Alina Bliumis, IMAGINATION NATION Elma, NY October 23 - November 30, 2021
“First, there is the old truth that ‘In the beginning is the body,’ with its desires, its powers, its manifold form of resistance to exploitation. As is often recognized, there is no social change, no cultural or political innovation that is not expressed through the body, no economic practice that is not applied to it.’”
— Silvia Federici “Beyond the Periphery of the Skin” 2020.
Entering the gallery, a visitor met by a floor to ceiling colorscape, hanging under its own weight, a linen from the artist series “Bruise.” Alina started the series last year, responding to the violence and battered bodies on the news coming from her birthplace Belarus. On August 8, 2020 the nation came together in unprecedented unity to protest against the rigged presidential election of the man who has held power over the last 26 years, Alexander Lukashenko. Thousands of peaceful protesters looking for justice poured to the streets where they were met by authorities conducting indiscriminate beatings and brutal mass detentions, and dispersing crowds with truncheons, stun grenades, and water cannons. Over the following weeks, protesters made their battered bodies public to record the evidence of a human rights crisis in the country. Lukashenko claimed that the opposition fabricated the abuse and “girls painted their butts with blue color.”
“Bruise #16” (2021) watercolor on printed linen was created for this exhibition. Beneath it lies the text-based and site-specific work “Concrete Poems” covering the floors of the gallery. Alina brings together art historical references such as Dada and Brazilian “Concrete Art” and the literal interpretation of concrete poetry inspired by city scribbles, graffiti, and absurdism.
One of the poems reads Imagination, Imagination, Nation.
*installation view photos by Ege Okal
Alina Bliumis, CARRYING THE WEIGHT, WAR LANDSCAPES, Wilbees, Andes NY August 7 -29, 2021
THE CLOUDY SKY
J.B. Bovina September 17th, 1845
THE MORNING OF FREEDOM! ROSE BRIGHT TO THE VIEW -
THE DAWNING EFFULGENCE OF LIBERTY’S BEAMS,
HER BANNERS VICTORIOUS, TRIUMPHANTLY FLEW
O’ER DELAWARES MOUNTAINS, HER FOREST AND STREAMS.
THE TYRANT, PATROONERY, RUSH’D ON TO HIS END,
DETESTING THE GLANCE OF HER SLAVE FREEING RAY-
THE BOARDERS BY FREEDOM BEGAN TO EXTEND,
AND DARKNESS GAVE PLACE TO THE DAWNING OF DAY.
THOUGH BRIGHT BE THE MORNING, UNCLOUDED THE SKIES,
UNDARKEN’D THE SUN, AND UNTARNISHED THE AIR -
HOW SOON CAN THE MOST OF THE MORNING ARISE,
AND DARKEN THOSE GLORIES WHICH OPENED SO FAIR.
THE MORNING OF FREEDOM! IS DIM’D WITH A CLOUD -
A FOG FROM THE PASSIONS OF MEN IS EXHALED;
HER GLORIOUS EFFULGES IS WRAPPED IN A SHROUD -
HER RADIANCE AT PRESENT IS PARTIALLY VEIL’D.
O’FOOLS! TO IMAGINE DESTRUCTION AND BLOOD
COULD BRIGHTEN THE BLOOM ON LIBERTY’S TREE;
THE VOTE OF THE FREEMAN! THE POWER UNSUBDUED,
NOW ONLY FURTHER THE CAUSE OF THE FREE.
Opens on the 176th anniversary of the most significant anti-rent war event in Delaware County, NY; the shooting of Osman “Bud” Steele at the Moses Earl Farm. The anti-rent war was fought in opposition to oppressive Landlords who represented a small group of wealthy families who leased land to tenant farmers. On August 7 1845, Anti-Renters gathered at the farm of Moses Earl about a mile and a half southeast of the town of Andes. They had heard that Earle’s cattle were to be sold for non-payment of rents and were determined to convince the posse otherwise. Steele was killed and the “War” moved into the judicial arena of the Delaware County Courts.
