V–A–C Sreda online magazine presents a three-month programme dedicated to memory and its relationship to history, archives, and nostalgia.
In this issue, we publish a text by the journalist and art critic Sergey Guskov. The author reflects on the contemporary cult of memory and its relationship to history, art, and cultural identity. Using examples from various artists’ works, Guskov explores how the “re-creation” of historical events through re-enactments, archival installations, and documentary projects multiplies interpretations—and ultimately comes to replace reality itself.
At first glance, history and memory seem to walk hand in hand. Yet they are not as close as they appear—and often, in fact, stand in opposition. The difference lies in nuance. History lays claim to fact and credibility, but it also demands continual reinterpretation and rereading. In doing so, it inevitably opens itself to distortion, manipulation, and quiet correction in the service of contemporary political interests. Memory, by contrast, is largely imagined and embellished. It fills its own gaps, reshapes its details in hindsight, and constantly revises its testimony—while fiercely insisting on its authenticity, on a kind of near-religious infallibility.
Artists, naturally, work with both history and memory. Yet it is impossible not to notice that, since the late twentieth century, the latter has held the upper hand. This has much to do with the decline of historical consciousness and a growing distrust of grand narratives—those intellectual systems that once claimed to explain the past. It also stems from an intensified fascination with the unspoken, the hidden, the repressed, and the forgotten. Small wonder, then, that cultural practitioners became obsessed with recollection: familial, ethnic, cultural, national, local, class-based, confessional, professional, gendered, generational—rooted in every conceivable form of social identity. Tribal, in the broadest sense. But curiously, not personal.
Today, memory is strictly coded as a collective experience, even when it speaks through a single, solitary voice. It is always an “I” through which a clear “we” is visible. And although collective memory is itself a kind of chimera, its repeated and unshakable confidence in its own righteousness has long since become rhetorically persuasive. In truth, it is nearly impossible to challenge or verify another person’s experience. Moreover, with the rise of autofiction and parafiction, the remembering subject now enjoys an inalienable right to inventiveness. The degree of invention—its percentage or permissible dose—cannot really be defined, let alone regulated.
Memory, for the most part, cannot be transmitted. Either you are its bearer, or you are not. At best, only a fragment of that experience can be externalized. The rest remains embedded in sensations—in what those who share it find “obvious,” that is, taken on faith. Such hermeticism enforces a division between insiders and outsiders. And if the initial intention of this decades-long global séance of collective remembrance was to fill historical gaps and, logically, to restore a sense of wholeness to the world, it has in practice achieved the opposite: a fragmentation of the cultural field. True, it was never truly unified—but there was a time when people aspired to make its parts at least somewhat coherent.
Curiously, in the clash between historical narrative and remembered experience, the latter has gained an unexpected advantage. Simply put, there are more memories. By sheer volume, the flood of testimonies has overwhelmed any claim to a universal picture of the past—the sort of unified account that history traditionally aspired to provide. Yet once the ambition for a single textbook of civilization was abandoned, individual recollections inevitably began to contradict one another. On the one hand, these accounts are built on the assumption that personal experience lies beyond criticism or doubt; on the other, every tribe has its own truth, often irreconcilable with the next. The result has been a ferocious struggle—bitter, protracted, and by nature impossible to resolve.
Having become a source of conflict, the practice of testimony has not lost its appeal; on the contrary, it has only expanded its reach, becoming a standard means of asserting one’s belonging to a group—precisely because of its militant character. And so, the process has become a loop.
Artists’ approaches to memory differ little, in principle, from those of writers, filmmakers, or even television showrunners. The medium, materials, and tone naturally leave their mark on the finished work, but the viewer still receives something resembling a coherent narrative. Its sequence may be complex, fractured, nonlinear—but the events still form one or more storylines that demand close attention. To look away is fatal to such works: they are made of the substance of time itself, and they continue to consume it. That is why they so often depend on spectacle to stay alive.
One of the key genres of testimonial storytelling is the re-enactment. It is protean in form. Some artists restage actual trials, like the Italian artist Rossella Biscotti or the Swiss director Milo Rau; others focus on a single symbolic event—Aslan Goisum’s Volga (2015) being a prime example. Still others try to reconstruct the creative atmosphere of another era, as in the collective “What Is to Be Done?” (Chto Delat?) and their project The Builders (2004–2005), inspired by Viktor Popkov’s 1960 Socialist Realist painting The Builders of Bratsk.
The canonical example of the genre remains The Battle of Orgreave (2002) by British artist Jeremy Deller. On the surface, he meticulously recreated the legendary 1984 clash between striking miners and Thatcher-era police. He gathered actual participants to play themselves and reconstructed the event in precise chronological order. And yet, this was not a perfect repetition. The actors—simultaneously the custodians of memory and presumed guarantors of authenticity—were no longer the same men they had been in the moment of the original confrontation. Their bodies, their views, their social roles had changed—some more, some less—but one never steps into the same river twice. Memory itself had undergone its own quiet transformation: a traumatic, heroic event softened, idealized, politicized. Rough edges were smoothed out; inconvenient details vanished. The result was an epic video—an outstanding work that operated not as a documentary reconstruction, but as a polemical interpretation of Orgreave.
