"Communist Guide To New York City"
by Yevgeniy Fiks
common room 2
New York City
January 20 - March 7, 2008
In our receding political culture, any attempt to point out the alternative paths of history may be tagged as nostalgic. It is hard, however, to notice a melancholic reverie in "Communist Guide to New York City," a photographic project by Moscow-born, New York City-based artist Yevgeniy Fiks. The exhibition tackles the Communist movement in the United States using the technique of frontal laconic, photography practiced largely in the political "department" of conceptual art of the 1970s (works by Hans Haake and Martha Rosler come to mind), Fiks's photographs of historical sites, which relate to the Communist movement in New York, do not suggest any subjectivism that one would likely expect from an artist with a post-Soviet background. They rather deal with the political psyche of the United States, which is shaped by the lack of historical memory and longing for the strong political movements that the country experienced in the past...