Alina Bliumis (born in Belarus, lives and work in NYC and Andes, NY) is presenting the watercolor-on-linen series: Carrying the Weight, War Landscapes - a gaze upon the dreamy wild fields of the Catskills mountains around her studio in Andes, the florid orange sunrise floods warm light over the Berezina River of her birth place in Belarus - or a palette of green meadows framing the shallow red-colored waters of the Rubicon River (south of Ravenna, Italy); all locations based on their historical, semiotic or metaphorical significance.
There is no visual reference to the dramatic historical events that took place in these landscapes of war’s past: no anti-rent rebellious farmers disguised as Calico Indians, no armies gathering under the direction of Napoleon or Caesar, no horses, no warships, no guns. No traces of the ravages of war, only the voice of the majestic stillness left after destruction. The geographical names allude to a historical event and signify a personal battle: crossing personal Rubicons-a point of no return, meeting one’s own Waterloo - an encounter with one’s ultimate obstacle, inevitable defeat at Austerlitz - facing gloom and “c’est la Bérézina” (translation: a serious failure).
RADICAL RURAL SOCIALISM: THE ANTI-RENT WAR talk by Jennifer Kabat, AUGUST 14, 4-5PM
As part of Andes Community Day on the Anti-Rent War. It was a time when our community was the most radical (and most violent) group in the US in an age of rage and radical reconsidering what the US could be. It’s a time remarkably like our own— if at opposite intentions. The uprising was fought across parts of Delaware County and took place in part, in my town, on my road, on my land…. I’ll talk about digging into the war's foundations in literal foundations and ruins where I live. Plus, the Anti-Rent War’s ties to other left/socialist/utopian movements from the 17th century up. (Let’s hear it for the Diggers…) Andes Community Day celebrates the shooting and death of undersheriff Osman Steele. It was the bloody apex of the Anti-Rent War, and afterwards, the governor declared Delaware County in a state of insurrection. The militia was called out and a grand jury sat for a month meeting every day but Sunday. The Anti-Rent War, which is little known had an outsized impact on the country. It led to the Homestead Act.
Jennifer Kabat’s essays have appeared in Granta, Harper’s, Frieze, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review and The White Review. A finalist for Notting Hill Editions’ Essay Prize, she teaches at NYU and the New School and was awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism. Her writing has been included in exhibitions at Arnfolfini (Bristol, UK), Index (Stockholm Sweden) and The Poor Farm (Little Wolf, WI), where her ongoing collaboration with the artist Kate Newby was featured in the summer of 2016. She is a founding editor of the essay site The Weeklings and is currently working on a book of linked essays, GROWING UP MODERN, exploring civic values from the modernist suburb where she grew up to where she lives now in the Catskill Mountains.
https://www.jenniferkabat.com
Alina and Jeff Bliumis, A PAINTING FOR A FAMILY DINNER, Social Dive, Tokyo Biennale, July 10 - September 5, 2021
In June 2021, we placed the following call for participation via social networking sites to Tokyo residents:
“Husband and wife artist team are offering a painting in exchange for an invitation to a family dinner. Please email for more info. According to the present situation, all gatherings will be via zoom.”
In July 2021, we had dinners with twelve Tokyo families via zoom.
A Painting For A Family Dinner is a broad socially engaged artistic initiative, developed in different cultural contexts and continents. It started in Bat-Yam, Israel 2008. It was continued in the Bronx, New York, US 2012, Beijing, China 2013, Lecce, Italy 2013, and Tokyo, Japan 2021.
For A Painting For A Family Dinner project, we placed a call for participation in the media and via social networking sites to local residents: "Husband and wife artist team is offering a painting in exchange for an invitation to a family dinner. Please, email or call for more info..."
When families responded to the call for participation, we visited as many homes as we could. Participation was based on a first-come-first-served basis. There were no guidelines for our interactions, and we were open to any discussions that occurred. We created a painting for each occasion in advance. Each painting was a still life with fruits and "Thank You for Your Dinner!" written in the middle. At the end of each dinner, all participants were seated on a family couch, with the painting hung above the couch, for a family portrait--to be taken by a local photographer. The painting stayed with the family.
