MERANO, ITALY.- Kunst Meran presents From Russia with Love, on view through September 23, 2007. The exhibition was curated by Bärbel Vischer. Greetings from James Bond. The novel and screen hero invented by the British author Ian Lancaster Fleming during the era of the Cold War is considered an icon of the western world.

The bestseller with the nice-sounding title From Russia with Love, published in 1957, was one of the top ten books of John F. Kennedy. And as a real Bond girl, Jacqueline Kennedy handed CIA director Allen Dulles a copy of it. Fleming took on a strongly anti-soviet attitude in the story, which reflected the public interest in the aggravating east-west conflict.

For fifty years, the film character 007 has been backing the self-glorification of the west, yet he is an anti-hero who stands for the failure of a polarized world view. The exhibition title From Russia with Love can also be read as a – self-ironic –allusion to the western eye focused on Russian contemporary art: Moscow remains a catalyst of the Russian scene, and the worldwide exploding art market massively manifests itself here, too. With some exaggeration, one might say that the majority of Russian artists feel more at home at the international exhibition booths of a handful of well-established Russian galleries than at international exhibitions. Then again, the program of the galleries reflects the restrictive attitude of the scene in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which hardly accepts the positions of Russian artists who live and work abroad. The situation is just as difficult for artistic workers in Russia, who are far away from the metropolis. From Russia with Love presents artists who live in Berlin, Ekaterinburg, Khvalynsk/Saratov Oblast, Moscow, or Vienna and belong to various scenes in and out of Russia. Some of the positions are little known, because they are not represented in any of the centers, like, for instance, that of the action artist Misha Le Jen or the group Where Dogs Run. Exhibitions focused on one nation or continent, regarded and positioned as supermarkets are popular all around the world, but regressive. They are one of the reasons why artists who live in Russia are hardly integrated in the in ternational exhibition arena. Supermarket exhibitions are a result of the ethnic categorization that is paradoxically demanded by the international art market.2 They go down well in the short run, but they lead to alienation. From Russia with Love is meant as a critique of exhibitions that comply with nation-state criteria, an attempt to explore the action space of current Russian contemporary art on the basis of the language affiliation of its protagonists, for language – the spoken and written word – is the most direct medium for the transportation of culture, for creating a sense of identity and collective identification. The nation-state categorization is obsolete. Now, language areas are at stake, and they are not tied to specific places, thanks to mobility, immigration, and media networks. On a social, economic, and political level, Russia is still undergoing fast changes, not to mention the acceleration of time and densification of space caused by globalization. Moreover, everyday life is intertwined with modern communication media to a great extent. The validity of existing value systems must be revised and new ones must be thought up. There is a series of different positions in Russian contemporary art that deal with internationally relevant issues concerning the notions of society, identity, culture and transformation, striving for definitions and interpretations of symbols and values in this context. That has to do with the fact that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not oriented by ethnic borders. Therefore, the artists do not consider themselves one-hundred percent Russian, neither from an ethnic nor from a cultural point of view, and the excellent education system of the USSR, which continues to have an effect today, was oriented by world culture. The exhibition From Russia with Love will prompt discussion, not about Russia or the exploration of specifically Russian stereotypes, but about an examination of the translation of culture and identity within a social or political system as well as human patterns of thought and behavior which are continuously adapted and changed. The videos and photographs in the exhibition reflect the cultural and social transformation that directly corresponds with the location of the exhibition, the city of Merano, and the multi-cultural society in South Tyrol. The factor of movement is inherent in the title From Russia with Love.

Until 1914, Merano and St. Petersburg were directly linked by a railway line. In fact, it is little known in South Tyrol that many Russians lived in Merano at the turn of the century, because the sophisticated spa town was very alluring for Russian guests,6 including many intellectuals and aristocrats. In the 1890s, Nadezda Borodina from Moscow established the Borodine Foundation, making it possible for needy Russians to visit Merano. Several buildings, a Russian Orthodox church where masses are regularly held, and a library with historical books that are publicly accessible are still intact today. Around the foun dation, in the Obermais district, further traces of South Tyrolean history can be found, because this is where the Russian builder-owners were most active. Moreover, the Russian guests had a preference for certain hotels, such as the Grand Hotel Palace or the Bavaria, for instance. Remarkably, the Russian community has been active for more than a hundred years.7 The Russian community in Merano is a gem in South Tyrol’s cultural field of tension, which is nowadays mainly centered on three large language groups. More than two thirds of the population speak German (65.3%), roughly one third speaks Italian (26.5%), followed by Ladin (4.2%), and other languages (4%).8 The society of South Tyrol is made up of ethnic fragments; the political system is a consociational democracy based on the integration of all of South Tyrol’s acknowledged language groups. The history of modern South Tyrol started in 1919, when the territory south of the Brenner Pass was annexed by Italy as a result of the First World War. North and East Tyrol continued to belong to Austria. In the Treaty of Paris reached in 1946, South Tyrol was given an autonomous status that later also applied to Trentino. The South Tyrolean autonomy implementation process in which Italy granted South Tyrol autonomous legislative and executive powers was completed in the year 1992. In South Tyrol, a land of ethnic diversity, discussion of culture and identity is part of everyday life. While cultural the orists have been discussing the problems of minorities ever since the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe and the USA, most of the rather recent cultural studies in Russia have been dealing with Russian self-conception, mentality, and worldview. The fact is that cultural history developed differently in the east and the west. In current Russian contemporary art production, there are motifs based on historical, cultural and political heritage on the one hand, such as the meaning of icons, the relationship between the individual and the collective, the masses seen as a body, or the analysis of social standards, and on the other hand, there are reactions to world affairs from different perspectives, for example the problems of mass culture and economy, the utopia of technology, and the creation of modern myths. The individual fields are interdependent; they react energetically and supply hitherto unknown interpretation models. In art, the polarization of east and west is dissolved.