Hanna Zubkova: "I am interested in the boundary between the artifact, the art object, and the archive."
translation of the interview in Artguide
Interdisciplinarity, the engagement of artists with philosophical, sociological concepts, and materials from other academic fields, has been a developing trend for some time, but it has become especially noticeable with the focus on internal, previously invisible processes. In November of this year, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art presented a new project within the Garage Archive Commissions program — False Sun. The Catcher by Hanna Zubkova. Over five years, the artist worked on a research, the calculations (and miscalculations) of which were incorporated into the installation, consisting of seven "myths" showing different stages of the project’s creation. The museum space features video attempts to capture the sunset in the Arctic, archival documents, and materials from open sources—ranging from Wikipedia or Google Maps to fragments of scientific articles.
The starting point for the project was the accidental discovery of the archive of little-known Soviet Marxist philosopher Georgy Kursanov. It’s hard to imagine other circumstances in which his drawings, newspaper clippings, and other documents would have ended up in an institutional archive, especially in a contemporary art museum archive. But it seems the entire work on False Sun is a series of coincidences and accidental discoveries that eventually become branches of one process. Is this a project about the philosopher? About ideology and history? About the phenomenon of the parhelion? Or about constructing a system of knowledge? False Sun. Catcher is a complex weaving of different narrative lines, a search for boundaries and their erasure. Artguide spoke with Hanna Zubkova about what research-based art is, how to work with research methods, and how to teach them.
Julia Evstratova: Is it true that the starting point for your project was the discovered archive? Where did you find it, and why did it interest you so much?
Hanna Zubkova: Yes, you could say the archive was the beginning. When I say it was discovered by chance, I’m mindful that behind any coincidence lie structures of power and knowledge, as well as a specific sequence of events. The archive was found in an apartment my friend bought in Moscow, which previously belonged to a little-known Soviet philosopher. A folder lying in a pile of things meant to be discarded caught our attention—we became heirs by accident. The archive is a disjointed set of unrelated documents that you dive into, like a space of memory, where, at the same time, it’s impossible to arrange everything neatly like furniture in a room. Even though this was an accidental inheritance, we still felt responsible for it. As I engaged with the archive, I realized I didn’t want to speculate on the life of this person or piece together his biography like the separate points of a scanned 3D object. Nor did I want to turn the archive into an exhibition artifact.
The subject of the archive was born during World War I, studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy, excelled in that field, and died in the 1970s. He wasn’t widely known: working with his papers didn’t involve sensational discoveries. In several documents, there was the life of an ordinary person within the system. This aspect also intrigued me: individual experience within systems of knowledge or ideology.
If a collection is a set of specially selected items and documents, an archive, on the contrary, is something disjointed and fragmented. For me, the key elements were the facts and properties of the archival documents, namely the date and place. From these, a chronotope began to form: on one side, a timeline, and on the other, a spatial line through a sequence of countries and places. I developed a meta-map to visit each of the established points and try to discover intersections with the body of grand history: for example, this person was born in the year World War I began, and his last drawings are dated to 1937—the beginning of the Great Terror. In some sense, I became the point of convergence between a biography given to me in fragments and world history. The phrase "between the past and the future" is actually rooted in a specific cartographic method—the creation of a chronotope.
Julia Evstratova: This raises an ethical question about bringing a personal story into the public sphere. Why didn’t the archive remain in the realm of the unknown and intimate?
Hanna Zubkova: I was not so much interested in the private life and attempts to reconstruct or imagine it, but rather in preserving the discovery as an archive in itself. It was fascinating to observe the flickering boundary between artifact, art object, artwork, archive, and collection, and to work with this vocabulary and toolkit for describing specific systems, bringing a fragment of knowledge to a place where it seemingly does not belong. The Garage archive is a system that preserves part of the legacy and testimony of the lives and works of nonconformist artists, meaning marginalized cultural phenomena. The archive of a nomenclature philosopher, which I decided to transfer to Garage, becomes a kind of unacknowledged cadence within the context that, through my gesture, includes itself where it seemingly does not belong.