The project is not about a painting or a dinner, but about the displacement of the familial/familiar by virtue of artistic initiative. The project was embedded in the real life of the community and depended on the participation of local residents. The process was inclusive and welcoming for everyone in the neighborhood(s) and community(s). The artists and the families were equal and active co-creators of the project. Many members of the local cultural scene were involved in the research, creation, production and dissemination of the project in its different stages.
Altogether, we had dinners with 51 families, and here is our journey.
A Painting For A Family Dinner eliminates the artificial separation between art and life in the place of the familial/familiar. A platform for exchange and conversation is provided, overcoming the distance that normally exists between the artist(s) and audience--by establishing an opportunity for engagement with enriched and expanded forms of sociality (inter-and intra-cultural). The project embodies artistic practice as a form of civic engagement and social intervention. The project's main objective is to enable cultural and social transformation by integrating art as a reflective practice, an exchange, and a communicative experience within the everyday setting of family life.
This artistic intervention engages all participants in expanding the value and the meaning of social interaction -- as what engulfs the familial/familiar place of sharing time and food. The foundation of the project is the creation of a place or a moment where the public and the private spheres overlap and reformulate; art in the private space reshaping the public sphere itself. The other elements of the concept are openness and thankfulness; openness is about welcoming the possibilities of communication with a stranger; and thankfulness is the acknowledgment of debt and the values inherent to the potlatch, a gift-giving economic system practiced by indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest.
The long term objectives are to expand the sphere of the social experience of all those involved, by injecting extra-/intra-social/cultural/economic dimensions into the familial/familiar space; and to make the arts more meaningful in the realities of individual's lives in different societies and countries, by effectuating art as a transformative experience of co-active being and co-active thinking.
Partner organizations are Tokyo Biennale, Tokyo, Japan; Ammirato Culture House (ACH), Lecce, Italy; Inside-Out Art Museum (IOAM) Artist Residency Programme, Beijing, China; No Longer Empty, New York, US; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, US; MoBY, the Bat Yam Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel.
Photography by Aya Morimoto (Japan), Alessia Rollo (Lecce), Du Yang (Beijing), Anton Trofymov (Bronx), Dafna Gazit (Bat Yam).
Alina Bliumis CARRYING THE WEIGHT, WAR LANDSCAPES curated by Sozita Goudouna The Opening Gallery, 42 Walker St. NYC July 13 - September 10, 2022
Carrying the Weight, War Landscapes is a series of watercolor-on-linen landscapes. The locations were selected based on their historical significance and metaphorical representation in contemporary culture.
Each landscape immerses the viewer in tranquil scenery: a palette of green meadows frames the shallow red waters of the Rubicon River, just south of Ravenna, Italy; a starry night shines into the sea north of Tsushima Island in Japan; a cool and ghostly morning mist fills a Waterloo field in Belgium; a florid orange sunrise floods warm light over the Berezina River in Belarus; the midday sun sends its beams over the rocky Golgotha hill near Jerusalem, Israel; a golden hour brings magical light to the sky over field-lines of Austerlitz in Slavkov u Brna, Czechia; Mannahatta blooms with foliage and dramatic pink clouds hang over Mahicantuck, on the Hudson River; and the dreamy landscapes of Andes lie still in the Catskills region in upstate New York.
No visual trace remains of the dramatic historical events that took place against these backdrops: no Caesar or Napoleon with armies in tow, no horses or warships, no crucifixions; no ravages of war, nor signs of revolt. Only the place-names call to mind these histories, inviting the viewer to imagine their personal battles in place of the old. One thinks of crossing a real-life Rubicon, or point of no return; of an encounter with one’s ultimate obstacle—a Waterloo, of sorts; of feeling unavoidably defeated, as if in the gloom at Austerlitz; of failure— “c’est la Bérézina,” one might cry in French; of an occasion of great suffering figured as Golgotha, or of a battle with the ghosts of memory, animated in Tsushima.
