Territories of Terror: Mythologies and Memories of the Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art

Curated by Svetlana Boym of Harvard University, this exhibition is one of the first attempts to tackle the dual imperative of Gulag history and mythology, map and territory, through contemporary art. Seven internationally recognized contemporary artists—Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Leonid Sokov, Grisha Bruskin, Eugene Yelchin, Irina Nakhova and Vadim Zakharov—who grew up in the former Soviet Union have been given a “territory” in the gallery in order to confront the haunted space of the “zone” in history and in the individual psyche.

They represent two generations of ex-Soviet non-conformist art: Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Leonid Sokov and Grisha Bruskin were born during Stalin’s time and reflect with a mixture of nostalgia and irony on their totalitarian childhoods, while Irina Nakhova, Eugene Yelchin and Vadim Zakharov, born during Khrushchev’s thaw, have a more alienated attitude vis-à-vis the totalitarian mythology.

Their territories of terror are border zones that reflect their cross-cultural experience. What they capture in their installations is the legacy of terror that shaped structures of mentality, spatial imagination, utopian aspirations and claustrophobic anxieties that mirror the tragic paradoxes of twentieth century history. A companion exhibition, GULAG: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom, runs concurrently at Boston University’s 808 Gallery.

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