(A similar metamorphosis was even more vividly felt by director Nikolai Evreinov, who in 1920 staged The Storming of the Winter Palace to mark the third anniversary of the event—enlisting many original participants. Of course, the staging was overseen for ideological accuracy, but since the Party narrative had not yet hardened into dogma, the celebrated “creativity of the masses” ran wild. The inflated perception of events only three years old—still emotionally raw—combined with theatrical ingenuity and technical artifice, reshaped memory far more dramatically than decades of erosion could. The resulting spectacle, like Eisenstein’s October (1927), replaced the actual storming with vivid, cinematic imagery. And the public accepted those images as authentic history.)
In re-enactment, the past is not simply reinterpreted—it is actively, conspicuously rebuilt. By now, artists even make a point of emphasizing this. Milo Rau, for example, invites prominent contemporaries—figures burdened with their own histories of statements and scandals—into his reconstructed trials. Thus, it is not only yesterday’s protagonists who are judged, but today’s as well. It feels transparent, a full accounting, free from manipulation—yet the transformation becomes all the more effective precisely because it disguises itself as self-awareness. The viewer is lulled by the idea that this is about the present, not the past. But then, memory itself speaks far more about the here and now than about the there and then.
Curiously, despite its fluid and irrational nature, memory is often subjected to systems of order—filed into drawers, vitrines, spreadsheets, and charts; numbered, described, analyzed, and displayed. Archival projects and documentary installations have become a standard way of presenting someone’s testimony about the past. Yet such artistic practices rarely, if ever, qualify as genuinely historical—even when the artist claims otherwise. Structurally, they exist somewhere between propaganda displays and amateur house museums. Their pseudo-scientific aesthetic lends them credibility and coherence. But the affective dimension of the narrative does not disappear—on the contrary, it intensifies. The artist, in proving the truth of their own experience, often abandons the last vestiges of critical distance.
It is no wonder that this immersion in material is especially rapid in projects devoted to family history—or, more broadly, to “the ancestors.” The found artifacts and documents may seem separated from the artist by time and circumstance, mediated by the format of the exhibition. Yet emotional attachment precedes the work itself, since the materials so often include family photographs, diary entries, home videos, familiar interiors, and personal belongings. These objects form not only an intimate, emotionally charged environment but also a kind of hyper-responsibility toward the memorialized. The echoes of this heightened sensitivity reach the audience and critics alike—particularly when they respond with anything less than reverence. It becomes forbidden not merely to doubt the authenticity of the experience (or the artist’s rendering of it—which, for them, is the same), but even to look askew. The consolation is that most such projects are produced during the artist’s formative years, and their creators usually move on to entirely different pursuits. There are exceptions, of course.
Generally, documentary or archival projects appear more restrained, more sober—but their authors can still be surprisingly volatile when faced with criticism. An installation created as testimony inevitably invites judgment, including skeptical ones—especially from someone shaped by a different memorial culture. Yet this is hardly surprising, since the “heroes” of such projects are almost always chosen in response to contemporary debates. These works rely on resurrecting forgotten names or commemorating figures whom the artist feels deserve to be remembered more, and better.
In this regard, one of the most significant practitioners is the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, known for his four Monuments (1999–2013) and for a series of related altars, festivals, and biographical displays. Each project honors a major writer, philosopher, or revolutionary—Georges Bataille, Ingeborg Bachmann, Robert Walser, Antonio Gramsci, Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, Michel Foucault, and others. Hirschhorn’s memorial installations are often situated in public space. His Gramsci Monument (2013), built in the Bronx housing project of Forest Houses, occupied a small park. Locals participated in its construction and daily life. It was designed as a meeting place—a space for conversation, cooking, drinking, and community events. A key element was a public library and reading room. The artist used it as an agitational platform, hosting lectures on Gramsci and Marxism. The structure itself—true to Hirschhorn’s style—was made from cardboard, plywood, and duct tape, deliberately fragile and short-lived. For the artist, the memory of the oppressed can only survive through ephemeral, unpolished forms that resist co-optation by capitalist spectacle. Ironically, the inclusion of these works in major collections, such as the Dia Art Foundation, suggests that Hirschhorn underestimates the system’s capacity to aestheticize even its own critique.