Julia Evstratova: Now at Garage, we can see the results of your reflections—the project False Sun. The Catcher. It’s an installation-essay with multiple plotlines, references, and citations. What would the synopsis of this essay be?
Hanna Zubkova: It seems to me that the logic of this work resists a brief retelling. We can talk about the French origin of the word essai—“trial,” “attempt,” an action that exists without reliance on results or certainty in them. The installation False Sun. The Catcher is simultaneously a map, an instruction, and a dispositif. It is a device assembled from attempts to witness the sunset at different points of the chronotope of geographical Europe, where two grand utopian projects and two mythological systems intersect: from the island of Paros in Greece—where marble for ancient statues was quarried—to the ghost town of Rudnik in the Komi Republic, where coal was mined within the Gulag system. All attempts to catch the sunset on the peripheries of these empires failed. The map included in the installation explains how the calculations of time and points on the ground were made, where the sunset could be seen. It seemed there could be no mistake, but still, I was always wrong: the sunset happened “the day after tomorrow”—there and then, somewhere impossible to reach.
Julia Evstratova: You call all these disjointed fragments “myths.” Could it be said that this relates to the impossibility of witnessing the sunset?
Hanna Zubkova: Yes, to the impossibility of witnessing it at all. It’s no coincidence that the image of the "false sun" gives the research its title. The false sun is an optical meteorological phenomenon that can only be seen from a specific point: the sun forms a "halo," and on either side, at its level, two sun-like counterparts appear. The title of my research points to the conditionality of the experience and the possibility of describing it. On one hand, it’s a concept that designates the phenomenon. On the other hand, it refers to a source—a double sun that appeared somewhere, sometime, but without us. Does it exist at all? Or did it only exist for an observer in a specific system of coordinates? Does it exist without an observer? To what extent is it false? This is about the story (or retelling) of an event that inevitably transforms into a myth. The relationship between the witness, the event, and the narrative (what I loosely call myth) defines the structure of the project.
The curator of Garage’s archive, Sasha Obukhova, used the word "metaphor" in the text about the project, but I prefer the word "image" because I’m not comparing anything with anything else. I’m rather referring to knowledge of a phenomenon: what is described in textbooks and scientific articles, not something poetic or metaphorical. I’m interested in how we describe experiences through existing systems of knowledge, how we live through them, and how those who are not participants in the event can only accept this knowledge on faith.
Julia Evstratova: One of the key themes of the project is the concept of "borders," which is revealed at different levels and stages: between Europe and Asia, utopia and reality, past and present, public and private.
Hanna Zubkova: In the project, the image of the border appears as something both conditional and ruthless. At the same time, the border in False Sun functions as a concrete cartographic tool—as a geographical, symbolic, political, or geopolitical phenomenon, as a familiar means of marking space. I take on the role of a tourist: this figure is appropriate for the experience of encountering these spaces. The name of the ministry—of culture and tourism—sounds interesting in this context. The tourist, as a consumer of territory, always seems to be hunting for the most spectacular view, the most memorable moment, even if a catastrophe is unfolding around them. They are linked to a rather vague concept of culture. It seems that a compass is indispensable here: I decide to reach the farthest point on the map in this travelogue. It turns out to be beyond all imaginable borders: the boundary of the Arctic Circle, the central time zone, the land before the conquest of the North, the boundary of permafrost. The ultimate point is a house in the ghost town of Rudnik, where coal was mined. Later, Vorkuta, one of the settlements of the Gulag system, emerged nearby. Using my research-artistic tool, I, still a tourist, try to calculate the ideal point to master and capture the space—to catch the most magnificent sunset. The result of this excessive reliance on tools is failure—yet another unsuccessful attempt.
