Aslan Gaisumov: If No One Asks
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Contemporary Art Gallery 555 Nelson Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 6R5
Aslan Gaisumov, "People of No Consequence," 2016
film still courtesy the artist, Emalin, London and Galerie Zink, Waldkirchen
If No One Asks marks the first solo presentation of Aslan Gaisumov’s work in North America. His artistic practice speculates on the entanglement of fictions and veracity, the inaccessible with the present and the acknowledged with the lost. As expressive forms, his artworks—whether moving or still images, found objects or installations—consider the pressures withstood by bodies and matter as witnesses to events. They are “experiments in both seeing and not seeing,” as renowned scholar Aleida Assmann has observed: at once crystalline in their visual and material clarity yet enigmatic. This exhibition brings together two works never previously shown together and, in so doing, offers a new means through which to consider many of the concerns that have shaped the artist’s practice over the past eight years.
Memories of War (2016) presents a single page torn from a found book. The artist’s intervention is a simple act of redaction: line after line of black ink has rendered the events conveyed by the author almost entirely obscured. Only one word remains conspicuously untouched, left to bear the burden of communication in its entirety.
The single-channel video People of No Consequence (2016) considers the carriage of memory and loss in a different way. During the Second World War, Soviet authorities organized and carried out the forced resettlement of entire populations within the USSR, including several nations from the Caucasus and Crimea. At the video’s outset, we regard the interior of a municipal hall filled with empty chairs. The video lasts eight minutes, the length of time it takes for 119 elderly Chechen survivors of the deportation, ranging from 77 to 105 years of age, to enter the room and take their seats. The group faces the camera, but they do not speak to us.
As with Memories of War, People of No Consequence carries a story but simultaneously withholds it from view. Gaisumov’s work makes present both the stories and the silences that surround them, where the audience is given the responsibility of listener to images and witness to the witnesses.
Aslan Gaisumov
Aslan Gaisumov was born in Chechnya in 1991. Recent solo exhibitions include Dark Shelters, Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons, Lyon (2018-19); Crystals and Shards, Kohta, Helsinki (2018); All That You See Here,Forget, Emalin, London (2018); People of No Consequence, Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp (2016); and Memory Belongs to the Stones, Zink Galerie, Berlin (2015). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Liverpool Biennial and the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, (2017); Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2017); and Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2016), among many others. In 2014, he was awarded the Special Prize of the Future Generation Art Prize of the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev, Ukraine, and in 2016 the Innovation Prize of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow, Russia. He lives and works in Grozny and Amsterdam.