After The Fall

A salaryman inspects a rogues gallery of prize fighters who line a wall like usual suspects after a particularly brutal round-up. Elsewhere, in hushed tones, an elderly couple have explained to them just why Russian soldiers are present at the birth of Christ. Upstairs, alone, save for two onlooking gallery attendants, a junior high school girl dons a pairs of earphones and, let's tell it like it is, sticks her head up a cow's head-size vagina.

Drawing in such a demographic hotchpotch of people to allow for a shared period of alternative contemplation conjures a collage both bizarre and beautiful in its own right. The tapestries of ideas and responses seeded among the diverse visitors are further magnified by the provocative nature by the Russian work on show at this, the current exhibition at the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art.

"The Origin of Species - Art in the Age of Social-Darwinism", however off-putting a title it is, is not provocation of an indulgent kind, though. It is actually the most engaging exhibition to have come to Hiroshima for a long time.

The use of Charles Darwin's celebrated thesis as an overriding framework for the event provides both the visitor with a useful touchstone to act as guide to the work, as well as supplying the artists with a disciplined view-finder through which to cast their gaze.

In the past few decades, few countries have undergone such drastic social change as those of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The bringing down of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc introduced new freedoms as well as challenges. On a personal level, there are those across the board who have managed to come out of this sea-change much better off than before; while there are others who have found the marketplace a much more exposed fight for survival. Now, with Russia also finding its stride again in the realm of world influence, pushing to carve out a role for itself in the new world order, a new national identity is in the process of being shaped. It's a dynamic time to be born Russian.

All in all, this makes such an event a timely opportunity to explore the emerging arts of one of Japan's closest neighbours.

Ever adapting, changing, and throwing up new ways to interpret the world we inhabit, art through the ages has mapped out the fluctuating tides of perspective from age to age and across cultures. Taking in art from the past enables us insights into how we all got to where we are today. Though this can only have happened when artists themselves were adapting to the developing sea of culture around them, combining what they had learned from masters before them with an aptitude for seeing what was appropriate for their own times.

Turning away from those who went before, living artists have the responsibility to respond to and interpret our ever-evolving surroundings, giving us fresh eyes with which we can make sense of our lives.

As our horizons have become increasingly globalized, contemporary work from culturally distant backgrounds serves now not only to inform us of our neighbours' thinking, but also offers a shared experience, a connection stronger than the heritage art we flock to in our thousands elsewhere.

As the world changes, so too must art-forms evolve or face perishing: they must adapt to it surroundings in order to survive. It is here that "Origin of the Species" allows for form and subject to merge into one.

Sergey Bratkov's prize-fighters are survivors. They're bloodied and beaten, but still on their feet; and they'll fight another day. Reminiscent of Russian Orthodox iconography - one Virgin Mary archetype even donning a crucifix - these are portraits of the brutal machismo that permeates contemporary Russian life. The portraits suggest a society which has rediscovered its religious roots, but one without the comfort of the Church's protection or salvation.

The challenges the human species is confronted with are many and varied. Lyudmilla Goriova's Hidden Menace series of Pop Art offers the most obvious and overtly political statements on the dangers of modern living. A subtler sense of foreboding is conjured in the paintings by Stanislav Shuripa, while Natalia Struchkova's feasts of pixel-frenzy give us heaven and hell depictions of the kind of visual pollution we have succumbed to in the computer age.

Quieter meditations can be found in the photos of Olga Chernysheva, who focuses on ice-fishermen in their makeshift plastic bag pods, and offsets these images against plants wrapped in muslin against the ravages of winter. The plants seem to take on human form, while the solitary fishermen's protection against the freezing conditions is evocative of greenhouses. The fine line between life and death is further brought home by the fact the wrapped plants resemble shrouds or body-bags, while the unmoving figures of the fishermen seem petrified in the frozen moment of the photograph. Opposite, Tatyana Liberman's disemboweled fruit and vegetables have their reproductive means exposed as they're slashed open, death giving birth to life, enabling it.

And then there's the cow. Oleg Kulik's lifesize installation piece, a huge objet, the fibre-glass back half of a Fresian cow with gaping rear-end is more an interplay of ideas than it might initially suggest. Titled Deep Into Russia, the viewer must enter the insides of this beast to watch a video projection of a the various stages of a baby being born and developing as a child, becoming increasingly independent from its mother. Mixed into this image is that of a dog holding on to something with all its might, to the extent that it is suspended from the ground. The juxtaposition between the letting go and the refusing to let go is not simply a physical one. This is after all, about Mother Russia and its relationship with its citizens. A further twist is offered by the fact that the spectator actually becomes part to the piece as soon as their face disappears into the creature?fs backside, and it is unclear if the image is of you being born, or are trying to climb back inside.

If portraits of 18th-century dignitaries are your cup of tea, then, yes, you'd be better off waiting for the next back-catalogue of Hermitage hand-me-downs to hit Hiroshima. This exhibition might not be for you.

However, should you feel like you'd like to start off the new year by having your thought buds refreshed and your synapses stretched, the you could do worse than to head up to Hijiyama before the end of this month to cast your gaze a little further.

It might, in the end, help you survive our own modern embodiment of the jungle.

The Origin of Species - Art in the Age of Social-Darwinism, at Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art runs till February 25.
Click here for more details.

Related link: Another view of this exhibition.