Yevgeniy Fiks and "Portrait of 19 Million" project participants

Born 1972 in Moscow, Russia / Lives and works in New York, USA

Having received artistic training in Moscow, Yevgeniy Fiks has been living in New York since 1994. It is here in a country vaunting to have won the Cold War that he has fully grasped the importance of Soviet Communist experience, its cultural status and place in contemporary history. In the series of works made in the USA the artist meticulously proves that Communist ideas once did - and still largely do - have deep roots in American life, culture, political history and everyday mentality. Yevgeniy Fiks describes the ‘Responsibilities of the Post-Soviet Artist’ as the duty to fight the ‘denial and repression’ of the Soviet history among Post-Soviet generations as well as to comprehend and picture the Soviet past anew.

http://yevgeniyfiks.com/

Portrait of 19 Million

“Portrait of 19 Million” is a participatory project based on an open call. Using artistic and sociological instruments, the artist turns to lives of people who had been members of the Communist Party of the USSR. The mission of this project is to analyze the conditions of today’s society and to demonstrate its relations with the Soviet history. Since mid1920s, membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had become more and more a fact of daily existence beyond politics. According to the official statistics, in the time of Perestroika 19 million people were members of the CPSU. This party was not a homogeneous group – neither socially, nor ideologically. So, who were those members of the party? What united or disconnected them? Who are they now? The participants of the project were asked to submit a portrait (or a self-portrait) of any person who was member of the CPSU by the beginning of Perestroika, notwithstanding age, occupation, or social status. These portraits could be executed in any medium or style, including painting, drawing, studio photograph, amateur photograph, cell phone photo, video, and so on. In addition to submitting a portrait, the participants were also asked to fill in a biographical questionnaire with the information about the sitter. This project is a continuation of previous works by the artist, “US Communist Party” and “American Cold War Veterans Association.”

 Project coordinator: Maria Chekhonadskikh

Project participants: Natasha Akhmerova, Anonymous, Anush Avanesian, Timur Bakhishov, Igor Baskakov, Alena Boiko, Ivan Brazhkin, Petr Chekantsev, Valera and Natasha Cherkashin, Masha Chlenova, Irina Drozd, Leonid Drozner, Matt Ferranto, Aleksandr Fedorov, Elena Golub, Green, Nadezhda Gutova, Svetlana Hansemann, Lili Idov, Tatiana Istomina, Aissulu Kadyrzhanova, Yakov Kazhdan, Lucas Kelly, Olga Kisseleva, Yuriy Koval, Vladimir Kolesnikov, Margarita Kolomoitseva, Stanislav Konev, Yegor Koshelev, Yuliya Lanina, Lena von Lapschina, Ekaterina Lazareva, Learning Film Group (Ilya Budraitskis, Nikolay Oleynikov), Nikolai Leontiev-Polyakov, Sasha Lerman, Georgiy Litichevskiy, Regina Maryanovska, Roman Mokrov, Viya Muragina, Raymond Nadeau, Anna Neizvestnova, Nikolai Onischenko, Larissa Polischuk-Rusina, Vladimir Potapov, Aleksandr Raevskiy and Ruksanda Stephanov, Ivan Razumov, Nadezhda Rogozhina, Nastya Ryabova, Oksana Salamatina, Maria Safronova, Maria Sevela, Sabina Shikhlinskaya, Igor Shuklin, Viktoria Shumskaya, Vlad Sofronov, Mark Stockton, Elena Tanaevskaya, Aleksandr Telegin, Marina Temkina, Sergei Tikhonkov, Igor Tishin, Alexey Vasiliev, Nikita Vishnevskiy, Pavel Voinitskiy, Yelena Vorobyeva, Julia Winter, Sergei Yaralov, Sergei Yerkov, Vlad Yurashko, Yulia Zadvornaya, Magda Zimbler, Yuriy Zimbler, Dmitriy Zudov 

http://portraitof19million.blogspot.com/

Yevgeniy Fiks, Portrait of Gabe Falsetta (Communist Party USA), oil on canvas, 36x48”, 2007 Yevgeniy Fiks, Portrait of Adam Tenney (Communist Party USA), oil on canvas, 36x48”, 2007 Yevgeniy Fiks, Portrait of Jarvis Tyner (Communist Party USA), oil on canvas, 36x48”, 2007 Yevgeniy Fiks, Portrait of Estelle Katz (Communist Party USA), oil on canvas, 36x48”, 2007 Yevgeniy Fiks, Song of Russia no. 18, oil on canvas, 36 x 48", 2005-2007