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Item: Leniniana by Vyacheslav Akhunov/ Лениниана Вячеслава Ахунова

1977-1984

Collage, 6 x (30 x 42 cm).
Materials: paper

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. S0438_2 — S0438_8).

Vyacheslav Akhunov is trying to save the tradition of art by a countermovement, a reconstructive movement. He is countering what became propaganda taking it back to space of constructivist reflection. He confronts the tradition of art with the rhetorics of the power system. Between 1974 and 1987 Akhunov worked on a series of collages and drawings in which he was using fragments of “Leniniana”, one of the official ideological types of Soviet realism art, created to perpetuate the memory of Lenin. In his collages Leniniana (1977-82), Akhunov uses reproductions from magazines, newspapers, albums and posters to create an imaginary political propaganda, in which he expresses his interest for the Soviet phenomenon of mass idolization with a mixture of irony and fascination.