Time of the Storytellers: Narrative and Distant Gaze in Post-Soviet Art

Curated by Viktor Misiano

When Misiano organized the Venice Biennale’s first-ever Central Asian Pavilion in 2005, his exhibition was revelatory for works evincing a geopolitical context in which modernism’s legacy was anything but consigned to the history books. Indeed, artists negotiated the double jeopardy of a stolen indigenous past and a lost Soviet future, producing intense work that—crystallizing at a remove from Western commerce—put in high relief the problem of contemporary art’s disconnect from a coherent public sphere. Misiano here seems set to continue the story, expanding its scope by including artists from Armenia, Georgia, and Moldavia as well as from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan; his theme revolves around the idea that an epic sensibility and a “distanced perception from reality” are appearing among artists of the region.