Anna Zorina Gallery is pleased to inaugurate its new Los Angeles Gallery space with the solo exhibition of Alina Bliumis, Borders and Bruises. This is Bliumis’ first show with the Gallery. The exhibition will feature three bodies of work including the watercolor maps of Nations Unleashed, the abstract paintings series Bruises and text-based sculptural works Concrete Poems. A percentage of proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to Direct Help For Ukraine and BYSOL, an organization supporting politically repressed Belarusians.
Bears, eagles and octopi have been active role-players in satirical maps since the 16th century. With her watercolor series,Nations Unleashed, Bliumis pays homage to cartographic curiosities by employing animal symbolism to convey biting political critique. In Bear vs. Nightingale, European countries become a battleground of zoomorphic shapes. Here the national animals are seen in mid-clash as the Ukrainian nightingale faces the Russian bear, an eagle representing the West stands alert. Bliumis explores this history of transferring human actions and motives onto primal beings to remove individual responsibility and agency from the political theater. This shift in perspective heightens awareness to this rampant strategy of displacement, compelling us to critically reflect on the Mine line that separates fact from fiction in global geopolitics.
Before maps are drawn, history is first recorded on bodies through experience captured in the form of bruises, wounds, calluses. The body is a document of social struggles. For example, in the artist’s native country of Belarus, the nation united in response to the rigged election of 2020. These protestors shared the resulting scars of having faced aggressive measures of suppression and brutal detainment across various media platforms, bringing public awareness to the human rights abuse in hopes of achieving justice in the future. These events have triggered Bliumis’ watercolor on linen series, Bruises. Each bruise painting is numbered in reference to statistics of human suffering. The traumas range from serious to playful, from political prisoners and refugees to unrequited celebrity crushes. The artist represents the bruises as abstract patches of watercolor allowing the pigment to bleed into the weave of the linen in a style reminiscent of Color Field painting. Bliumis engages the expressionist style’s association with making an emotional impact through clarity of color and form with an emphasis on celebrating individual expression and freedom of subjectivity. Her paintings are spatial and alive to endow an immortality to the feelings and sensations that underlie these important moments throughout our own personal and collective history.
If the border is what you fight for and body what you fight with, then poetry in life is a tool for survival. The works within the Concrete Poemsseries depict a literal approach to a visual poetry tradition that takes on a specific typographic arrangement to convey meaning. Inspired by street wall scribbles, grafiti, and absurdist poetry, the artist makes her mark firmly in concrete. Breaking down words into a context that brings new meaning or finds irony in everyday language, Imagination Nation; Mother Other; Father Her; Slaughter Laughter. Bliumis exploration of her second language of English finds that even one letter can make all the difference.
The exhibition is accompanied by text written by art critic, media theorist, and philosopher, Boris Groys.
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 Controlseries (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?