Such memorialization, however, is not reserved for the political left. Similar patterns appear on the right, sometimes across entire exhibition series. A recent example is the line of projects curated by the Voznesensky Center—beginning with The Thaw Research Center (2022), continuing with The Museum of Spiritual Avant-Garde (2023–2024), and culminating in Dark Thaw (2025). The thread of mystical underground life—stretching from the circles around pianist Maria Yudina and theologian Sergey Durylin to the “Yuzhinsky Circle” and the artist-writer Alexei Smirnov (von Rauch)—ran through them all. The first project resembled a historical archive exhibition, but by the last, the curators had moved toward an artistic intervention into what had become the consensus of Moscow’s art and museum scene. Guided, consciously or not, by the nostalgia of their chosen subjects, they took up the long-ago struggle against Soviet “soullessness” as their own. The curatorial structure of Dark Thaw—a densely packed total installation—merged works into a single organism. Its goal was clear: to amplify the testimony of its heroes, to proclaim their truth in the loudest possible register. Yet beneath that reconstructed chorus, the curators slipped in their own narrative—one that, predictably, turned out to be a polished new fabrication.
Sometimes, upon entering an exhibition, you immediately start doubting the credibility of what you see—questioning curatorial notes that seem artificially attached to certain objects or documents. A single small detail can undermine the trust you place in the entire narrative. But museums have always been breeding grounds for dispute and conflict. At any moment, a single sentence in a wall text can ignite a public campaign with unpredictable consequences.
And yet, openly fabricated pasts and intoxicating counter-histories are also forms of working with memory—albeit in a particularly peculiar way. This is precisely the territory explored by the Agency of Singular Investigations (ASI), a collective founded by Anna Titova and Stanislav Shuripa ten years ago. In fact, if we count their earlier collaborations, they began fabricating hidden pages of history and inventing forgotten characters four years before ASI formally existed.
One of their early successes was Dystopia Park (2015) at Moscow’s Factory Center for Creative Industries. The premise was simple but striking: a meteorite had fallen on Moscow, leaving behind a vast crater inhabited by monks who preserved artifacts of the past—objects now stripped of meaning. Memory had materialized in things but vanished from the minds of those living in this imagined future. Images from this fictional archive were printed on a spiral-shaped table for visitors to peruse (and, naturally, they all looked oddly familiar).
In Flower Power—first shown at the 1st Riga Biennial in 2018, then in an expanded form at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2019—ASI shifted focus back to our own world. The story: a centuries-old conspiracy dating back to late-eighteenth-century French naturalists who founded a secret society called La Puissance des Fleurs. From the Decadents to the Dadaists to the hippies, almost every major cultural figure, the collective claimed, was somehow tied to this floral “Freemasonry” that subtly steered the course of world events. In the turbulent years that followed, one could almost be forgiven for believing it—a conspiracy theory disguised as hazy collective memory.
A similar, though far more radical, approach was taken by American artist Norman Daly. From the early 1960s until his death in 2008, Daly built a complete material culture around a civilization he invented, the Lluro. He reclassified ordinary household items—door latches, juicers, graters—as, respectively, sculptural groups, oil lamps, and sundials. After analyzing their forms and materials, he identified six historical periods of Lluro civilization. Daly even reconstructed its language, literature, music, religious practices, and scientific doctrines. It was anthropology as artistic fiction—an entire world remembered into existence.
Kazan-based artist Sasha Shardak works differently. His projects draw on real sources—mid-century Soviet design and the rave culture of the 1980s–2010s. The former connects him to family history and his time working in a library; the latter to personal experience and the oral folklore of fellow travelers. But these images are cunningly interwoven, laced with threads of American minimalism, experimental sound, and more. Entire eras—and the testimonies of countless people, including the artist himself—collide like tectonic plates, creating mountains and fault lines in sprawling installations. Shardak asserts nothing and teaches no lessons; he simply immerses the viewer in a flow of phantom memories. The only challenge is not to lose yourself in it.
As for Irina Korina, by now practically a classic of Russian contemporary art, she has no single method but two traits worth noting here. Some of her early installations no longer exist in their original form; when the need arose to exhibit them again, they were literally rebuilt. This was the case with Camouflage (2001)—a darkened room with wall lamps and garish wallpaper—and at least twice with Urangst (2003), a floor made of teetering planks that shift underfoot. The reconstructions differ slightly in texture, color, size, and shape. Korina once lamented that she could barely find wallpaper as tasteless as the early-2000s original when recreating Camouflage for GES-2’s Tuning-3 exhibition (2022). Each era, after all, has its own version of bad taste—and Korina, a meticulous chronicler of material culture, pays particular attention to it. Yet even the richest deposits of kitsch are quickly exhausted. So one must stitch together artifacts from different times.
As for the installations that have survived intact—those preserved in private or museum collections—they function as instant snapshots. Many of them possess no historical depth, no genealogical chain behind them: they are made of whatever was at hand, embodying precisely the moment of their making. Over time, these works themselves begin to resemble memories—but perhaps they may one day serve as the raw material for history.