Yes, Chaos!

VLADIMIR POTAPOV & EMMANUEL BORNSTEIN

CRONE gallery, Berlin

25 June - 27 August, 2022

During the first Corona Lockdown in March 2020, Bornstein and Potapov launched a virtual art project: locked in their studios in Berlin and Moscow, they exchanged small paintings and notes daily via Instagram in which they captured their experiences with the pandemic. The result was a series called Chronicles of Isolation that was clicked thousands of times and exhibited at Russia's Perm Museum in late 2021. A selection of the works will be on display at the Kunsthalle Dessau in July 2022.

Already a year ago, a joint exhibition by Emmanuel Bornstein and Vladimir Potapov was planned for the end of June 2022 at Crone Berlin, in which they wanted to reflect on the second year of the pandemic and continue the Chronicles of Isolation.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine gave the project a new, unexpected turn. Under the impact of the brutal, inhumane military campaign, Bornstein and Potapov began an artistic dialogue via WhatsApp and Telegram, expressing their personal concern, emotional involvement, and powerless rage over the war, not through words, but through the means they know best: painting.

Potapov, confronted in Moscow with the censorship and crushing of any form of protest, but at the same time a firm opponent of the Russian invasion and false propaganda, portrayed Russian activists who - like him - opposed the war despite all the repression. Bornstein, faced in Berlin with the television and social media images from the Ukrainian war zones and the hesitant behavior of the German government, responded with depictions of the Russian writer and pacifist Vsevolod Garshin, who already fought against imperialist militarism in tsarist Russia at the risk of his life and is considered the founder of anti-war literature.

3D REVIEW

Potapov used the actual materials of the war, drawing attention to the literal footage and plots of the unfolding tragedy. Bornstein responded with a variation of Goya's Catastrophe of War, in which people, houses and landscapes, Ukrainian symbols and Western artifacts spin in the air like in a centrifuge: Yes, Chaos!
In total, CRONE Berlin will feature 22 images that Bornstein and Potapov have created over the past three months in support of protest and opposition to the war.

They reflect the injustice, atrocities and neo-imperialism of the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin, but do not exhaust themselves with this. Referring to the historical context, they rather put a sign against any form of violence and war, which always ends with imperialism.

Eng

NEW SECURITY

CHRONICLES OF ISOLATION