Men are from Murmansk, Women are from Vilnius

Men are from Murmansk, Women are from Vilnius belongs to a group of works sharing a common title Nations, which the art collective Slavs and Tatars prepared to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the Parisian concept store Colette. In the first edition of the project (2007), the works were in poster form, in the second, shown in Raster Gallery in Warsaw (2012), short phrases had been painted on mirror glass set in frames. All Slavs and Tatars’ artistic statements refer to their chosen sphere of interest, which in a declaration very often quoted by critics they have described as “an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China”.

Thus delineated, this part of Eurasia is not so much a geographical as a cultural construct. Both Walls are boundaries in a symbolic sense: each in its own time, they divided the world with regard to politics and economy as much as to culture and ethnicity. As such, they separated civilisation from the barbarians and the economic centre from its periphery.

As the name of the collective indicates, the artists, being residents of the periphery of the stereotypically perceived West and of the “barbarian” area of the Eurasian Steppe, programmatically locate themselves on the margin and subject images fixed in collective imagination to criticism. The subject on which they perform an anthropological vivisection is the vast area of the former Soviet Union, a political structure that appropriated a part of Central-Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Two cities: Murmansk and Vilnius provide a focus for the observation. The title Men are from Murmansk, Women are from Vilnius is, in turn, a paraphrase of the title of John Gray’s best-selling psychological self-help book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1992). Psychological differences between men and women pointed out by Gray, personified by the god of war and the goddess of love, serve as a metaphor for the differences between Russians and Lithuanians, as well as, in a broader sense, between the inhabitants of Eurasia. Slavs and Tatars confront the region’s difficult history and play upon the resulting stereotypes, in which this ethnically, nationally and religiously diversified territory tends to be perceived as a unified whole. The artists subvert its integrity by means of a formula which is popular and strongly rooted in culture, and whose overtones are, in their interpretation, as serious as ironic.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz