Vladislav Shapovalov's “Image Diplomacy”: The Archive as Medium

The relationship between historical images and the political imagination is not simply a correlation
between image and reality, or even between image and proposition. As we break down the concepts to
their minimal units and common denominators, all kinds of contradictions arise that transform images
not only into the result of a certain political imaginary (or another), but also into one of its building
blocks. In his research project “Image Diplomacy”, Vladislav Shapovalov, a Russian visual artist and
researcher, acts as a kind of mediator between different processes of transfer, presentation,
representation and reception of historical images surrounding the key political imaginary of the 20 th
century – the cultural politics of the Cold War. “Historical images” in itself is a very loaded term, and
could be easily made to encompass every representational image since the introduction of the
reenactment of battles in history painting (starting in the 15 th century), but is more often confined to
photography – the preferred format of political propaganda.

Following Shapovalov (from his public talk at Garage in Moscow, 2017), I will move away from these
object-and-image based conceptualizations of image history, towards a tripartite model of the political
imaginary, defined as the system of circulation images, based on three elements: exhibition strategies,
photographic media and films. The project “Image Diplomacy” and its open-ended image/imaginary
system is based on archives left behind in different European countries after the end of the Soviet
Union, underlying a curious story: Shortly after the founding of the USSR, the “All-Union Society for
Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries” (VOKS), was created in Moscow in 1925, in order to
coordinate cultural contacts between Soviet artists and peers in other countries (first focused on the
Western capitalist countries but then later embracing also the third world and the non-aligned countries
that were instrumental for the spread of the Soviet message). The scope of activities was very broad,
including cultural exchanges between musicians, cinematographers, artists, scientists, athletes, etc.

However, “Image Diplomacy” is specifically interested in traveling exhibition strategies (a format that
was only nascent at the time and somewhat modeled after the World Expos), for which the VOKS,
created a network of archives in many countries based around local 'friendship societies' (according to
historian Svetlana Chervonnaya, there existed 47 such societies in 1957). These societies were
basically propaganda outlets tasked with presenting a positive image of the USSR through cultural
activities, apparently independent of the party but closely monitored by VOKS and often accused of
spying on Western interests (see a declassified working paper from the CIA, released internally also in
1957, detailing the activities of these organizations from an American perspective). These societies
organized exhibitions, screened films (an innovative key aspect of Soviet propaganda) and sponsored
artists' travels. The exhibitions were conceived in a generic format, and according to Shapovalov, they
were “small, portable, prefabricated”.

The photographic images were packed into folders, including diagrams of exhibition that could be
easily set up anywhere, requiring minimum expertise. The topics of the imagery portrayed the carefully
staged everyday of the Soviet Union, with a focus on domestic life (and anyway the sociological
concept of the “everyday” as independent from the different spheres of human action proposed by
earlier Western sociologists like Weber, was central to the intellectual arm of socialism and the politics
of the Cold War, at the opposite end of American Fordism and functionalism), but also other subtly
politicized aspects of the socialist experiment: the role of science and architecture or the abstract and
limited emancipation of Soviet feminism. But the narrative mechanism deployed is everything but
casual, for there's a carefully engineered construction here of a certain type of (hyper)realism – which
existed across the arts in the Soviet Union – counterintuitive to America's doctrine of the epic and the
spectacular. Eventually, this realism was to become the dominant aesthetic of the third world.

There were other aspects of Soviet geopolitics at stake in the race for images, that through
Shapovalov's minimal interventions, highlight the spectacular ambitions of Soviet cultural diplomacy:
An image of the earth from outer space (we have to remember here that at this specific point the race
for images is a chapter in the space race which is a chapter in the arms race) presents an absolute notion
of representation beyond the national and cultural, and identifies what the artist calls “a competition for
universalist representation”. The image of the globe is a global image indeed, therefore it preemptively
encompasses all (possible) imaginaries, past and present, and is not merely a snapshot at Soviet history
but the totality of human history. If we agree with Arendt, that the earth is the very essence of the
human condition, the project of socialism aimed at transcending the human condition, often at the
expense of destroying it, or at least, radically changing it. The price of this change of course was
terrifying, and millions died in the labor camps as a result of this experiment.

