M HKA Ensembles

Mixed Media, 300 x 1060 x 60 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community (Inv. no. M00251).

For this installation titled Soviet Stereographs, Maes photographed the grounds of the Vystavka dostizheniy narodnogo khozyaystva (Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy), or VDNKh as it is commonly known, in Moscow at various times between 2009 and 2015. This gigantic site showcased the industrial, technological and scientific achievements of every region of the USSR from 1939 to 1989. After a long period of neglect, the pavilions were partially restored under Vladimir Putin. In 2015, the site became the location of the 6th Moscow Biennale. Over ten days, performative, political and artistic actions shaped the space, following the theme, ‘How to Gather? Acting in a Centre in a City in the Heart of the Island of Eurasia’. The biennale was curated by M HKA’s Bart De Baere together with Nicolaus Schafhausen and Defne Ayas. For Soviet Stereographs, which was made during the biennale, Maes drew on archive images, his personal research material and new photos from 2015, which he combined into stereographic images. The juxtaposition of the images features propagandistic motivations behind the recent restoration process. In view are the Lenin Monument, a Vostok rocket, a portrait of Yuri Gagarin, the Ukrainian pavilion, the USSR pavilion that once stood at Expo 67 in Montreal, and the newly build replica of the Soviet pavilion from the 1937 Universal Exposition in Paris. In the stereoscopes, the photos from different periods flow into each other and form a new image of a kind of ‘meantime’, a hybrid of communism, capitalism and something undefined in between.