Rachel Monosov

Rachel Monosov: The Flag Bearers

Becoming B – Chapter 7

In her solo exhibition The Flag Bearers, Rachel Monosov draws inspiration from the Surrealist imagery of Edgar Ende (1901–1965). The exhibition takes its title from Edgar Ende’s Die Fahnenträger (1931), one of three paintings which the artist then brings into the present, extracting their symbolic content through sculptural installations and performance. Rachel Monosov looks to Surrealism as a response to the aftermath of the First World War, a movement that abandoned logic and linear views of reality. By turning to dreams and the subconscious, the Surrealist movement offered both a refuge and a means of confronting loss, trauma and human fragility. Through this lens, the artist reflects on the cyclical nature of history while tapping into today’s collective psyche, ultimately exposing the emotional undertones of rising nationalism and the tension between bodies and ideology.

The historical distance between the two artists is consequently central to the work. Edgar Ende lived through a period in which national symbols were transformed into instruments of mass mobilisation. He experienced destruction as a byproduct of nationalism, while Rachel Monosov is working within a contemporary context of escalating conflict where questions of geopolitical power and territorial aggression have again become urgent.

The sculptural installations create an uncanny sensation. Two unusually long benches seem to stretch between here and elsewhere. Strands of long hair lie on their surface like traces of an erased human presence. Prosthetic bird legs have replaced parts of their original structure. Nearby, a jacket hangs from a metal rack, as if waiting to be worn; it is embroidered with a target motif across the back. On the other side of the room stands a metal sphere. Around it, a series of flags. White. Not tied to any particular nation. Their scale is disproportionate to that of the sphere

On the wall, a series of poetic scores written by the artist serves as the common thread; these were intended as choreographic instructions for the performers. Rachell Bo Clark, Cami Brogaard and Victor Dumont activate the sculptural installations through a performative work that acts as the soul of the exhibition. Opening the door to a “mirror within the mirror” universe, they lead visitors into a dreamlike reality where symbolism, exaggeration, the tension between objects and bodies, and free associations compose a metaphor of the collective unconscious through a surrealist perception of space. There is no hierarchy, no beginning or end. Spaces and stories collapse into each other, they are misleading. Everything exists simultaneously, and can only be interpreted through one’s own points of reference and lived experiences.

In The Flag Bearers the artist approaches the present as a historical condition that leaves its traces not only on nations and bodies, but also upon the unconscious. Beneath our individual experiences lies a shared terrain of haunting imagery, repressed guilt, and the uneasy question of what could have been done, or what might still be done, otherwise. Rather than affirming fixed identities, the exhibition places the body in a field of competing symbols, affiliations and projections. The white flags, stripped of any national emblem, are taken up by the performers, who repeatedly shift and unsettle their meaning through movement. Against the backdrop of a fractured political landscape, safety acquires an uneasy undertone. It describes less a state of arrival than a fragile proposition, repeatedly tested through movement, repetition and the collective body.

The Flag Bearers, curated by Jorgina Stamogianni, marks the seventh chapter of the series Becoming B. Across its chapters, Becoming B, a series initiated by Antje Weitzel in her role as Artistic Director, brings Berlin-based artists and curators together in changing constellations, allowing existing practices, encounters and relationships to enter into new contexts. Jorgina Stamogianni and Rachel Monosov bring to this chapter a collaboration that has already been unfolding over the last years through their joint research interests in bodies as sites where power structures and resistance intersect.

Text: Jorgina Stamogianni

In When All Is Still Monosov points to the relationship between Soviet monuments and the nexus of nuclear weapons, connecting these systems of control to contemporary warfare. Through opposition, the cement and glass create a visual poem of man-made ideas which could, and did, bring darkness to humanity. Socialist Realism played a role in shaping public perception within the Soviet Union, producing official accounts starkly different from the lived experiences of those affected. Today, the role of nuclear weapons as potential catalyst for unprecedented devastation looms large, adding an extra layer of urgency to these artistic narratives.

The accompanying two-channel video work fast forwards us into a post-nuclear future. A character plays the artist, the creator, who tirelessly carries the heavy cement sculptures, but breaks them at will, stepping out of the suspended disbelief demanded by these objects. She breaks them for artistic freedom, which was, and today still is, robbed from artists by oppressive governments. She breaks the whitewashed representation of a much darker reality. While this rebellion is taking place, on a second screen, where the objects lie broken and still, they offer a backdrop, a landscape, for the endurance of one of the few creatures which could survive a nuclear disaster.

