On July 20, Moldovan artist Pavel Braila started a snowball fight in front of St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. Four Mercedes sedans pulled up inside the city’s main Palace Square, and a security detail of suit-clad men emerged to deposit 660 pounds of artificial snow onto a golden table, arranged outdoors for the occasion. Braila said that he collected the fake snow in Sochi during February’s Winter Olympics, shortly after he received a commission from Manifesta for the biennial’s public program. Claiming to have preserved the snow specifically for that midsummer afternoon, Braila watched one of several performances he conceived for the 10th edition of Manifesta with bated breath. How would onlookers respond?
Having completed their task, the four men stepped aside to give the assembled crowd — small children, their mothers, curious tourists, members of the local artist community, and the city’s culture press — access to the glinting, watery mass. Within several minutes, snowballs flew in every direction as audience members spontaneously pelted each other under the shadow of the State Hermitage Museum (where Manifesta is currently on view). Braila had pitched his project as a celebration of Sochi to municipal authorities. He hoped they would approve a laudatory gesture, much as he knew the final performance would be altogether different. One ironic breach of propriety led to another, less affected one. Observing the impromptu results of his handiwork on that sunny Sunday, Braila exclaimed: “It’s perfect!”
The Chisinau-based artist’s “Cold Painting” performance was but one of nearly 100 events organized as part of Manifesta’s public program, curated by Joanna Warsza. The curator invited artists from the western republics of the former Soviet Union — previous colonial territories, like Ukraine, that are underrepresented in the main exhibition — to produce time-based commissions across St. Petersburg throughout the biennial’s four-month run. With such a wide variety of performances and artists, including Ragnar Kjartansson, Slavs and Tatars, and newcomers like Alexandra Pirici, the biennial’s public program amounts to a massive undertaking in its own right, more than a secondary complement to chief curator Kasper Konig’s main exhibition at the Hermitage. While Konig’s display demonstrates how a reactionary Russian state undermines political art’s agency by appropriating its leftist critiques, the public program shows that the government’s attitude can also be co-opted by artists. By re-appropriating elements of the current regime’s self-celebratory rhetoric, public program participants like Braila assert that things are not as they appear. In such inverted circumstances, farce proves a more effective creative tool than dissidence.
That weekend, the public program created a temporary theater of the absurd inside the Palace Square, a sprawling public space that previously hosted some of the most dramatic political turns in Russian history. In October 1917, Bolshevik troops stormed the Winter Palace and started the Soviet Union from that square; nearly a century later, Braila started a small snowball fight there, while earlier that day, Estonian artist Kristina Norman erected a modest steel sculpture in the shape of a Christmas tree amidst the square’s symbols of political might. The obvious differences between such historical and contemporary dramas overshadow their shared revolutionary spirit. By injecting spontaneity and visual dissonance into settings steeped with emblems of state power, public program artists create conditions for viewers to question the sources and symptoms of authority.
Case in point: winter reigned that day in the Palace Square, despite the July heat. In the morning, Norman, who represented Estonia at the 2009 Venice Biennale, unveiled “Souvenir,” a green steel frame that has the form, though not the foliage, of a Christmas tree. The bare-bones sculpture appears especially out-of-place against the Winter Palace’s baroque façade, painted green but covered in gilded ornamental detail. As the initial crowd dispersed, passersby approached the tree out of confusion — why is there a fake Christmas tree standing here in the middle of July? — and found a placard explaining in English and Russian its Ukrainian roots. A symbol for the infamous Christmas tree erected in Kiev’s Maidan Square, where the Ukrainian revolution began last winter, Norman’s piece proved disturbing, not merely bizarre, in light of the Malaysia Airlines plane crash that occurred in Ukraine three days prior. Norman’s effort to map Maidan onto the Palace Square extends to her video “Iron Arch,” screened at the Hermitage. Named after the triumphal arch in Maidan devoted to friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian nations, the reel shows Ukrainian artist and Maidan activist Alevtina Kakhidze navigating around the Petersburg square as though in Kiev. There, imagines Kakhidze as she walks past “Souvenir” in the short film, is where we set up the makeshift medical clinic; over there is where the soup kitchen was located, she tells the camera, pointing toward the Hermitage. Neither Norman nor Kakhidze overtly say that the Palace Square could also host a comparable popular uprising, though the suggestion looms large over the tree and its attendant film. The reminder that Petersburg’s main square has already witnessed such upheavals in the past is ever-present.
That metaphor was not lost on Russian authorities: two days after Norman premiered “Souvenir,” Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky issued an unusual statement about the piece. “People, be aware! Maidan caused chaos… Disturbances can be borne out of innocent entertainments,” he warned, insisting that “Souvenir” advises against such upheaval. “The Palace Square is vulnerable,” he explained. Yet Norman’s installation immediately revealed as much — the artist used little more than a fake Christmas tree to turn St. Petersburg’s symbolic seat of power into a site for interrogating that same authority.
“It’s only art, but it’s our tool,” said Warsza, the curator, during a discussion about contemporary art and political activism later that day. Initially, her sentiment had a defeatist ring — why fake winter in the middle of July, if it won’t change much? Yet the artist and activist Dmitry Vilensky, who was sitting in the audience, had already noted the importance of distinguishing the seasons. “It’s fucking winter outside. If you ran outside naked, full of joy with the red flag, you’d be frozen in five minutes,” he observed in 2013. “And then your brain and your body will be rather useless for the task of the future transformation,” he explained to a foreign curator who insisted that activists could overturn the Russian government. “So, if you want to do it, please take into consideration what season it is, and don’t pretend that the Californian sun is shining outside when it’s actually a Russian winter.”
