, groups that pass themselves off as feigned solo artists (Claire Fontaine and Reena Spaulings); we have encountered twosomes that operate under the guise of a larger entity (the Otolith Group and Bureau d’Études) and, at the same time, a great many collectives scattered around the world that seemingly gain strength and visibility in numbers (Raqs Media Collective, Tercerunquinto, Raising Dust, Sędzia Główny [Chief Judge], Ultra-red, and Shahrzad Collective spring to mind here). Slavs and Tatars, on the other hand, as a sometimes fluctuating collective of four, happily occupy a middle—and perhaps more common—ground. In notable contrast to the smattering of examples provided above, where a unifying standpoint and a distinct voice for a small multitude are often embedded in the crucial cement of identity politics or rooted in genius loci, Slavs and Tatars seem to delight in jettisoning the usual rhetoric of collectivism. They are, instead, the most cosmopolitan of collectives, where a geopolitics of globe-trotting allows their shape-shifting projects and concerns to continuously cross-pollinate divergent, and sometimes diametrically opposed, cultural specificities.

http://chtodelat.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2011_GROUP-THINK-artforum.docx