ANNA JERMOLAEWA
AUSTRIA PAVILION AT THE 60TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2024
curated by Gabriele Spindler
Artist: Anna Jermolaewa
Commissioned by Federal Ministry for Art, Culture,
Civil Service and Sport
Thecnical Coordination in Venice
Anna Jermolaewa presents five selected works, divided between the rooms of the pavilion and the inner courtyard.
Rehearsal for Swan Lake (2024) – in collaboration with Ukrainian ballet dancer and choreographer Oksana Serheieva – refers to a memory from the artist’s teen years. In times of political unrest, Soviet television replaced their regularly scheduled broadcast with Swan Lake in a loop sometimes for days. In Soviet cultural memory, Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet became code for a change in power. In Rehearsal for Swan Lake, a group of ballet dancers rehearse select scenes, transforming Swan Lake from a tool of censorship and distraction into a form of political protest-here, the dancers rehearse for regime change in Russia.
The Penultimate (2017) consists of a series of plants: carnations, roses, tulips, cornflowers, lotuses, saffron crocuses, jasmine, a cedar and an orange tree. Presented as a still life, these flowers and plants are a reminder of what undemocratic regimes fear most: an overthrow originating with the people.
In the postwar Soviet Union, people were banned from owning record albums containing popular music, especially rock or jazz from the West. In response, Soviet sound engineers developed a way to subvert the ban: they copied albums onto used X‑ray films hospitals had discarded. Ribs (2022/24) takes a sample of these Soviet recordings and returns them to their original function: displayed on a doctor’s X‑ray film viewer. In the Austrian pavilion, selected X‑ray film records will also be played once a day on a record player in the room.
In Research for Sleeping Positions (2006), Jermolaewa, in a hooded sweatshirt and winter coat, tries to find sleep on a train station bench in Vienna’s Westbahnhof. Seventeen years earlier, when she arrived in Austria as a political refugee, she spent her first week on a bench in this station, sleeping on it every night before ending up in the refugee camp in Traiskirchen. The artist reenacts this experience but with one crucial difference: the bench now has armrests, installed as a deterrent for people trying to find rest.
The readymade Untitled (Telephone Booths) (2024) is a bank of original telephone booths from the refugee camp in Traiskirchen, Austria. Written on their walls are notes from asylum seekers. The booths are a capsule of a spectrum of emotion-the insecurity, but also hope, feit by those in transit, who have left their homes and do not know what will happen next.
Photo Credits:
Markus Krottendorfer and Bildrecht
Anna Jermolaewa and Bildrecht