Artist talk and book presentation: Victoria Lomasko: “The last Soviet Artist”
moderated by Clemens Krümmel
The artist Victoria Lomasko from Moscow, whose political works are banned in Russia, has been living in exile in Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since November 2022 she has been the recipient of a scholarship from the Martin Roth Initiative at the GfZK Leipzig. In a conversation with the art theoretician Clemens Krümmel, she presents her latest book “Die letzte Sowjetische Künstlerin“ (The last Soviet Artist), published in German by Diaphanes. A Catalan edition of “The Last Soviet Artist” was awarded by PEN-Catalan in 2022.
“With her travel reports from Armenia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia, Belarus and Russia, Victoria Lomasko sets out to investigate what has become of the Soviet legacy. She combines external events with her personal feelings and comments, describing the processes of social transformation in the former Soviet republics: the fight for the rights of women and the LGBTQ community in deeply patriarchal societies, the painful aftermath of forced ethnic resettlements under Stalin, the final transformation of Putin’s totalitarian regime into a dictatorship. Through her unique artistic form of documentation, Lomasko brings together perception and experience to create images for an unseen present which, for the moment, can perhaps only be adequately related through the anonymising medium of drawing.” www.diaphanes.net
Victoria Lomasko studied printmaking at the State University of Printing Arts in Moscow. In 2018, her book Other Russias was awarded the Pushkin House Prize and described by the Guardian as one of the five best books to understand contemporary Russia. She recently participated in documenta 15 as a guest, and her solo exhibition The Last Soviet Artist was shown at the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia. In 2023 she received the Couilles au Cul Award for Artistic Courage from the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême.
Clemens Krümmel is an art historian, curator, author and translator. He co-curated the exhibition “Tauchfahrten – Zeichnung als Reportage” (2004/05, Hannover and Düsseldorf) and co-founded the Melton Prior Institut für Reportagezeichnung in Düsseldorf (both with Alexander Roob). He is co-editor of the book series “Polypen”, b_books Verlag, Berlin (with Sabeth Buchmann, Helmut Draxler and Susanne Leeb), and currently teaches at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.