The “global Russian” website Snob.ru, the online platform of oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov’s Snob Magazine, is reporting a funny story about Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and the Venice Biennale. The exhibition at the Azerbaijani pavilion, it seems, has been put on hold after Aliyev personally draped over a sculpture by participating feminist artist Aidan Salakhova.
The reason? Aliyev found the work demeaning to women.
Arriving on opening day – an unusual practice for a head of state, writes Snob's Maria Shubina, but an understandable one, this being only Azerbaijan’s third time at the festival – Aliyev examined the exposition. One of Salakhova's works, titled “The Book,” depicted a black oval of a woman’s head and torso in Islamic dress, with no distinguishable face and protruding white hands that appear to hold the Quaran. It was at this point that the president reportedly declared that such a work could not represent his secular nation’s attitude toward women, and covered it with a sheet.
Salakhova’s work in the Biennale, if Snob’s illustrations are to be believed, also features a vaginal-shaped black-and-white sculpture known as “The Black Stone.” Her “Destination” series, to which “The Book” belongs, includes a piece where the traditionally-dressed woman holds a double-sided penis - a giveaway, one might suspect, that Salakhova is anything but an Islamic propagandist.
“Reading irony, seeing double entendre – all of this is, undoubtedly, not for presidents,” Shubina writes, adding the incident has produced so much buzz for Salakhova, it is as though she and Aliyev were in cahoots.
Salakhova, who owns galleries in Moscow and Baku, is known for previous works that featured intrauterine devices and other objects related to female sexuality, as well as installations that focused on abortion, motherhood, and virginity. Four other artists - Altay Sadykhzade, Hanlar Gasymov, Aga Gusejnov, and Michail Abdurahmanov - are also featured in the pavilion, in a show that seems likely to go on, even if at least one of Salakhova’s works remain shrouded.
UPD: Well, the rumor mill may have gotten ahead of itself on this one. Prominent Russian architect Yuriy Avvakumov now says Salakhova's sculptures were draped because of a break that happened on the way to Venice. Still, the publicity may not have been the worst thing that could happen for Azerbaijan, or for Salakhova. We now know that Azerbaijan is in the Venice Biennale with its own pavilion, and that the sculptor is there with a selection of non-Islamist women-centered art. Art that, it turns out, weighs up to a ton and is inspired by Sufi and Catholic imagery.
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