Alina Bliumis BORDERS AND BRUISES Anna Zorina Gallery Los Angeles, CA, June 2 - July 9, 2022

Anna Zorina Gallery is pleased to inaugurate its new Los Angeles Gallery space with the solo exhibition of Alina Bliumis, Borders and Bruises. This is Bliumis’ first show with the Gallery. The exhibition will feature three bodies of work including the watercolor maps of Nations Unleashed, the abstract paintings series Bruises and text-based sculptural works Concrete Poems. A percentage of proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to Direct Help For Ukraine and BYSOL, an organization supporting politically repressed Belarusians.

Bears, eagles and octopi have been active role-players in satirical maps since the 16th century. With her watercolor series, Nations Unleashed, Bliumis pays homage to cartographic curiosities by employing animal symbolism to convey biting political critique. In Bear vs. Nightingale, European countries become a battleground of zoomorphic shapes. Here the national animals are seen in mid-clash as the Ukrainian nightingale faces the Russian bear, an eagle representing the West stands alert. Bliumis explores this history of transferring human actions and motives onto primal beings to remove individual responsibility and agency from the political theater. This shift in perspective heightens awareness to this rampant strategy of displacement, compelling us to critically reflect on the Mine line that separates fact from fiction in global geopolitics.

Before maps are drawn, history is first recorded on bodies through experience captured in the form of bruises, wounds, calluses. The body is a document of social struggles. For example, in the artist’s native country of Belarus, the nation united in response to the rigged election of 2020. These protestors shared the resulting scars of having faced aggressive measures of suppression and brutal detainment across various media platforms, bringing public awareness to the human rights abuse in hopes of achieving justice in the future. These events have triggered Bliumis’ watercolor on linen series, Bruises. Each bruise painting is numbered in reference to statistics of human suffering. The traumas range from serious to playful, from political prisoners and refugees to unrequited celebrity crushes. The artist represents the bruises as abstract patches of watercolor allowing the pigment to bleed into the weave of the linen in a style reminiscent of Color Field painting. Bliumis engages the expressionist style’s association with making an emotional impact through clarity of color and form with an emphasis on celebrating individual expression and freedom of subjectivity. Her paintings are spatial and alive to endow an immortality to the feelings and sensations that underlie these important moments throughout our own personal and collective history.

If the border is what you fight for and body what you fight with, then poetry in life is a tool for survival. The works within the Concrete Poems series depict a literal approach to a visual poetry tradition that takes on a specific typographic arrangement to convey meaning. Inspired by street wall scribbles, grafiti, and absurdist poetry, the artist makes her mark firmly in concrete. Breaking down words into a context that brings new meaning or finds irony in everyday language, Imagination Nation; Mother Other; Father Her; Slaughter Laughter. Bliumis exploration of her second language of English finds that even one letter can make all the difference.

The exhibition is accompanied by text written by art critic, media theorist, and philosopher, Boris Groys.

Boris Groys ART HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

We are accustomed to living in a disenchanted and designed world – the world of administration, technology, geographical maps, statistical data and abstract painting. In this world almost all wild forms of life are already domesticated and put under control: tigers and lions live in national parks or in zoos. However, there remains suspicion that some strange, alien forms of life are concealed under the familiar surfaces of our world and cannot be totally suppressed. In the polytheistic myths of ancient cultures the flows, woods and mountains became animated. And through this act of animation they became also dangerous and violent. In her art Alina Bliumis applies the same act of animation on the familiar images of our lifeless, soulless, administered world. As a result, the hidden energy of violence and aggression becomes revealed upon which those images owe their aura of tranquility and peaceful stability.

Indeed, when we look at the political map of the world, on which every country is presented by a certain geometrical form, we tend to forget that this form is always a result of bloody wars and oppression. In her series “Nation Unleashed” Alina reveals the “animal” energy of hate and aggression to which contemporary countries owe the shapes of their borders. She shows the peaceful surface of our world as camouflage concealing the violent fight for dominance. Of course, as an artist of Belorussian origin Alina cannot turn her eyes away from the eruptions of violence that currently take place in her region. However, long before these actual events took place, she was attentive to, what one can call, the political zoology of our contemporary world –the descent of national political symbols from mythical animals of the polytheistic past. 