Texts from earlier Cosmism, promoting trans-humanism and the colonization of other planets, were
particularly popular among early Soviet intellectuals and scientists. Russian artists Pavel Pepperstein
and Arseny Zhilaev, who have worked – albeit in very different styles – most extensively on the
archives of Cosmism, would tell us not only about the irrational, messianic and somewhat
Christological aspect of the movement, but also about its deep impact in early Soviet science and
subsequently literature. The relationship between collapsing metaphysical systems (in the Western
world) and political apocalypses has been a feature of modern history rather than a bug, and it appears
to be the only constant indeed – the end of this Roman republic has dragged for too long. Nevertheless,
these moments of catastrophe have always come hand in hand with rigid historical structures that as
they implode internally, are protected by a hard shell on the outside. The fate of Soviet propaganda is
well known, as is the end of the socialist experiment, but its images have lived lives of their own.

In one of the most interesting speculative reconstructions of archival material by Shapovalov, “I Left
My Heart in Rhodesia” (2017), the artist reenacts an exhibition for which there's no documentary
evidence that it ever took place: In 1958 a letter arrived in Moscow from the Photographic Association
of Northern Rhodesia, requesting that a Soviet photographic exhibition sent to their country. The
installation follows the exhibition proposal and reenacts what never took place. The photographs are
selected from the network of archives spread throughout Europe, and – according to the exhibition text
– they render the Soviet Union a multinational, resource-rich universe, in a vast multi-ethnic
iconography from which Russians are absent, presenting thus the Soviet space as identical with
political space in general. While this is a preconditioned imaginary of the Soviet reality, it points at the
conditioning of reality in general at the heart of VOKS' work and that codified reality as a reaction to
propaganda rather than propaganda as a reaction to the political.

This type of material – multiethnic, heavily industrialized, reliant on science and progress and
ultimately infallible, wasn't the exclusive domain of photographic exhibitions; it dominated the Soviet
media landscape for half a century and was massively consumed, whether it was out of curiosity or
political affinity. As someone growing up in Latin America, I myself was vastly exposed to the
magazine Sputnik, published in many languages, a kind of Soviet Reader's Digest, to which my parents
were subscribed (the magazines had subscription cards anyone could use, addressed to embassies and
friendship societies), and I read avidly as a child during the years of Perestroika. In Latin America,
during this period (and earlier), it was commonplace among intellectuals to adopt non-align views and
to have studied in the Soviet Union, and Russian language courses were inexpensive and widely
available, through cultural institutes or partnerships at state universities. From childhood memories: A
film screening every week at the Russian cultural center before which the International was sung.
The Cold War was in Latin America not merely a cultural influence, but a political battlefield that split
factions along the lines of Socialist Internationalism and American Neoliberalism, often in combination
with armed conflict. To my knowledge, this was also the case in the Middle East, where non-aligned
countries such as Iraq and Syria were largely shaped in their interactions with the West by Soviet
interests; visual culture of the time, in particular the spread of socialist realism and its adaptation to
local tropes (most “official” artists of the generation, endorsed by the regimes, had been trained in the
Soviet Union), was the consequence of continued cultural exchange of the kind promoted by VOKS.
The last photographic exhibitions of that kind documented by Shapovalov took place in Bogota as late
as the end of the 1980s, organized by the Central Bank in the country's largest library, and were well
attended by groups of school students, who toured the historical downtown in groups, visiting cultural
landmarks.

I still remember the first book I stole from my father's bookshelves as a teenager: Oparin's “The Origin
of Life” on biochemical evolution and the chemical history of stars, published in Spanish in 1955 by
official publisher “Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga” (Editions in Foreign Languages), available at almost no
cost. But when the Soviet Union collapsed it happened rather fast, and in the transition from a global
power with unlimited reach (only comparable to the United States) to a newly formed national state,
many of these official ties to associations and networks of organizations were abandoned overnight,
leaving behind countless archives. This is where Shapovalov's practice intervenes the material (rather
than the images themselves), after having found intact exhibition folders in former Soviet associations
in Milan (where he lives and works), comprising the tripartite structure we described at the beginning:
exhibition strategies, photographic media and films. In the absence of a power structure to hold them,
these archives are neither active, nor dead. They lie in a suspended state.

The fate of Soviet archives has been peculiar not only because of their sheer quantity but also because
of their disposable nature. The Archivo LaFuente, a private collection in Cantabria (Spain) spanning
modern and contemporary art from Europe, Latin America and the former USSR, for example,
organized a major photography exhibition “The Soviet Century” (2018), based on some 800 holdings,
photographs but also prints, books, postcards and the like, among them works by superstars such as
Rodchenko or El Lissitzky. Their holdings have been drawn from many private collections, archives
and individuals, with a careful process of selection. The image archives of the former friendship
societies are nevertheless, of a different kind – largely unused, massive waste destined to be discarded,
in the same way that my father threw away decades of Sputnik magazines during a house move after
the paper began to rot in a basement storage and it became impractical to keep dozens of boxes of
unread magazines without an audience – only a few survived among my high school books.

