2008 | Exhibition / performance
Venue: ParaRam Gallery, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Dates: 30 April – 5 May 2008
Occasion: 3.5th anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade
The Anniversary
By spring 2008, the Brigade had been working together for three and a half years. To mark the occasion, the members turned their own history into an exhibition, performance and self-portrait of the group.
The title, Spring Glitch, or an Attack of MALERia, deliberately mixes several associations: glitch, cranberry, happiness, painter and malaria. The wordplay belongs to the Brigade’s own language, where ordinary words, borrowed meanings and accidental associations become material for action.
During the preparation, the Brigade produced its April Theses, a four-handed portrait of “Someone’s Name”, a slide film and photographic compilation of its previous actions, as well as a collection of apocrypha, jokes and popular sayings about painters and Malevich.
For the exhibition, the Brigade also changed its everyday uniform — black polyethylene bags — for white non-woven garments.
A Self-Portrait of the Brigade
The exhibition presented different “themes from the life of the Brigade”: travel, photographs, paintings, seasons, memories and stories from its previous actions.
It also included a retrospective of the Brigade’s activity and a collective staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull, based on a libretto by Viktor Oborotistov.
The result was not simply an anniversary exhibition. The Brigade turned its own history into material for a new collective work.
It documented itself, invented its own mythology and performed its own identity.
The Brigade as an Open Formation
The project was created by an open group whose members maintained their individual artistic practices while working together as the Brigade.
The April Theses described this principle:
“Each of us is an individualist in our artistic practice. But within the Brigade, we become a single organism.”
By 2008, the Brigade had begun to treat not only objects and spaces, but its own collective existence as material for artistic action.
Documentation
The project was realised collectively by Elena Gladysheva, Viktor Oborotistov, Marina Razheva and Vladimir Romanov.