RADEK INVASION
The Associazione Prometeo is happy to announce the first Italian exhibition dedicated exclusively to the Radek Community group from Moscow. After taking part in the Utopia Station section of the 50th Venice Biennale, Radek Community are now presenting a new work specially conceived for the former church of San Matteo, the Associazione Prometeo's premises.
Amongst the most radical voices on the Eastern European scene, Radek Community is a group of young artists, activists and musicians set up in Moscow in 1997 around the school of Anatoly Osmolovsky and Avdey Ter-Oganyan. United in their rejection of the visual power of the image and its commercial use of art, Radek Community constructs its action strategies from an ironic, mocking, ideological critique of an area that suddenly passed from socialist regime to one of globalised liberalism.
Right from the start, the group has made its mark with its political, highly critical urban interventions, such as the occasion during the 1999 electoral campaign when they burst into the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square waving a banner bearing the words "Against All", or when they staged a real hunger strike during the first Prague Biennale in 2003, outside the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art – a message for workers in the East but also a temporary magnifying glass on the relationship between protest and power.
One of the fundamental points that Radek has most frequently dealt with is the condition of communication and – at the same time – the concept of community, as the name itself indicates. Does communicative activity exist outside consensus and unanimity? Is collectivity a fiction produced by mass culture? Is democratisation as internationalism no more than rhetorical forms of globalisation?
One ironic action was presented at the Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt in 2002 when a video called Manifestation showed a strange demonstration filmed in Moscow the year before. For its action the Radek group had chosen the Barrikadnaya Underground station at the point where traffic lights regulate the flow of pedestrians on their way to work. Members of the group with slogans on red banners accompany the pedestrians as they cross the road, giving the impression of a real demonstration or manifestation. As they say themselves, all the features of a demonstration are visible – the crowds, the slogans, a street in the centre of the city and the blocked traffic. Marx's idea about the self-knowledge of the revolutionary class appears in action!
Radek Community always prefers action to representation: it is no accident that it takes its name from Karl Radek, the revolutionary activist purged by Stalin in 1939. All men use their head first and then act – said Stalin – but Radek acted first and thought afterwards.
For its first exhibition in Italy, the Radek Group, like an alien body coming from another planet, will invade the Associazione Prometeo's space with a series of unexpected situations.
RADEK COMMUNITY
Group of artists, cultural activists, authors, musicians established 1997, Moscow Maxim Karakulov (b. 1977), David Ter-Oganian (1981), Pavel Mikitenko (1977), Petr Bystrov (1981), Alexander Korneev (1980), Alexey Buldakov (1980), Andrei Serguienko (1977), Vladis Shapovalov (1981).
Opening: Saturday 19 March 2005, 18.00
Address: Prometeo cultural association for contemporary art
Church of San Matteo, Piazza San Matteo 3 Lucca – Italy
Duration: 19 March – 7 May 2005
Opening hours: Monday/Saturday 10,30-13, 16-20.
Info: tel 348.7394163 fax 0583.471464
http://www.prometeo-arte.it
Full address: http://www.gif.ru/eng/news/radek-it/
