To those who have no time to play 2022-23

To those who have no time to play is structured around four stories drawn from the artist’s own experiences. Each narrative is represented by its own form of architecture and mode of reception. As someone looking at the exhibition, you are asked to perform different roles during your time there. You become a reader, a viewer, a listener, an emotional participant, an outsider caught in the midst of a protest, a collective presence in a chorus of sewing machines or any number of other roles you can define for yourself. There is a beauty in how the exhibition unfolds and how your attention is called to other people’s struggles that ask to become part of your own, if only for a little while.

from the curatorial text by Charles Esche “Who has no time to play?” (page 35)

Antigone Update

The final element is not closed on itself but a stage that opens out to the room. On the stage eight figures sing in turn in a new version of the classical Greek play Antigone. Keeping the structure of the ancient tragedy, Antigone Update features a chorus spread out among the actual visitors. In this new version, the protagonists sing as ghosts from the past and the chorus speaks from our times. The script has been developed in an experimental collaboration that Gluklya proposed to the Matras Platform, an informal group of migrants and travelers from around the world who are living in Amsterdam. The play follows most of the plot of the original Antigone, though changed in important ways such as the fact that both sisters plot to bury their brother together. As Gluklya explains: “Antigone and Ismene are doing the act of burial together as opposed to the individual act of the heroic deed and romanticised loneliness of the single hero.”

Red Yurt

Gluklya calls the larger yurt in this exhibition the Red Yurt, in reference to the Soviet emancipatory struggle and the ambivalent impact it had on its many different territories. The yurt form here is more directly associated with its origins as it introduces stories and artworks from Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. It is perhaps useful to know that of all the Central Asian republics that emerged since the end of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan has been the least authoritarian and most subject to influence by the citizens of the state. These democratic freedoms have also led to a poor economic record and consistently poor working conditions. The struggles of the Kyrgyz women in particular are what animates the Red Yurt.

Two diaries

Melting Snowball

In a third space – a white dome that Gluklya named a Melting Snowball, a precarious relative of the revolutionary cobblestone –clothes are propped up around the base. Clothes are a returning motive in Gluklya’s work and these ones were worn by people who participated in the May protests in Russia from 2015-19. Inside, films show scenes from various 1st May (Labour Day) protests in St. Petersburg up to the year it was made illegal. On one textile, the words Queer-Peace-May appear, words that are also banned in Putin’s Russia today. The three videos surround you as though you have been unknowingly caught up in the middle of the demonstration.