A. Petrovichev Roman, you are a fully-fledged artist with your very own distinctive style, yet this is your first solo exhibition in Moscow. You worked in Germany for a long time. Was the moment of your integration into the Moscow art scene of any importance to you?

R. Minaev Although I lived in Germany for quite a while, I studied art there - and incidentally I also represented Germany at several international exhibitions, my German colleagues have always seen me as a Russian artist. From the very beginning of my artistic practice this conflict of cultural identity led me to decide to work outside the national context, which is partly the reason I chose to make net art. It enabled me to identify myself as an artist without national borders. It took me about two years to adapt to the Moscow scene, during which time I participated in several projects and have been actively cooperating with the Electroboutique group (Shulgin and Chernyshev).

A. Petrovichev Generally speaking, is the difference between the Moscow and the Berlin context a topic for you, or is it more or less equal?

R. Minaev The difference is, of course, colossal. Berlin, as it is today, exists as an urban idyll of the international art scene. I am at times under the impression that everybody in Berlin is an artist. My supposition may be well-grounded. Germany has dozens of art academies that annually churn out several hundreds of young artists. Many of them try their luck in Berlin.

A. Petrovichev Does the German viewer understand you and do you know the Moscow viewer? Anything special in the way they see things?

R. Minaev In the past few years in Germany I worked primarily on interdisciplinary projects on an institutional basis in cooperation with representatives of different professions. Such projects expand the notion of art, and the German viewer is prepared for it. In Moscow I first discuss each and every one of my exhibition projects with my colleagues who often tell me that my 'Western' ideas will ring no bell here.

A. Petrovichev You know, the Krokin Gallery cooperates with at least three artists - Vladimir Kuzmin, Vladimir Sitnikov and Vladimir Anzelm - who have similar identification problems. Rather, they are not problems but actual aspects of the correlation of the two cultural and historical systems. This synthesis is fascinating and always individual. The problem, if any, is really all about the way viewers see things. So tell me, what does an exhibition at home mean to you? Is it just another experiment with context, market monitoring - or something else?

R. Minaev I currently live and work in Moscow. Any participation in art life requires first foremost an understanding of local context. I've recently been making objects, drawing on my media experience. New technology enables anyone, almost without exception, to put material of any nature and content on the Internet, rapidly and without the need for major resources. In his recent lecture in Moscow Boris Groys made an assumption that mass creativity of this virtual type has abolished the role of the artist, as a result of which art has lost its viewer. The appearance of means of technical reproduction made it possible to reproduce the original; today there is a reverse tendency to produce precisely unique things. In this respect the physical space of a gallery is an ideal platform to embody this concept.

A. Petrovichev How did you get the idea of the Flags project?

R. Minaev The idea of flags occurred to me in Moscow a couple of years ago when I began to actively follow developments in Russian art. Among other things, I was attracted by the discussion of the form of national representation among leading Russian artists. This idea is not new and is prompted not only by the desire to become integrated within art history, but also the impulses coming from the international art scene with its innovative formations such as the young British artists (Brit Pack), new German painting and Chinese pop art.
This trend is symptomatic today in different spheres of Russian culture and strikes me as a component of a monocentric program to promote a positive image of Russia. However, the expression of national ideas in art can contain a double meaning, not in the least because these ideas are associated with the negative historical experience when art served as an instrument of ideological propaganda.
One example is the German photographer Erna Lendvai-Dircksen who, in 1930 published a series of photographs called 'Das deutsche Volksgesicht', which at first glance seemed harmless enough. When the Nazis came to power later on, the series was reprinted several times. Lendvai-Dircksen, who is also referred to as the Riefenstahl of photography, is one of the most publicized photographers in history. After the war her photographs were branded as racist and few people remember her today. To this day artists in Germany deliberately avoid the national theme in art. For that matter, to speak of national pride - if not a taboo, is never the less quite rare in society. It reflects the idiosyncrasy of the European mentality as well as a sense of guilt for former narcissistic nationalism. To quote Kurt Tucholsky, "What they are proud of in Europe: Of being a German. Of being a Frenchman. Of being an Englishman. Of not being a German. Of not being a Frenchman. Of not being an Englishman.".

With national exhibitionism being not only current in the Russian context but also encouraged in every way, this is precisely a topic that deserves a response. As a result I have found a tongue-in-cheek solution for how to translate national art; to express its message in an easily comprehensible idiom, such as conveyed through the national flag. From my point of view its outward appearance is similar to geometrical abstraction. Every particular element of the flag has its own unique meaning. Incidentally, in every country identical colors and shapes have different meanings. For instance, the red of the Japanese flag represents the color of the rising sun, while the red of the American flag is the color of courage and readiness for struggle. So you see, the use of such meaningful abstract forms can easily lead to misunderstandings. The deformation of individual elements of the flag leads to new meanings that may be interpreted as either offensive or, on the contrary, as exalting one particular nation. To avoid this I created a media work, the components of which are transformed and distributed on the surface with the help of a random number generator. In other words, the national images are the result of an unconscious machine creativity.

A. Petrovichev You have voiced the universal priorities of a contemporary European in your answer.
From a conceptualist point of view, it is a particular manifestation and a reflection of these views in contemporary art. Although this tendency exists in Russia, it is not dominant. While I am no judge of contemporary Europe, in Russia we have pronounced polarity. Russia never treated the national component as an abstraction, even in the Soviet period. To a certain extent this was extrapolated to flag symbolism. I find it strange and superficial to identify the national as an ethnocultural root phenomenon with Nazism as a lowly ideology of a concrete historical period. And yet, can social ideology be balanced against or correlated with the cultural space of "free art" and to what extent?

R. Minaev Under certain circumstances practically any artistic statement can easily be appropriated by ideology and fall victim to manipulation. I am primarily interested in conscious creativity. In the mid-1990s I happened to attend a NOMA exhibition at the Hamburg Kunsthalle. An installation of beds, tables, partitions and lamps was displayed at the cupola hall. Russian texts without any translation were carelessly hung on the walls. A recorded message in Russian came from under one of the beds. I found no explanatory texts either at the exhibition or in its catalogue. According to Ilya Kabakov, Western viewers had a unique chance to experience the extinct totalitarian system of the Soviet Union through his art. Every artist represented there operated within the Soviet context. And although Western viewers understood nothing language-wise, nonconformist art proved a successful representative of Russian art. It has set a certain standard for the next generation, which still stimulates many artists.šNational art represented today in the institutional field can be criticized fiercely as long as it fails to live up to correct political intentions. Balance is meanwhile found in the commercial sector, where much is possible for the time being.

A. Petrovichev A multimedia object is an active component of your art. Will you make use of it in this project?

R. Minaev I am going to exhibit a generator, The National Character of Geometric Abstraction, which I used to make a series of eight paintings.

PHOTOS of the EXPOSITION