The Lenape people inhabited the land on which I work for thousands of years before the European settlers arrived. They named their island home “Mannahatta,” meaning “Island of Many Hills.” We use the term “Mannahatta” to refer to the island as it was in 1609, and “Manhattan” to refer to the metropolis of today. The river we call the “Hudson,” the Lenape knew as “Mahicantuck,” meaning “river that flows two ways.”
Behind the four landscapes of Andes, NY (where my studio is located), there is the story of the Anti-Rent War of 1839–1845, a collective revolt of farmers who resisted tax collectors and successfully demanded land reform.
Alina Bliumis, NARRATING AGAINST THE GRAIN Curated by Corina L. Apostol, Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia, July 17 - September 6, 2020
Where would you go if you wanted to see the centre of Europe? What are the traits of the average global citizen? What happens to our families when our political views are crossed? How can differences among us be re-defined in ways that enable resistance and creative activity for cultural change?
The “Narrating Against the Grain” exhibition features new commissions by Alina Bliumis and Tanja Muravskaja and will be open from 17 July until 6 September at Art Hall Gallery. The exhibition opening will take place on 16 July at 5 pm.
“Nations themselves are narrations,” observed Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993), a statement that holds true in our current time. While conflicts continue to be waged over the ownership of land (and resources), issues of who has the right to work, live, settle and travel, and indeed the question of a nation’s future, are nevertheless echoed, challenged or even decided upon in narratives, both written and visual.
This exhibition brings together two artists who share the experience of growing up in Soviet Eastern Europe as well as a thematic interest in transcending borderlines, the constructed-ness of national identity, the entanglement of art and politics and the im/mobility of migrants. The global refugee reception crisis as well as the dramatic transformations in Europe during the pandemic have been catalysts for these artists to create artistic narratives that go against the grain and engage with forms of being in-between geographies and the struggle over self.
With humour and empathy, this project, the first collaboration between artists Alina Bliumis and Tanja Muravskaja, will introduce inventive forms of togetherness at the intersection of art, politics and education. The project specifically consists of a physical presentation of photographs and interviews of life under the pandemic with at-risk, vulnerable, resilient members of society, a series of banners emblazoned with different types of big cats from national passport covers presented at the gallery and partner cultural institutions (including Nõmme Cultural Centre, Estonian Art Academy, Museum of Photography, Tallinn Russian Museum) posters of different centres of Europe highlighting the shifting definitions of borders, and more.
While the physical exhibition will take place at the Art Hall Gallery and across Tallinn, the curator and artists will also engage audiences in lively online discussions on the consequences of the emergency state and reflect on the challenges and opportunities of mutual aid and solidarity, as well as new modes of engaged citizenship.
The exhibition will grapple with the possibilities that art and culture offer and respond to current reimaginings over citizenship and homelands. Building upon the experiences of two artists who share a personal history of migration across cultures and borders that have greatly influenced their work, the exhibition will help facilitate exchanges that will have a lasting effect upon public opinion. Ultimately, “Narrating against the grain” aims to reflect upon the contingencies of our time, urging all of us to take an active role as agents of change.
Alina Bliumis, MASSES Curated by Elizabeth M. Grady SPRING/BREAK Art Show March 3-9, 2020
The series Masses (2019-2020), by Alina Bliumis is an exploration into the tipping point, where analysis becomes obsession and participation becomes dissolution, as the individual relinquishes a sense of self in the face of phenomenological overwhelm. At 58 x 83” the cotton panels that comprise the series depict crowds of over-life-size figures representing internal and external encroachment on the psyche. To pass between and among the mono-chrome gossamer hangings, which combine digital print and watercolor, is to revisit each time you’ve experienced that transcendent moment of fear or ecstasy where the only certainty is that you’ve given up your personal agency to the mob.
