Care Outside the Comfort Zone

Abstract

This article situates the politics of Katrin Nenasheva’s contemporary performance practice, which is based on a maternal aesthetics of tactile communication, within the broader, developing history of performance in post-Soviet Russia. First, I present a history of the development of the idea of the maternal in Russian performance art after 1991. By creating a dialogue between the works of key performances artists and Bracha Ettinger’s theoretical text “Copoiesis” on the ethics and aesthetics of the ‘matrixial borderspace’, I show how the concept of a maternal aesthetic gained traction as a political aesthetic in post-socialist Russia between 1991 and 2012 (703). I then show how Nenasheva engaged with this history and theory in her first two major performance projects, Don’t Be Afraid (2015), which worked to make visible the often invisible, embodied experiences of female inmates and Sewing Meditation Practice (2016), which examined not only ‘feminine’ labor and public memory, but also the relationship between textiles and corporeal identity. I further demonstrate how these first two projects laid the groundwork for the particular ideas about maternity, aesthetics and politics that emerge in Punishment, and describe the implications of the project’s particular interventions both into the history of performance art in contemporary Russia and the growing body of theory on the maternal in art. I specifically elucidate Nenasheva’s contribution to that body of theory by revealing, through my analysis of her performances, how her ideas about the aesthetics and politics of the maternal both resonate with and resist Ettinger’s key claims.

Notes

1 In the documentary text that accompanied this action, Nenasheva described the frame as a ‘hospital bed’ (bol’nichnaia krovat’).

2 The critic Andrei Erofeev, who worked as Russia’s chief curator of contemporary art from 1989 to 2007, confirmed in a recent interview with the author that Actionism arose as a trend in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and quickly spread throughout Russia.

3 For a description of the Punk Prayer and a translation of its lyrics see Masha Gessen’s Words Will Break Cement (2014: 15–97 and 111–118).