Have you ever played music from your ribs, watched Swan Lake in a phone booth, brought flowers to a revolution? Thoughts on Anna Jermolaewa

By Lucy von Goetz

Anna Jermolaewa represented Austria in the 2024 Venice Biennale. When something sticks with you for some two years or more you must ask yourself why. Jermolaewa’s work encompasses the beauty that can be found in simplification, the ability to distil something enormous into something tiny. Along with their artistic potency, Anna Jermolaewa’s works possess poetry and humour. They are characterised by an acutely vigilant sense of human and social nuance and of people’s various absurdities and manipulations, dissecting them with razor-sharp, comedic sensibility.

Born in 1970 in Leningrad (USSR) Jermolaewa became involved in the political opposition party, Democratic Union in the late ’80s and was co-editor of the party’s illustrated weekly. Though it was the time of glasnost and perestroika, she and her husband drew the attention of the KGB and had to leave the country. It was stemming from this context that her presentation was created.

The most captivating work to me in the Biennale presentation was, Ribs. In the postwar Soviet Union people were banned from owning record albums of popular music, especially rock or jazz from the West. If caught with this contraband the owner would face jail time, not jail house rock. In response to this, Soviet sound engineers developed a way to subvert the ban: they copied albums onto used X-ray films that hospitals had discarded. These X-ray film records, nicknamed “ribs,” “music on bones,” and “bones” were exchanged on the black market until the advent of the audio cassette tape. Ribs took a sample of these Soviet recordings and returned them to their original function.

The uncanny mix of light, music, and images of human skeletons on the records that produced this music illustrated the total brilliance of human ingenuity and absolute need for music and freedom in the face of absurdity.

Aleida Assmann wrote about Jermolaewa’s love of hotel rooms. How she has been transposing the traumatic experience of being denied asylum and the notion of “flight” into that of travel: “She enjoys the brief escapes from everyday life, loosening the ties to the stasis of her safe and sound existence. Traveling allows her to have a different experience of time—one that is fleeting, preliminary, and always limited in its compartmentalized state. The counterpole to traveling and hotel rooms, for Jermolaewa, is the bed. “A long time ago, I made a habit of working from home because I raised my daughter as a single parent for the most part. Disappearing into the studio, therefore, was unthinkable.” The bed is her incubator for the written word and thought—the horizontal, immobile position par excellence lets her mind wander as freely as possible. Her laptop doesn’t rest on her lap, but on top of her belly as she lies on her back—the locus of creative pregnancy.”

Jermolaewa said; “The most beautiful thing of all, for me, is to stroll around a place where I’ve never been before, not knowing what’s behind the next corner. I’ve thus come to a sharper awareness for discovery in such moments. You are awake! You see things that you would otherwise walk past. After three days in the same place, this awareness dulls again.” These are the words the artist uses to describe a concept well known in Russian art theory, Viktor Šklovskij’s notion of “deautomatisation” (also known as “defamiliarisation”). A formalist and Saint Petersburg compatriot, in 1916 he defined the concept as follows: “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself.” Art is based on defamiliarisation, which, in turn, is based on the freedom of being allowed to see things differently than they present themselves in the busy daily life regulated by routine.

In her work Rehearsal for Swan Lake, created in collaboration with the Ukrainian ballet dancer and choreographer Oksana Serheieva, Jermolaewa references childhood memories of Soviet censorship. In times of political and social unrest, like in response to the death of a head of state, Soviet television would broadcast Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake on repeat, sometimes for days. Dramatic changes in politics were greeted with aesthetic anesthesia. The technique of ballet had remained the same since the Tsarist time. Swan Lake was a symbol of this cultural stability because it was created by the leading French-Russian ballet master of the 19th century, Marius Petipa. In Rehearsal for Swan Lake Jermolaewa shifts the attention of spectators from the canonical form of the ballet to its rehearsal, with all the unavoidable imperfections and tentative approaches that this shift implies.

The Penultimate (2017) initially looks like a trifling array of bouquets in a florist, on closer inspection it turns out to be a collection of “colours of the revolution.” Presented as a living still-life; these carnations, roses, tulips, cornflowers, lotuses, saffron crocuses, jasmine, a cedar and an orange tree, represent a “colour revolution”: a popular uprising referred to or symbolised by a colour or floral term. With red carnations, Portugal welcomed a military putsch against its dictatorship in 1974. A flower was used as a symbol of protest by Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 and Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution in 2007. Also characterised as colour revolutions: Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution of 2005, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution of 2010, and Egypt’s Lotus Revolution of 2011. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution of 2007, and Belarus’ unsuccessful Cornflower Revolution in 2007.

And as for the phone booths, in the pavilion’s courtyard, visitors were able to encounter “witnesses” of the artist’s second stop in Austria: phone booths from the refugee camp in Traiskirchen. Thousands of refugees, including Jermolaewa used these exact booths to inform their families that they had arrived safely in Austria. Apparently the most international calls made in Austria came from these six booths. Rendered obsolete by the mobile phone the booths were recently removed from Traiskirchen. Dalek-like figures holding all that emotion, insecurity, and hope.

Ludwig Wittgenstein left us a sentence that fits the sentiment of Jermolaewa’s works: “Where others pass by, I stop.” Jermolaewa’s art is, in the vein of Wittgenstein, a manual for awareness and sharpening of the senses. Art can keep, retain, and honour what went missing or got lost in the torrents of time.

All this has nothing to do with nostalgia but a lot with reflection, attentiveness, vigilant perception, and the ability to reinterpret. Everything can get a new meaning: the ballet used for censorship, the X-ray film recycled as a music storage medium, the colour of a flower that stands for a political revolution.

The connotations, codes, symbols, mysterious meanings are the things of life - we have to decipher them.

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