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Guest from the Future

Guest From The Future was a collaborative exhibition of multi-media work with the artist and writer Simon Morley. Chevska was offered a solo exhibition at Galerie8 in London, but instead she proposed a collaborative project in which the two artists investigated the relationship between history, poetry and the translation of cultures through an exploration of the 1945 meeting in Leningrad between the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

The exhibition title derives from Akhmatova’s description of Berlin in her Poem without a Hero. The concepts of liberty and art expounded in the poem provided the basis for a contemporary reconsideration of the relationship between art and politics (East and West). Taking Akhmatova’s language as material for her paintings, Chevska gave new visual form to the poet’s testimony of the silenced past by embedding words from the poem in her canvases and allowing them to be both revealed and occluded by the intimate gesture of brushstrokes. Sixteen paintings were shown alongside small-scale paper assemblages that re-shaped the primal forms of modernist architecture and sculpture, incorporating the patterned symbolism of the local environment on their exterior surface.

Chris Townsend, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, who carries out research on interdisciplinary modernist practices, was invited to write an essay for the exhibition catalogue (ISBN 9780953965052). The essay locates Chevska’s practice in relation to Akhmatova’s poem and explores the underlying premises of the exhibition. The catalogue also features photographs taken by Chevska in the Fountain House in St Petersburg where Akhmatova and Berlin met.

The exhibition led to a related selection of works by Chevska being showcased at Art Stage Singapore (12-15 January 2012) and RAW, Amsterdam (8-12 February 2012).