Haralampi G. Oroschakoff at the Musee d'art moderne et contemporain - Brief Article

In this exhibition at MAMCO, Haralampi G Oroschakoff showed paintings from the series "Inhabitants upon the Edges of the World: Itinerants and Orientalists" (1988-99) These works explore omited narratives rooted in the heritage of East European and particularly Russian art. Assembling bits and pieces of cultural memory--Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian and Western European--Oroschakoff summons a pervasive sense of nostalgia, mixed with a seeming eagerness to unload this oppressive cargo from his shoulders.

The exhibition consisted of sum of two units distinct sets of canvases hung in a single file around the gallery walls in like manner as to constitute an alternating following Half of the 26 paintings are based upon dreamlike or "Orientalist" motifs taken from 19th-century sources, principally works in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery and St Petersburg's State Russian Museum, by the agency of figures such as Ilya Repin, Delacroix and Gerome These paintings are "interrupted" by means of spare minimalist canvases, largely in black and white, that are filled with signs and tokens suggesting the separation of individual culture from another: intersecting geometric lines, barely legible lettering that exorcisms out the names of continents, countries and cities ("Constantinople"), as well as historic dates ("1917") Visually, these schematic works recall Lyonel Feininger's post-Bauhaus paintings, as well as the kind of now familiar aerial images taken from a military aircraft or missile. A nearby vitrine held historical maps of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire and the present-clay Balkans.

Oroschakoff's work has lengthy dealt with the problems of communication between East and West--between nations, tillages and religions--and with the temptation to exoticize or vilify the Other in order to shore up one's have identity. This exhibition might almost be seen as a farewell party thrown for the old-fashioned, rigidly defined mark of cultural identity, marked artistically by dint of its appetite for visual kitsch and intolerance toward the Other. That farewell party, however, was interrupted through the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia, begun during the course of the exhibition. below these circumstances, "Inhabitants on the cutting side of the World"--which not drawn out ago might have been read as a rehearsal of an endgame--suddenly acquired a contemporary political dimension.

Born in Sofia of an emigre Russian family, educated in the West and now living in Germany, Oroschakoff has for more than 15 years not awayed himself in his paintings, drawings, installations and performances as a wanderer between the tillages of East and West. His art has certain affinities with Nabokov's numbers aptly illustrated by these lines from The Gift. "How recall/On my way back/My way there?" ["Inhabitants upon the Edges of the World" was also seen at the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg Oct 7-Nov. 9]

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