Stomach It, 2017
artist's menu, performance
In a performance integrated into the opening reception for Space Force Construction, uniformed servers offer guests dishes on the politics of food: edible paper, two carrots wrapped in a poem by
a Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, bread made from flour of dried leaves and hay, a lollipop in the shape of Lenin’s head, and a loudspeaker on a plate with sounds of hungry stomachs. All lead to a kind of kinaesthetic time travel, evoking the pain of hunger experienced by millions who suffered starvation and death because of Soviet policies, especially in the 1930s in Ukrain and the Caucasus. Taus Makhacheva, whose family roots are in the Avar ethnic group of the Caucasus, makes expres- sive performance and media works that illuminate recent historical conditions of life in her ances- tral region.
Peter Taub
I take a timeline as a starting point; I take a point on that timeline as a starting point. A sound your body rarely makes, the intimacy of sharing when there is little left to share. You listen to me, you try to stomach it, stomach the past in your present gut. Who started this, who shapes this history, what shape do the brains take in your mouth. Changing numbers on bread coupons, a test of how little one needs to be able to lift a finger. Can you even swallow meat made from newspaper, soup made from wallpaper paste. Can you swallow that past, a past bereft of choice. Do we even mention cannibalism here, do we even mention the historical facts of famine and cannibalism caused by the state. Is this how your plate would have looked. It’s a line, it’s a small boat, I travel across the water into the past, dishes float by, I catch something every now and then with a net, I take it out for you to swallow.
Costume design: Panika Derevya
Sound design: Alexander Khokhlov
Visualisation: Voploschator
Objects production: Make Fabrication Studio
Costume production: Svetlana Kondrasheva, Olga Kostornova, Irina Olezhkina, Svetlana Shcherbakova
Smell: Ilya Nastenko
Food: I Figli delle Stelle
Candy mold production: Ledenfab
Candy wrapper: CNC Machine
Graphic design: Zaven
Production: Malika Alieva, Kamila Banks, Nadya Gorbushina, Jamilya Valieva Research: Malika Alieva, Kamila Banks, Jamilya Valieva
Translation: Evgeny Bonver
Special thanks to Svetlana Anokhina, Katerina Chuchalina, Carlos Noronha Feio, Patrick Hough, Anna Ilchenko, Maria Isserlis, Daria Kirsanova, Magomed Magomedov, Greta Mavica, Magomed Piramagomedov, Peter Taub
Photo: Andrea Penisto
Commissioned by V-A-C Foundation
Site under construction. Contact: info@tausmakhacheva.com