Legally Soviet: A Conversation

摘要

This conversation between Moscow-born, New York-based artist Yevgeniy Fiks and curator Olga Kopenkina raises issues pertinent to Fiks's work since the early 2000s, which has been focused on the legacy of the Communist movement in the West. His practice is informed, on the one hand, by the legacy of late-Soviet visual culture and, on the other, by developments in contemporary Western, left-leaning art. Fiks's post-Soviet diasporic subjectivity is revealed in a series of projects devoted to the legacy of the Communist Party USA, which signal the “return of historical memory.” Pursuing a critical reexamination of twentieth-century political history in both East and West, Fiks proposes a notion of “critical nostalgia” in stark contrast to the nostalgic melancholy of the 1990s.