Framer Framed presentsTo those who have no time to play,the largest solo exhibition by theAmsterdam-based artist Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), curated by Charles Esche. In keeping with her previous work, the exhibition involves many collaborators from Kyrgyz textileworkers and recent migrants to the Netherlands to musicians and writers. The exhibition is structured around four elements, each with its own unique architecture. These are twoyurts, a dome, and a stage on which there will be occasional live performances. The works take us fromAmsterdam to Bishkek, and via St. Petersburg back to Amsterdam again. We are pleased toinvite you to the exhibitionTo those who have no time to playfor a review. During theopening, curatorCharles Esche,artistGluklyaand select collaborators will be present. Reserve a spot byemailing press@framerframed.nl.
The idea to create this performance in the context of the long-term project Matras Platform came to me after the start of the war in Ukraine. Since 2012 I was busy developing the concept of a theatre for migrants, where professional and nonprofessional actors might blend their energies to create a performance together. During the pandemic, I came to realise the necessity to call for collaborators living here in Amsterdam, and after my first meeting with Khalid Jone from We Are Here (a refugee action collective), the title came: Matras Platform. It derived from our sessions of writing questions on mattresses left out on the streets, directed to the city as an open environment for exploring a new way of communication. We started to meet regularly at my studio, talking on different topics, developing trust and trying to understand what kind of performance we should produce which might unite us despite gender, status and experience differences.
But 24 February 2022 changed everything. Following the outbreak of the war, I proposed to read the tragedy Antigone written by Sophocles. The core Matras Platform group accepted it, and we agreed that I would write the script to then be debated and developed from meeting to meeting. The trust necessary in this process was facilitated by amazing Marianne Koeman. The war also brought an old friend again: I started to correspond with composer Vladimir Rannev and proposed him to write music to our performance, introducing him to my dream of combining singing dresses and live performance together. Through our communication, we developed the structure of this multimedia installation combining soft- and hardware programming with the synchronization of sound and light. The choice to work with the classic play came largely as a result of thinking how to show the enormous gap between Europe and the rest of the world. Ancient Greek mythology is ruling the game here, penetrating our cultural environment with codes that only people who grew up with them can understand, leaving the newcomers outside the magic circle. Our sessions in studio became like a school of sharing and unlearning these codes together.
The first thing that struck me when I was reading Antigone in Russian was Antigone’s double attempt to bury her brother. My second thought was the realisation of the absence of enslaved people in the story, and another intriguing thing was the doubt of the sentry, who after capturing Antigone said, But here is what is very strange: I felt sadness coming over me,which showed his unsureness in what he had done.
After reading several versions of Antigone, I was inspired mostly by Bonnie Honig Antigone Interrupted, who interestingly speculates around the topic of the double burial and the role of Ismene, Antigone’s sister.1 In my script, I dramatized the preposition that the sisters did the heroic deed together, highlighting the topic of a sororal politics, feminist sisterhood and the problems with self-organisation among women. The doubt of the sentry is emphasised in the performance by splitting the character between the singing dress on the stage and a live performance by Shepherd Camara. The general structure of Antigone Update remains from the classic tragedy, but with a twist of protagonists who sing from the stage and a chorus who speaks from our times.2
It is trespassing all the conventional norms in terms of how the perception of the public should be structured: focus on the values as sharing and caring is prevalent and obviously etic is dominating on esthetic in a good way.
It does not mean that there is no good and beautiful works. A lot of them!
The enormous number of artists invited, 1500! Artists are invited other artists, not any single “famous “in terms of selling’s artists involved
And on top of that, the scandal around the topic of the trauma of WWII, provoked a great solidarity among artists, one more time proving that the values of the socialism are still alive and strong. This generosity triggered us to contribute with a performative spontaneous gesture of taking art works by People’s Justice by Taring Padi down from the exhibition by adding to the display this example of the Utopian Dress, regarding a very recent R/U War, which brought an immense global impact.
« On the ground floor there was a rectangular garden, full of flowering plants and tall trees whose branches reached up to the second floor. Kati was in charge of watering it, and in the meantime she photographed every flower, every leaf, every insect. Suddenly we heard her screaming, she was calling us. We thought she got hurt. Leonora, Chiki, Gaby, Pablo, José, the dog and I,we all rushed down the stairs together, we were frightened. Kati, perfectly fine, was photographing a chrysalis. “Look, this is the divine moment! The caterpillar is dying and the butterfly has yet to be born. What for one is a coffin for the other is a crib. But if the caterpillar has ceased to exist, the butterfly does not exist yet. In short, no one exists at the moment. I’m photographing nothing .. ”