The production of uranium glass, a unique radioactive material, was stopped once the Manhattan Project was underway. Although it is safe to handle and live with, its characteristic green glow is reminiscent of an ominous reality. The lingering specter of fear built by the proliferation of nuclear arsenals during the Cold War is imprinted on the collective consciousness and perpetuates a cycle of conflict and control that distorts our perception of power and security - an influence that continues to shape people's decisions, opinions and voting behavior decades after its fall.

LIMINAL, 2021

Liminal is a performance-based video work which translates the diverse states of our psychic and physical being during the Covid-19 pandemic into a digital exhibition. Conceived in early 2021 as a website to allow the public to virtually enter the three rooms of Villa Massimo in Rome without restrictions, in October 2021, at Casa Artelor in Timisoara, the work was presented for the first time as a 3-screen installation available for in-person public viewing.

The boundaries between us have dissolved. The lens replaces your eye, initiating and sustaining contact.

Inside this Liminal phase, we can change our identities and our governments. We exist in between the life we lived before and the life we will live after… whenever after comes. Still, the lasting effects on our psyche and social behaviors are still unknown. The only thing we know is that we miss touching another body, we miss our own bodies which could rebel! We are looking for the place of healing through movement together.

LIMINAL was originally commissioned by Accademia Tedesca Roma Villa Massimo.

Concept and Choreography: Rachel Monosov
Co-Choreography and performers: Rachell Bo Clark, Stephanie Amurao Music: Philipp Rhensius

Composer: Santa Bušs
Singer: Julia Shelkovskaia

Camera: Andrea Arnone
Video Editor: Vera Rosa Maria Herr

The Blind Leader

The blind leader is never one person, but a group of people who choose one head, while the others are the arms, the legs, ears and nose. The only thing a tyrannical group does not have between them all is sight.

Whether we are safe within the established community, or within a state of dislocation, the prevailing culture can carry with it the requirement that we move slowly and with permission. This is not a normal state of consensus-driven decision making, nor a self-guided state of deliberation. Instead, the closed culture demands permission for every statement, every decision, every movement, to be approved by some leadership. The burden of obtaining this permission is addressed by the artist, Rachel Monosov in her new exhibition, The Blind Leader. In Waiting Room we encounter this burden of permission through the use of fencing. The actors wait for something unknown, separated from the viewer and the rest of the world. The simple fencing of the waiting room could be transgressed physically but the weight of culture makes the actors obedient.

We decided over time, that some people were worth more than others. We gave out gifts for some, from the day of birth, while placing obstacles in the paths of others. We used words like God to give us a reasoning for the disparity, and later we used the word science and most particularly Darwin, to justify our systems. As it becomes clear that we misunderstood nature, that Darwin’s survival of the fittest was only partially correct, it remains our task to update our culture to match reality. This much needed revision to our systems is resisted by many because although it is aligned with the newest technologies, as well as our biology, it is contradictory to the models upon which our cultures are built. The fingerprint taken at a border has a hint of criminality built into the process of identification. This constant suspicion of the individual is highlighted in the artist’s presentation of Fingerprint. Held by the neck and around the knee, the mobility of the body is challenged while an imprint equivalent in uniqueness and wonder to those found in imposing geological formations is taken as a form of intrusion and control. The link between complacency and blind authority will continue to be heightened as we propel into the Information Age and our rapidly evolving technologies. Each of us will stand as newcomer at this threshold between ages, and each of us will, in that sense, bear some imprint of the refugee experience. Even those who do not move across physical borders will be forced into this position of migrant when dealing with the profound changes of culture that must attend such a great period of transformation. The Space In-Between creates a sense of the never ending balancing act that all who cross borders have with the sharp ends of authority. In effect, the constant tension in this work is equivalent to a mental state that is tasked with code switching while it must give away nothing; no sense of effort or labor.

​

Instead of seeing our leaders as bridges to the greater wisdom we have often allowed them to become unquestionable figures of authority. We have clung to these figureheads whether we agree with them or not, simply because they fulfill a parental role we crave. According to the schools of religion, or their secular counterparts, we have allowed the few to wield great authority over our lives so that we may live in some escapist manner. This desire for authoritarian messiahs or for the safety of homogeneous days that no longer exist has resulted in fences that deny more than individual entry, they deny the power of the human species as whole. These fences that our leaders have erected are meant to act not as membranes between interlinking objectives or communities but as obstacles to cooperation. These fences are meant to keep out newcomers but in effect they serve as unacknowledged pens for all common people. This movement towards separation of humans from one another leads to a constant experience of isolation so profound that even those with eyes are rendered blind. By repeatedly walling ourselves off from nature or from what we actively perceive we have found there is nowhere else to turn our fixation but onto ourselves. Power politics now dominate our lives not exactly as they did when we first gave birth to our present visions of God, or our scientific gods, but they are still tinged by lesser commandments that demand allegiance to ideology and identity before all else. In this present state of transition the systems still move but their collective vision is impaired. The collective head of our power system is cut off from its sensory organs, and together we grasp in the dust for some sense of what is next. To see or not to see, where our power is surrendered and where it can be recovered, this is the question asked repeatedly by Rachel Monosov in The Blind Leader.

