EXTRA: Mother Tongue: An interview with Yevgeniy Fiks by Suite (212)

Born into a Jewish family in Moscow in 1971, Yevgeniy Fiks moved to New York in 1994. His conceptual art reacts to amnesia about the USSR in the post-Soviet space, resisting nostalgia and commodification in favour of recovering repressed histories, especially those of LGBT and Jewish people; he also looks at the relationship with the USSR and the USA before and during the Cold War, and at histories of the American left, suppressed since the McCarthy witch-hunts.

In this Suite (212) Extra, Juliet talks to Yevgeniy about his exhibition Mother Tongue at London’s Pushkin House from March-May 2019, dealing with the underground slang spoken by Russian gay men in the 1970s and 80s, and his wider practice.

SELECTED REFERENCES

PROJECTS BY YEVGENIY FIKS (https://yevgeniyfiks.com/)
Song of Russia (2005-7)
Lenin for Your Library (2007)
Monitoring Lenin’s Sales on Amazon.com (2007)
Communist Party USA (2007)
The Communist Guide to New York City (2008)
American Cold War Veterans’ Association (2009)
A Gift to Birobidzhan (2009)
Homosexuality is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America (2012)
Landscapes of the Jewish Autonomous Region (2012-16)
Monument to Cold War Victory (2012-14)
Anatoly (2014)
Sovetish Kosmos, Yiddish Cosmos (2016)
Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary (2016)
In Edenia, A City of the Future (2017)
Mother Tongue (2018)

Guy Burgess
FRIEDRICH ENGELS, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) – https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm
Gay Laboratory
Masha Gessen
Kama Ginkas – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_Ginkas
Zinaida Gippius – https://www.rbth.com/literature/2014/11/20/a_life_unshackled_remembering_the_symbolist_poet_zinaida_gippius_41541.html
Harry Hay – https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/harry-hay-communist-mattachine-society-lgbtq
DAN HEALEY, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia (2001) – https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/307
Magnus Hirschfeld – https://minorliteratures.com/2018/05/17/berlins-third-sex
Langston Hughes
Nikita Kadan – http://nikitakadan.com
Yevgeni Kharitonov – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Kharitonov_(poet)
Vladimir Koslovsky – https://www.academia.edu/2074803/Between_lavender_and_light_blue_Negotiating_transnational_and_local_gay_identities_in_Russian
MIKHAIL KUZMIN, Wings (1906) – http://chromajournal.blogspot.com/2007/09/review-wings-by-mikhail-kuzmin.html
V. I. LENIN, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) – https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm
Georgy Mamedov - https://soundcloud.com/suite-212/against-simple-answers-art-sexuality-and-society-in-kyrgyzstan
Vladislav Mamyshev Monroe – https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/2849/vlad-mamyshev-monroe-new-exhibition-marilyn
Dmitri Merezhkovsky – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Merezhkovsky
Sergei Paradjanov – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/mar/13/sergei-paradjanov-films-gulag
Queer in Space: Kollontai Communist Archive (dir. ShTAB, 2015) – http://www.frieze.info/article/juliet-jacques-school-theory-and-activisms-queer-space
Rainbow Association (Moscow)
Restricted Sensation (dir. Deimantas Narkevičius, 2011) – https://lux.org.uk/work/restricted-sensation
Mykola Ridnyi – http://www.mykolaridnyi.com/
Paul Robeson
SHEILA SAMPATH (ed.), Letters Lived: Radical Reflections, Revolutionary Paths (2013) – http://sheilasampath.ca/letters-lived-blog/2013/12/1/letters-lived-contributor-sheila-sampath
Seekers of Happiness (dir. Vladimir Korsh, 1936) – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026119/
GENNADI TRIFONOV, ‘Letter from Prison’ (1978) – https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/04/10/the-case-of-gennady-trifonov/
Harry Whyte – https://www.marxist.com/letter-to-stalin-can-a-homosexual-be-in-the-communist-party.htm
Aleksandr Zaremba – http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/bioz1/zaremba01.html
KALMAN ZINGMAN, Edenia (1918) – https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/8498/edenia-lost-yiddish-utopia-ukraine-afterlife-modern-day-kharkiv