Aslan Gaisumov: People of No Consequence

M HKA’s IN SITU programme offers medium-scale monographic exhibitions by significant early- and mid-career artists from all over the world. It focuses on the commissioning of new work and seeks to foreground experimental practices in the museum’s largest exhibition space.

The third artist to be featured is Aslan Gaisumov, born in 1991 in Grozny, Chechnya. Gaisumov is developing an oeuvre that feeds on, but also transforms and transcends, personal and collective memory. His works are poised between visual immediacy and social commentary, between the momentary and the monumental. They are mostly videos and installations incorporating found and purposely crafted objects, but sometimes also photographs and works on paper.

People of No Consequence is the title Gaisumov chose for his newest video installation, a single shot of a gathering by a group of seniors. These men and women all experienced the Soviet authorities’ deportation of the entire Chechen people to Central Asia in the winter of 1944, an atrocity that remains too little known.

Gaisumov reuses his title for this entire constellation of three recent works. The exhibition also includes the video installation Volga (2015), a re-enactment of how the artist’s family fled the bombs falling on Grozny in 1995, and the three-dimensional work Household (2016), which consists of two large sealed wooden crates with household objects belonging to the artist’s family.

This is Gaisumov’s first museum solo exhibition. All the works are accompanied by short narrative wall texts doubling as captions. In the list of objects that make up Household one item in particular—tarpaulin sheets from UNICEF—reveals to the attentive viewer that Gaisumov must have his own memories of enforced nomadism.

Gaisumov graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow in 2012. From 2016 he is enrolled in the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. His solo exhibitions to date include Untitled (War) at Vinzavod Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow, in 2011; Memory Belongs to the Stones at KROMUS + ZINK, Berlin; and When You Ride in a Chechen Cart, Sing a Chechen Song at Contemporary Art Center, Grozny, in 2015.

Aslan Gaisumov has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, notably the 3rd Moscow Biennale for Young Art and I Am Who I Am at Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf, in 2012; the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013; two collateral exhibitions for Manifesta 10 in St Petersburg, and Burning News at Hayward Gallery, London, in 2014; as well as Lines of Tangency at the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK), Ghent; Austeria at BWA Sokol Gallery, Nowy Sącz, Poland; and Glasstress Gotika, a collateral exhibition for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. In 2014 he was awarded the Special Prize of the Future Generation Art Prize of the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev, the Ukraine, and in 2016 the Innovation Prize of the National Centre for contemporary Arts in Moscow, in the category “New Generation.”

An extensive catalogue with specially commissioned essays and interviews will be co-published in 2016 by M HKA and Occasional Papers, Antwerp. The works in the exhibition were in part produced with the creative and financial support of FLACC, Workplace for Visual Artists in Genk, Belgium. The project is organised by Anders Kreuger, Senior Curator at M HKA.

M HKA is a Flemish Community Initiative and receives support from Stad Antwerpen, Klara, Cobra.be, H ART, Bank Degroof, De Olifant and Allen & Overy.