Masses #1 is perhaps the most anomalous of the series, focusing as it does on an internal struggle. Evoking the howling forces of worry and self-doubt that visit in the blackness of the small hours of the morning, the work suggests a descent into a demon-plagued hell of our own device. Monstrously twisted and disembodied limbs vie with attenuated spectral faces for command of the poor soul, bent over at the base of the composition, and gazing apprehensively over its shoulder at the reigning chaos. As riveting as it is disturbing, it is Fuseli’s Nightmare for our troubled times.
On a lighter note, Bliumis turns to mass celebrations of Dionysian excess in the rock concert depicted in Masses #2. The main figure is blissed-out and spread-eagled in mid-stage-dive. The darker side of the experience is intimated by the blackened eye sockets and inverted pose of the figure, however, and we are left to question whether the stage divers act is a celebration of music and communal experience or a kind of temporary martyrdom, where consciousness is sacrificed through the use of drugs for release from the pressures of this mortal coil. The veiled reference to St. Peter, who as legend has it asked to be crucified head-down so as not to risk dilution of the memory of Christ’s torture, cannot be lost on anyone familiar with the Western tradition.
Front-page news often records crowd hysteria, and the palette of Bliumis’ series reinforces the newspaper reference in works like #7-8 and #5 which depict a Protest and Soldiers respectively. In the former, there are as many emotions as faces, showing the rage, fervor, anxiety, devotion, and hope that can forge a compelling collective identity at mass demonstrations. Yet one is left to wonder, given the multiplicity of expressions, if these protestors will ever achieve unity of communal purpose. The soldiers, in their uniformity, are a stark reminder that in rigid discipline and conformity comes another kind of excess that can be wielded as a blunt and unforgiving weapon against a mass of individuals.
Abandonment of reason is a theme that carries through several of these panels, not least in the Masses #3 (Lovers). Here, bodies entwine in the abandonment of an orgy, with the ebb and flow of momentary sensations evoked by shifts in scale, as in the couple at center right; or the union of body parts, like the heads at the bottom center, whose mouths unite when the tongue of the head on the right becomes the lips of the head on the left, in a perceptual twist that would have made Cezanne proud.
The installation of the works, as large fabric panels dividing the space, will create a disorienting experience for viewers, ideally, a psychological state that hints at if not approximates the loss of self-experienced when one becomes part of a crowd or mass, whether for good or for ill, ecstasy or violence. Bliumis depicts scenes where mass experience tips over into mass hysteria, where the intellect is overcome by emotional input. What differentiates a rally from a revolution? A riot from a rock concert? Whether attending a military exercise, a religious rite, or an orgy, overload provides release through collective identification with a larger purpose.
Alina Bliumis, CLASSIFICATION PATTERNS: CHRISTIAN, MUHAMMAD, LEE Curated by Irena Popiashvili “Ў” Gallery of Contemporary Art, Minsk, Belarus October 9 – October 31, 2019
The “Ў” gallery of contemporary art is pleased to present a solo-exhibition by the Belarus-born artist, Alina Bliumis. The artist was born in Minsk, but she received her education in New York and has exhibited extensively in the US and in Europe. This is Bliumis’ first solo exhibition in her native Belarus.
The title of the exhibition refers to the artist’s 2018-2019 text-based series Most of Us Are. This 12 part work describes how “most of us” are born, believe, worship, don’t eat, consume, own, lose, dream, and spend our lives. Bliumis used statistics, demographic research and opinion poll data to define the main characteristics of a global citizen, and then construct a verbal portrait of “the most typical person.” Statistically, it is correct that “most of us are named Muhammad, last name Lee.” But as Stamatina Gregory noted in her text on Bliumis’s work (Political Animals, Aperto Raum, Berlin, 2018), “no citizen of the world cobbled together from shared demographic data truly exists.” And Bliumis’ statistic-based text portraits are anything but typical. Classifying, researching, collecting and creating new patterns of order is essential to the artist.
To create the series entitled Amateur Watching at Passport Control, the artist studied all 195 passports currently in circulation worldwide. She dissected the symbolism of the coats of arms featured on the covers, and identified four major categories: plants and trees, birds, big cats and weapons. From Lebanon’s cedar to Mauritius’ dodo, to Georgia’s lions and East Timor’s AK 47, the four works in the series, Amateur Bird Watching at Passport Control, Amateur Cat Watching at Passport Control, Amateur Flora Watching at Passport Control and Amateur Arsenal Watching at Passport Control (2016-2019), bring to life this curious intersection between nationalism and nature.