We don’t need bloody revolution in most cases.

To engage in a global restoration of power we must be willing to see ourselves as a globe of newcomers. To open our doors to the shifting needs of our biosphere and by engaging it with a philosophy of interconnection. We must rewrite our perceptions of power so what we see is transparently shared. To achieve this transparency we must uncover a new version of society, one where interconnection precedes ideology. By embracing power through projects of interdependence we can do more than exhaust ourselves on resistance. We can see leaders once again as capable servants playing roles no greater or lesser than each of our own. We must move power away from its theatrical tendencies that provide false safety and into a more administrative role that presupposes and encourages a new level of maturity in the human race.

Essay by Mariette Papic

In Olympia  Monosov takes Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia (1936) as a point of departure and investigates the bodily moments before the action and after the seconds between motionlessness and getting into shape. The artist scrapes out this sculptural moment of transition and works with the image of perfect bodies, standing united on the starting blocks and finishing line.  

Concept and Choreography

Rachel Monosov 

Performers

Camilla Borgaard, Victor Dumont, Susie Yugier

Rachell Bo Clark,Stephanie Amurao,Katrina Bastian

Music

INRA (Philipp Rhensius & Adam Ben-Nun)

Live Visuals

Lisa Lapierre

Three young actors, two woman and a man, conceived by your imagination and guided by your script, spend their days in the meditative, sun-filled, sprawling spaces of House Van Wassenhove, a concrete modernist architectural delight melted into the green environment that surrounds it, and set in the middle of Sint-Martens-Latem, one of the wealthiest municipalities of Belgium. The three young people have the air of luxurious, laid-back living. They fill their days with painting, playing piano, and eating clams, living in a kind of art enclave detached from the real world. This concealed, peaceful location can be read as a Garden of Eden. It feels as if we walk around in The Golden Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder, the painting that structures your film. As a whole, the setting is a separation from the general state of the world; an escape out of the accelerated Anthropocene; an antidote to the turbulent storm of world disorder; a fertile ground for artistic inspiration and introspection; a fitting place to contemplate our contradictory, toxic age of political conflicts, wealth inequality, and environmental degradation; to search for spiritual and religious significance. But, herein is the paradox: the three inhabitants protect themselves from any danger. But, is the danger not enclosed in this absence of danger? How can they contemplate about a world in which they do not participate? Is this idealized world as ideal as it looks? Is this triumph of love and art over war and misery, not straight up delusional?

Melodica completely convinced me of your sensitivity as an auteur - both as a writer and a director. You deliberately observe daily life and create drama of a high order of artistic integrity. As the British producer and dramatist Martin Esslin wrote in his book The Field of Drama: you, the director of a film, have the power to compel the spectator to look at certain things and to restrict the ability to look at others, which you want to conceal or withold. I like the way you control the tiniest gesture. How you masterfully create a state where characters operate in an enchanting, tender listlessness; and how you immerse us in a dark, often suicidal fairy tale bridging childishness and recognition with a veil of alienation and madness.

I was also touched by the sounds and the music - from natural recorded bird songs and harp, to strange synthetic noises. Reading the subtitles, I noticed two musicians, Stella Gotshtein and Omri Barel, were involved in the creation of this unique soundscape. Then you informed me about the intensive process of recording the sounds in Italy. Sometimes the soundscape provides a powerful ‘subtext’ indicating hidden thoughts and emotions of the characters. Sometimes it is used as antithetical to the visuals, co-existing in a dialectical relationship to each other. Also remarkable is how you diligently direct our attention towards thought-provoking questions: from underlying existential reflexivity, through which one comes to terms with notions of isolation, vanitas, meaning(lessness), the cosmos and the death; to (the breaking of) the self-awareness of the protagonists, and thus our own self-awareness… that moment when the performers look at us and we realize they are performing for us. The final meditations of the narrator muses in my head: “Je considère que je suis devenue philosophe à mes 28 ans. Et depuis je ne dors pas. Je compose souvent des réponses, mais là j’avance des questions derrière un miroir dans la nature, confuse de cette époque, notre époque.” In those last shots, we see the characters looking into the sky. It reminds me of the end of your video work Freedom in the Clouds where the female character, a researcher, is lying on the ground, gazing at what seems to be a utopian universe. It is true that in your films one can still dream to devise an optimistic antidote against the not-all-rosy reality.

Yours,

Sofie