30.04.2008  Afrika (Sergei Bugaev) Good ballerina is always right

• This is the fourth exhibition of Afrika at I-20 gallery. It presents an installation of a ship’s mast bearing three sail crowns. The installation is made out of stylish two-seat turn of the 19th century Siberian sleigh with flags and metal sheet representing the sails. The sheet is a door part removed by Afrika from the Vera Mukhina sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. It was removed during the Donald Destruction performance of 1987, Moscow. The flags were produced during the other performance that took place in Crimea and was entitled Krimania in 1995. In the concept of obsessional representation Afrika stayed for one month at the psychiatric clinic with aphasic (loss of comprehension of language) inmates. The inmates, insensitive to the hierarchy of linguistic elements, worked on the flags. The objective was to illustrate the collapse of the Soviet Union in the form of aphasic incoherence of post-Soviet traumatized consciousness. The art produced by both performances was utilized to produce the installation, now on exhibit at I-20 gallery. Afrika (Sergei Bugaev) was born in Novorossisk in 1966. In the 1980s and 1990s, he founded with Timur Novikov the New Artists Movement in Leningrad. They also founded the Soviet band Popular Mechanics which was led by experimental composer Sergei Kurhokhin. In 1987 Bugaev starred in Serrgei Soloviov’s ASSA, one of the most significant Russian film of the Glasnost era; and in 1989, he was commissioned by John Cage to design sets and costumes for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s August Pace. Bugaev lives and works in St. Petersburg.