The exhibition also includes the works: My Soviet Childhood, He and My Soviet Childhood, She,2018. Bliumis created them together with her long time collaborator, Jeff Bliumis. The diptych comprises a collection of postcards of Soviet movie stars from the late 1960s through to the 1980s that he built up during his childhood. The artist says “the series is dedicated to all Soviet-era children who collected stamps, postcards, pins, cigarette and match boxes, soda bottles, candy wraps, juice box stickers” during that time. There is an implied association between identifying the symbols on modern passport covers and the curious eye that encouraged the collection of Soviet movie star postcards. Having past experience of this common childhood pleasure, of creating and curating collections of day-to-day objects, is essential in understanding both Most of Us Are and Amateur Watching at Passport Control series.
In My Soviet Childhood, He and She, the artists are trying to create a portrait of the most typical Soviet-era movie star. But there is a reverse process underway in Amateur Watching at Passport Control. Alina Bliumis is grasping the bigger picture of different coats of arms and dissecting them into their visual parts.
The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Franklin Furnace, NY
Alina Bliumis ON THE LAND OF EAGLES Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France September 14 - October 26, 2019
Alina Bliumis’ exhibition, On the Land of Eagles, voyages through global national symbols and identities. The Poems Without Borders series features the world’s tourism slogans in patterned rhymes. Amateur Bird Watching at Passport Control unlocks symbolic imagery from passport covers. The artist traces global territories in the allegorical Maps Unleashed drawings, and portrays national animal symbols in the Nature of Nations series.
“I feel Slovenia, I need Spain, Fiji Me, Cameroon is back.” Tourism slogans market countries to an expanding industry fueled by low-cost no-frills airlines. Abstract yet suggestive taglines allow foreigners to dream up their own ideas about the countries they want to visit. The series Poems Without Borders (2018-2019) arranges official national tourism slogans of forty-eight nations into sixteen poems. For this exhibition, the text-based piece is placed directly on the wall in one straight line that wraps around the gallery space.
Tourism and migration are the most significant manifestations of globalization. While economic, political and environmental migrants are routinely blocked at the border, tourists are ceaselessly wooed on various media and advertising platforms. While countries sculpt their national identities to make themselves more appealing to visitors, they use ethnic and cultural definitions to reinforce laws limiting migration.
“Free as a bird” we definitely are not. Yet ironically there are fifty bird symbols incorporated into the coats of arms depicted on the passport covers of forty-three nations. The Amateur Bird Watching at Passport Control series (2016-2017) presents forty-three works on paper. From eagles to doves, from Albania to Tonga, Bliumis studied all existing passport covers – 195 in total -- looking for birds in order to free them from their national context. She traced each bird, true to its source, with a focus on the species’ characteristics. The birds at the intersection of nation and nature include: the famous one-legged pose of a flamingo (Bahamas), a vulture in a gliding flight (Mali), an extinct flightless dodo (Mauritius), a rooster with an axe (Kenya) and a mythological creature that is part woman and part bird known as a Harpy (Liechtenstein).
Birds are not the only animals that nations use to symbolize themselves—a brown bear, a Fennec fox, an Apennine Wolf, a Barbary Macaque, a Marten or a goat are all official national animals. Nature of Nations (2019) is a series of watercolor portraits inspired by official national animals, heraldic design elements, geographical borders, folk fables, and stereotypes. The resulting images portray: A bird of prey, the bald eagle, freed from the USA coat of arms with a halo made of two olive branches is staring at the viewer, its claw is free of arrows. A seductive double-headed rooster of France is flirting with the audience. An outraged bear with wings is a combination of two symbols, the bear of the Soviet Union and the double-headed eagle of contemporary Russia. A goat of Iraq is crowned with a sword-shaped horn.
