Taus Makhacheva: Storeroom

Storeroom is Taus Makhacheva’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands and marks the acquisition of the video Tightrope (2015). The ownership of this work is shared with M HKA in Antwerp as part of ongoing collaborations within the L’Internationale museum confederation.

Dagestan is where Makhacheva’s roots lie, and the collection of the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts named after P.S. Gamzatova is central in both the exhibition and video. Based on an article by Dzhamilya Dagirova about the art history of the region, Makhacheva, together with the keepers of the collection of the museum, selected 68 paintings and works on paper that could be considered to represent the Dagestani history of art. Copies of these works are “reactivated” in the video Tightrope in which Rasul Abakarov, a representative of the fifth generation of a family of tightrope walkers, carries the works across a ravine in the Caucasian highlands, in doing so risking his own life. A daily performance in 2015 at the Moscow Biennale and the Kiev Biennale, On the Benefits of Pyramids in Cultural Education, Strengthening of national Consciousness, and the Formation of Moral and Ethical Guideposts (2015), was documented in photographs and adds another layer of activation. Acrobats use their bodies and the art works to construct pyramids and hold their poses for as long as possible. Their constant attempts to keep themselves and the works in balance address the precarious position of culture in post-Sovjet times, while the idea of an itinerant collection addresses the fragility of heritage and how museums construct, commemorate, remember and forget.

In the current exhibition Storeroom the art works are presented on two opposite walls and stored in a rack, allowing visitors to take them out for examination. A performance on November 24 based on  interviews with the keepers of the collection of the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts named after P.S. Gamzatova will reactivate the works, adding a new layer of stories and cross-references. The work is contextualised by the video Super Taus (Untitled 2) 2016, showing Makhacheva’s alter ego Super Taus going in search of a suitable place for her monument to two museum invigilators Maria Korkmasova and Khamisat Abdulaeva who prevented the theft of a painting by Alexander Rodchenko. In the work Way of an Object artefacts from the same museum are transformed into marionettes. In an audiotape they discuss their position in the museum, how they are mediated and who is allowed to speak. The documentary film A National Circus (1967) functions as a prologue and epilogue to the exhibition. By connecting the art works from and on the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts named after P.S. Gamzatova with the Russian and Caucasian circus tradition, Makhacheva questions the balance between human, institutional and state care for culture and imbues them with new energy and significance.

Performance
On Saturday 24 November there will be a performance, followed by an artists’ talk with Taus Makhacheva and Rasul Abakarov, tightrope walker and protagonist in the video Tightrope.

Biography
Taus Makhacheva (born 1983, Moscow, Russia) lives and works in Moscow. She graduated in 2007 with a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London and gained her MFA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2013. In 2018 she participated in Manifesta 12 in Palermo, the Liverpool Biennial and the Riga Biennial. Her work was shown in the Venice Biennial in 2017, the Shanghai Biennale in 2016 and the Moscow Biennale in both 2015 and 2011.

The acquisition and the exhibition have been made possible with the generous support of the BankGiroLoterij. Special thanks to M HKA in Antwerp for their generous support to the exhibition and to Bart de Baere and Georg Schöllhammer, curators of the Moscow and Kiev Biennale, for making this acquisition possible.