Elena Kovylina

Born 1971 in Russia, she lives and works in Moscow.  

Staging Russian history

After training as a painter in the former USSR, Elena Kovylina worked in the studio of Rebecca Horn in Berlin and began producing performances. From Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, to the Sharjah Biennial, from a square in Salzburg to the Odessa Steps, from MAK in Vienna to Art Basel Miami, Kovylina uses whatever space or context is available to put on radical performances that question conventions, standards, gender, politics and history. The artist’s position and vocabulary are extreme. She often puts herself physically in danger, meaning that spectators run the risk of witnessing a fatal event. Her performances disturb and fascinate, provoking unease and desire at the same time.

Kovylina has been invited to perform, among others, at the Nomadic Nights of the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (2002), at La Maison Rouge, Paris (2007), at the Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow and at the Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo in Turin (2010). The Misunderstanding (2009) was her first big monograph show in Western Europe, put on after a residency of several months at the Analix Forever gallery in Geneva. The nature of the “misunderstanding” in question is twofold. Firstly, it concerns the mastery of images: the artist is always the main subject of her performances, which means that they are filmed by someone else. And secondly, it concerns the mastery of time: the artist claims to be above all a performer, producing actions that are by definition ephemeral, yet at the same time she goes back to the painting of her early years in order to appropriate the fugacious images generated by the performer (the artist’s performances are all filmed, and then reworked as paintings). Her canvases thus reprise screen captures from the videos based on films of her performances. They allow Kovylina to choose her perspective, subject, lighting, colour, and the details on which she will focus, the material to be used. She thus reappropriates her own work by a series of subjective decisions.

Her painting, in the purest tradition of the Russian academic painting that she spent twelve years studying, combining “hot” and “cold,” itself represents part of history — of art history. One of her films – and one of her most fantastical paintings – revisits the famous Odessa Steps scene from Eisenstein’s mythic film The Battleship Potemkin. In Kovylina’s film it is the artist who pushes the pram down the steps. This is identical to the one filmed by Eisenstein – except for the fact that it is empty from the beginning to the end of the shot.For the Printemps de Septembre, Kovylina is presenting a caustic collective performance on the Bolshevik myth of Égalité, but also the specially made The Fist. Kovylina’s appropriation of history here is particularly flagrant, in that she herself plays the role of her grandfather.
“All our Russian grandfathers know something about this story,” she explains. “One of my grandfathers told it to me: he was walking across a big white, snow-covered field with a very important packet that he had to take to his commanding officer. He was wearing dark clothes and was very conspicuous. Suddenly a German aeroplane appeared in the sky and started firing at him. My grandfather began to zigzag around and the aeroplane used up all its ammunition before it could hit him. The plane then started hedgehopping, so that my grandfather could clearly see the German pilot’s face. So he raised his fist to him in a gesture of victory – a victory all the more glorious in that it was against the odds.”
Kovylina, too, raises her fist, both in real life and in the film shown in Toulouse, in which she is dressed as a soldier, the better to remind us – not without pride – that Russia, with its back to the wall after Hitler had suddenly revoked the German accords with the USSR, entered the fight against Nazism and fought heroically, without counting its dead, the millions who fell to save the nation (the “Great Patriotic War”).