Alina’s disbelief in the surface characterizes her series “Bruises.” Images on their surface that look to be late examples of abstract expressionism become revealed as images that remain on human skin after a punch. Here again peaceful art for art’s sake suddenly turns into a document of physical violence and the fate of the body in the contemporary world. And in the series “Concrete Poems” familiar words that seem to be merely vehicles of ordinary communication begin to dissolve, revealing an abyss of the absurd hidden behind their grammatically correct surface.

Theodor Adorno famously said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is impossible. The appearance of the beautiful would only serve as cover making us forget the cruel reality of our world. Many artists reacted to this challenge by making their artworks look as ugly as reality itself. However, in this way they missed the cruelty of the second degree – the cruelty of the aestheticizing cover-up. It is this cruelty of the second degree – the cruelty inherent to the artistic practice itself – that Alina makes her topic in a subtle and at the same time surprisingly direct and convincing way.

*The exhibition Borders and Bruises at Anna Zorina Gallery, LA is accompanied by text written by art critic, media theorist, and philosopher, Boris Groys.

Boris Groys WHAT DO THE BIRDS DREAM ABOUT? Political Animals, Apero Raum, Berlin

When we speak about globalization we mostly mean the global circulation of information, money and commodities. However, long before this circulation started animals, birds and insects were circulating around the world – and they still are. Migration of birds and animals preceded the migration of men. At the same time not all the animals migrate. Some of them are local – and parts of local ecologies. That is why migration of animals and other living organisms, such as viruses and microbes, is seen as dangerous for the ecological balance in certain regions. Now, the analogy with the human migration is obvious. Often enough it is also seen as a negative factor destroying the ecological balance of certain national states.

Alina Bliumis came to the USA from Belarus. One of the persistent topics of her art is a reflection on the processes of accommodation and integration in which everyone with a similar background is unavoidably involved. The tone of this reflection is far from being dictated by personal ressentiment or protest. Rather, her attention is drawn by the absurdities of the processes themselves. Her recent projects Amateur Bird Watching at the Passport Control and Political Animals deal with the images of animals and birds that serve as symbols for different national states and thus put on the official documents, including passports, of their citizens. There is this standard expression: free as a bird. Speaking about the freedom of birds we mean, of course, the migrating birds that high in the sky cross all the national borders – the freedom which the planes, for example, do not have.

However, the birds which images we find in our passports are not migrating
birds. Mostly, they are birds of prey – like eagles, for example. In this respect they are similar to the political animals – lions or bears. The eagles do not migrate – they are circling in the air and controlling their territory. They are machines of surveillance. They look for a prey – and catch it. So it is clear enough why so many states have chosen the eagle as its symbol. Of course, there are also some more peaceful examples. But the common characteristic of all these birds is the fact that they are local – be it a pelican from Barbados or a parrot from Dominica. All these birds are prisoners of their territories. Do they ever dream to become free, to migrate, to visit different countries – and not only to draw always the same circles over the same territory? We do not know it. But if the birds have these dreams it is the citizens of the states that have images of these birds in their passports who realize these dreams – at least in symbolic terms. Thus, even if a parrot remains on Dominica and a pelican - on the Barbados the passports with their images have a chance to be checked at the airports all around the world. Whatever can be said about the migrants one thing is sure: they realize their birds’ dream of flying.
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SPECTERS OF COMMUNISM: CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN ART James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, NY, USA, 2015 curator Boris Groys

Boris Groys
Excerpt from Specters of Communism: Contemporary Russian Art, The James Gallery and e-flux, New York
"Jeff and Alina Bliumis, a pair of New York-based, Russian-speaking artists born in Moldova and Belarus, respectively, also open themselves up to the potentialities of new landscapes in the work that produced an installation of thirty-nine 24 x 24 inch photographs at The James Gallery. For their long-term project A Painting for a Family Dinner (2008-2013), the Bliumis' traveled the world from The Bronx to China stopping in Italy and Israel, looking for hosts who would exchange a home-cooked meal for a small sweetly but primitively rendered painting. Their project, which is the only one in the exhibition that does not directly engage with Russia, is documented through photographs where they stand with their temporarily adoptive families and in a set of limited-edition books that trace the project's steps within each country. Reviving the barter system in the twenty-first century when our transactions have advanced to new currencies, like Bitcoins and devices like Apple Pay, the Bliumis' humble proposition is inspiring, even though its success is not guaranteed in the capitalist system. A Painting for a Family Dinner allows us to see a positive side of communism because it puts into practice the notion of equal and shared property circulating within an international codependent community".