When working abroad we often ask ourselves what we represent in this context and why we have been invited. There is the hidden pressure to talk about some exotic, artistic/activist experience drawn from our own country, where politics somehow survives against coercion more brutal than that in the West. As we have often written, there is a certain problem with this outsourcing of politics. As Elena Filipovic correctly notes in a recent article about our group, we have to represent “a certain history while overcoming common preconceptions in order to act as international translators.” But what are we actually translating/representing? 

The point of departure for our solo show at Kölnischer Kunstverein is our first songspiel, *Perestroika Songspiel: Victory over the Coup* (2008), which marks the end of one period in Russian history. For most of us, it was an event that was crucial in shaping our political subjectivity: we date the history of the new Russian state to this moment. So we asked ourselves what remains in our memories after all the transformations of the past two decades, and we ran head-on into a set of disturbing, weird, grotesque images. As usual, our narration is based on the media and the popular imagination: we merely decided to push them to the limit and reveal their inner irrational and vital functions, and to try and confront them with our body of documentary film works. That’s how the installation *The Russian Woods* began to grow.

This time we have decided to try and find a way to represent the Russian unconscious and to examine how far the language of art is able to take a representation of reality rooted in its historical dynamism, brutality, and lack of transparency. What can we do with this reality’s horrible and largely indescribable violence that renders all varieties of artistic virtuosity powerless? It is not our intention to sensationalize or demonize Russia: we are convinced that the Russian situation is very much the result of the global division of labor and geopolitical confrontations triggered by capitalism, and that its political system is no less irrational (or, for that matter, rational) than the “Russian soul.” So we must speak about Russia in the context of a new global order where sheer exploitation of the periphery goes hand in hand with the accumulation of enormous wealth by the minority who control all resources (human and natural), the self-elected few who deprive the majority of the fruits of their labor, forcing them to live in poverty and misery like modern-day slaves.

It is important not just to demonstrate our negative attitude to Russia’s current regime, but also to offer a visual explanation for why we continue to oppose our country’s current development and the mode of governance that has brought it to a dead end.

—Dmitry Vilensky, August 2011