Julia Evstratova: Could it be said that research begins with a chance discovery, an impulse, perhaps empathy? And when does it end? Do you plan to continue the project? Will the archive be placed in a museum?
Hanna Zubkova: I would probably replace the word "empathy" with "responsiveness"—responsiveness to chance. "I work with what comes to me," as one of my favorite artists, Jannis Kounellis, said. When does it end? The seminar in my research practices workshop is called: there are no endings, only stabilizations. Nothing ends but is merely placed into a certain temporal form. Well, the project is stabilized as a manifestation, where all the documents related to this meta-archive, the research itself, and the attempts to record the sunset are shown. I would say there is a resolution: to stop the attempts and invent a witness capable of outliving me. Having despaired of capturing the sunset, I left a transparent canvas on the ruins of what was presumably a kindergarten on the outskirts of Rudnik, which, according to my calculations, should at some point finally witness the sunset.
The canvas is transparent because all other colors reflect light, while the transparent one is supposed to let the landscape pass through it and capture the imprint of the event. Thus, the work continues to live, either in material form as this canvas, or as part of a conversation, or as part of the Garage archive, and more broadly—within the system of archives, such as RAAN (Russian Art Archive Network—Artguide).
For me, the word "exhibition" has long been inapplicable to what I do, as i its English equivalents "show". I like inventing new terms. Let’s say, there is a research process, possibly even closed or protected, and it has "manifestations." In this logic, the material gradually consolidates until it becomes tangible to another. But for me, it continues to stabilize. Even after finishing the work, I don’t stop searching for gaps.
Julia Evstratova: In 2019, when you began working on the project, in an interview with ELLE, you said that your artistic practice is "connected with the situation and the environment, that is, with reality." How has your approach transformed in the context of constantly changing external circumstances?
Hanna Zubkova: Here, the figure of the artist emerges more as a conductor rather than a creator. This "conductivity" became my way of working. It’s hard for me to imagine that my work wouldn’t respond to changes. The research is born from traces, in a triad between what happens, the material, and myself. There is the expression in situ, meaning "on site"—when a work is created in a specific place as a response. For me, the process is always tied to what’s happening around me. I find the idea of creating from nothing tempting, though it’s not close to me. On the other hand, perhaps that’s why my favorite artists are those who create from nothing, without the imperative of context and text, such as Anna Tagantseva-Kobzeva, Apollinariya Broche, Nikita Seleznev, and others.
Julia Evstratova: You not only create projects but also curate the Research Praxis atelier. Before this, you curated workshops at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Joseph Bakstein) and the online school Bang Bang Education, and you are now collaborating with Baza. What is research-based art? How do you explain this to your students?
Hanna Zubkova: In this sense, I have a non-academic approach because I’m not impressed by terminology. I use terms to simplify communication. In the workshop, we don’t talk so much about the phantom of art chronology and classification; rather, we observe and identify something that unites the practices of artists working with documents, context, and ready-made objects, as well as various forms of historiography and archaeology. For me, research-based practices are primarily related to vision—the processes of selection, montage, articulation, inclusion, and exclusion. From Walid Raad's Atlas Group to Neïl Beloufa and Sasha Sukhareva, these may be people who don’t identify themselves as researchers, but I find common research tools in their practices—like observation, conversation, collection, and data analysis. It was natural for me to turn to them because part of my background is linked to academic research during my master’s studies at the Sorbonne, in the Department of Philosophy, Media, and Art, and then at the École Normale Supérieure, where I conducted research projects at the intersection of philosophy, language, and psychiatry. Through my academic work, I developed research tools that I later began to realize and apply in artistic practice. While teaching, I realized that these tools can be useful to everyone.
Julia Evstratova: But artistic research is seemingly in opposition to academic forms of knowledge. The quality criteria we apply to academic research can’t be applied to art. With that in mind, what constitutes artistic research and what doesn’t?
