Collective Actions:

Trips out of Town, 1976–2009

Curator: Sabine Hänsgen

Collective Actions (Andrej Monastyrskij, Nikolaj Panitkov, Nikita Alekseev, Elena Elagina, Igor’ Makarevič, Georgij Kizeval’ter, Sergej Romaško, Sabine Hänsgen)

The performances by the group Collective Actions played a significant role in the development of an alternative space for communication in Russian-Soviet culture during late communism. It facilitated the self-organization of a subcultural art scene apart from the state-controlled cultural sector, access to which was regulated by strict censorship policies. The common objective of the “Trips out of Town,” having taken place since 1976, is the collaborative journey of a group of participants into the rural countryside around Moscow—usually into a wide, empty field, that is, away from the metropolitan sphere imbued with symbols and into an “empty” natural space. Often a field of untouched snow has been the stage for mysterious Minimalist actions that fathom elementary spatiotemporal structures of perception.
For the Collective Actions, the exploration of the Soviet ideological culture of texts, manifestos, and slogans is not, however, reduced to the instantaneous perception of a situation. In fact, the situative gesture of “experience” more closely equates to a new impulse in an endlessly interpretative spiral in which text and situation enhance each other again and again.
The “installation as diagram” enables the exhibition visitors to more thoroughly study the multifaceted documentary materials as an intricate web of interrelationships.
By opening a “planetary” perspective through recent satellite images—upon which the respective localities are marked at which the Collective Actions have taken place over the course of thirty years—the artistic reflection of ideology and power in late communism is extended to comprehend contemporary processes of globalization. (Sabine Hänsgen)

Online Archive of the Collective Actions
conceptualism.letov.ru