The series Nations Unleashed (2018-2019) is inspired by the historical tradition of satirical maps, which employ animal symbolism and stereotypes to convey biting political critique and/or to cover up human actions in certain political theaters. The series comprises watercolor and pencil drawings on paper. Delicately toned washes of blue surround loosely sketched landmasses populated by an array of diverse animals, each representing a critical political interest. Bliumis’ interpretations range from the literal – as in the American bald eagle – to the fanciful – as in a two-headed Scandinavian lion. What these maps lack in geographic accuracy is made up in thorough doses of imagination and humor, leaving further interpretation open to the viewer.
All four series in the exhibition investigate the formation of national identity, its historical and geographical roots and its ambitions in global geopolitics. National symbols often reflect national interests, but imagine for a moment if, as the myth goes, the U.S. Congress had conceded to Benjamin Franklin. For instance, he might have chosen the wild turkey as the national bird, instead of the bald eagle. Would the country’s domestic policies and international interests have unfolded differently?
Alina Bliumis, POLITICAL ANIMALS Aperto Raum, Berlin 13 September - 22 October 2018
Aperto Raum is proud to present Political Animals by Alina Bliumis, her first solo exhibition In Germany. The title of the exhibition references Aristotle's term in his Politics. "However, instead of meaning, as Aristotle did, that we build society by practicing good social relations in organized establishments called cities (polis), Bliumis mockingly takes this expression at face value through a comic, yet productive form of literal mistranslation by focusing the use of birds, bears, and so forth, in political theater. Regardless of biology, states divide the world into two types of fictive persons: their citizenry, and everyone else. So as to keep this exclusionary set-up under control we had to invite something bestial, but sadly, something all too human: the police. Although borders are themselves fictive, try to cross one without your identity papers. But really, what is identity anyways? I mean if your documents are expired, does your name do so well? Or perhaps, your height and eye color vanish in a puff of smoke, poof!” - excerpt from Adam Kleinman, "Plucked," exhibition catalogue
Political Animals presents four series: Amateur Bird Watching at Passport Control, If There Is A Bear, Political Animals and Most Of Us Are. Amateur Bird Watching at Passport Control focuses on the birds that are featured on passport covers from countries around the world. From eagles to doves, from Albania to Tonga, this series explores the intersection of nation and nature. The series If There Is A Bear is inspired by the TV ad titled The Bear, created by Hal Riney for the 1984 U.S. presidential campaign of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. This example of the Cold War narrative make us aware that using animal imagery for the purpose of politics is not merely an aesthetic choice, but in fact a political strategy. While Political Animals is blurring the boundaries between the human and the animal, Most of Us Are is a study of the human species based on statistics of the “most typical” person worldwide.
Alina and Jeff Bliumis THANK TOY PAINTING EXCHANGE, Denny Gallery, New York 2014
In collaboration with Jeff Bliumis
Thank You Paintings Exchange, 2014-2015,
Series of 15 paintings: canvas, acrylic, epoxy, documentation: graphite, paper, c-print, bread, rose tea, money and foam roller, Dimensions variable
Thank You Paintings Exchange initiates a series of material, social, gestural, intellectual and monetary exchanges between artist and collector.
The series of fifteen paintings depict scenes of everyday life: a woman sitting on a deserted beach, children playing, cars parked in front of a suburban home, etc. Each painting has the text, “Thank You For Your...” painted on it, completed with words such as “Email,” “Poem,” “Kiss,” “Prayers,” “Dance,” “Pants,” “Thoughts.”
Sometimes a viewer might detect a relationship between the text and the subject of the painting, but there is no deliberate, direct relationship. The
painting points toward the value of the painting as an artwork, while the text points toward the exchange the artists propose to initiate with the collector.
In order to acquire a painting, collector participated in the exchange the artists have proposed, giving the artists the object, gesture, concept, etc. for which the painting thanks them, in addition to making a flat $1,000 financial transaction. The interactions between artists and buyers were documented. The actions and objects requested by the artists were creatively interpreted by the collector.