Hanna Zubkova: From my point of view, there is no such opposition. These are just different containers and knowledge machines. It's more about similarities in approaches and tools. The local interest in research-based art may be related to many different things. For example, the reassembling of exhibition spaces into a library, which the Garage team undertook, might be related to a general demand for reflection and articulation of pauses in a series of festive events, and amid a prolonged sense of catastrophe. Perhaps we’re seeing a turn toward hidden work, as the very notion of "contemporary art" ceases to be associated with the social spectacle of the vernissage. At the same time, research beyond the bright spectacle is often invisible and non-spectacular. In the case of Garage, this interest may be connected to its institutional specificity, particularly the fact that the archive forms the museum’s foundation. But honestly, I wouldn’t define attention to the research approach as a trend. It’s a natural process that is finally being more or less universally recognized as an integral part of artistic work.
Julia Evstratova: I also meant that in the field of "artistic research," there’s a lower entry threshold than in academia. Artistic practices have become a convenient language for addressing decolonial and feminist trends, for example. If an artist calls their work "artistic research," can we really determine whether it qualifies as such or not?
Hanna Zubkova: I don’t focus on defining criteria, and if someone says that my work is not research-based, I would respond, "Well, okay."
Julia Evstratova: But, for example, when participants in your workshop present project ideas and initial drafts, you must evaluate and guide them further, clarifying their methods.
Hanna Zubkova: My workshop is not a laboratory for creating "research practices" and developing their criteria. We don’t discuss what can or can’t be considered as such. I offer tools, somewhat similar to those of classical academic research. Sometimes, a participant tells me they’d like to apply, for example, to a program or residency that requires a research project. It’s important that the requirements for potential participants specify the criteria for their projects. This is a different task. Here, we think about how to compile a portfolio or project application to meet the criteria. But in this case, we’re not so much in the realm of artistic work as in communication: how to talk about something that may not yet exist, and how to do so in accessible language. One of my students once said, "I’d like to create an exhibition that babies could attend." I think that criteria, like borders, are conditional and, at the same time, harsh and ruthless. Like borders, you can choose to notice them or not, talk about them, try to cross them, legally or not, or even dedicate yourself to the struggle to abolish these criteria. I’m interested in the artistic process. I relate criteria to the realm of communication and interfaces.
Julia Evstratova: Previously, the Garage Archive Commissions program was based on artists working with the museum's archive collections and documents to create their own statements. But you, on the contrary, brought your own archive to the institution's archive.
Hanna Zubkova: The idea to transfer the archive of a Soviet Marxist philosopher to Garage came to me back in 2019. It was connected with reflections on what constitutes a personal archive and an institutional archive, and how an artist can engage with them beyond purely aesthetic relations. Is it a cast of the past or a lens applied to the present? What is my responsibility toward this legacy? How can the necessary shift be made so that the archive can be activated, rather than just remain as an illustration? In the archive, among other things, we see drawings, and we assume that the person wanted to become an artist but for some reason stopped and chose a career as a nomenclature worker in the Soviet apparatus. How does Garage’s archive determine who is an artist and who is not? Whose archive can become part of the collection, and whose will remain outside the common narrative? I was interested in the modalities of this choice. Perhaps my symbolic capital as an artist can be converted into the power to transform archives.
Transferring the archive is a conceptual gesture that raises many questions. Yes, I disrupt the logic of the program: suddenly, among documents of nonconformist art, seemingly foreign elements appear, but they are nevertheless an integral part of the context. This is a documentary fact—and with it comes the thought that perhaps nonconformist artists do not exist without apostles of ideology. In a strange way, the most common, typical figure of the time was excluded—and I initiate the possibility for him to take his place. It is symbolic, perhaps, that the project concluded with the transfer of the archive precisely now, in 2022–2023. History does not stop being full of ruptures, but at least we have the opportunity to point out the oddities in the narratives of the past. I am interested in the agency of the archive, the agency of the past—not only do I work with them, but they also work with me.