Shapovalov insists on what gave a title to his Moscow talk: Archives that were never meant to be kept.
In their suspended state, these archives ceased being historical images alone, and through becoming
latent – they might suddenly awake again anytime, unexpectedly – they have transformed into cultural
objects in the same way that the video tapes that can no longer be played because the technology to do
so fell out of use, are kept in museums under glass vitrines as if dealing with precious archaeological
artefacts. The material, according to the artists, is exiled from history and exists outside of historical
time. This only proves the correlation between images and the concreteness of lived time, so that
systems of images can only become activated (and therefore meaningful semantically) in a correlation
between structures of power, temporal continuity and cultural meaning, no matter how remote the
referent. The irrelevance of the subject matter in an operational semantics leads us to think more
seriously about the exhaustion of photographic images caused by the implosion of historical images.

As the Greek photographer John Stathatos argues: “Of course, despite their fluidity, photographs are as
vulnerable to exhaustion as any other visual medium – more so, perhaps, given the seemingly ceaseless
flood of photographic images we are deluged by daily. This is another source of anguish to purveyors
of traditional political imagery, since, compelled as they are to address the widest possible audience,
they must necessarily adopt the most direct visual vocabulary available; inevitably, such images rapidly
degenerate into cliché, draining them of meaning and defeating their very purpose.” It is then possible
for images to collapse as units, once they are removed from cycles of visual significance. Shapovalov
returns to the idea of the exhibition as a fundamental unit, arguing for example that “Image
Diplomacy” in its three iterations (Moscow, Bolzano and Istanbul, of which I have seen two) has
expanded and acquired different layers of latency, as 'an archive that wants to travel, seeking the gaze'.

Before elaborating on the problem of images in the context of image and exhibition systems hereby
presented, it is necessary to clarity that the format of the exhibition as propaganda isn't exclusive to the
USSR and it might have been pioneered by the colonial museum, founded in the course of the 19 th
century. Traveling exhibitions, such as the celebrated American expressionism show that traveled to
Moscow and Paris (and profoundly influenced the artistic circles in Moscow), MOMA's photography
exhibition “The Family of Man” (often referenced by Shapovalov) or traveling exhibitions of classical
archaeology, have been a feature of Western political life, and can be read also in the context of
propaganda. The key difference here is that they cannot be studied retrospectively, in a suspended state
and removed from their systems of power and meaning, as if dissecting a frog in a laboratory, for the
creature is still very much alive. From the Soviet experiment, we learn about the ambivalence and
inconsistency of the historical image.

Because these exhibitions at the heart of “Image Diplomacy” were not dealing with artifacts (also
photography could be understood in this manner, given a certain context, for example archaeological
photography or the work of Man Ray) but with easily reproducible, and disposable material, they have
pioneered a new chapter in the anti-historical history of photographic images, as it is evident in
Shapovalov's central film “Image Diplomacy” (2017, screened in Istanbul separately from the AVTO
exhibition, at SALT Beyoglu), where the artistic intervention goes from the purely speculative
reconstruction into reconfiguration of the historical space; collecting documentary and photographic
material scattered in dormant archives from different parts of Europe, the film attempts to poke a
window into Soviet Cold War exhibition diplomacy, and breaks away from the predictive cycle of
socialist realism into contingency – it is not possible to completely pin down images to a framework,
insofar as they have been torn off from their own meaning-systems. They're unpredictable.

Baudrillard writes in one of his most famous essays, something extremely poignant about the
relationship of images to referents: “I would like to conjure up the perversity of the relation between
the image and its referent, the supposed real; the virtual and irreversible confusion of the sphere of
images and the sphere of reality whose nature we are less and less able to grasp. […] Above all, it is the
reference principle of images that must be doubted, this strategy by means of which they always appear
to refer to a real world, to real objects, and to reproduce something which is logically and
chronologically anterior to themselves. None of this is true. As simulacra, images precede the real to
the extent that they invert the casual and logical order of the real and its reproduction. 1” Here we reach
an unavoidable conclusion from the context and experiential time of “Image Diplomacy”: Images are
more referred to each other, in an infinite closed loop, than they refer to the real world with its
Cartesian versions of correlation between mind and object, and this is what an image-system is.

What questions do these images ask when they look at us? This a question proposed by Shapovalov
(throughout the project and in his talk), that considers not only the suspended state of the imagery but
the potential of these statecraft images, to construct concrete political situations, rather than opinions
alone. The archival state of abeyance, turns out to be, at least from the perspective of the artist (what
exactly does an artist do here and who is he speaking to?) an advantage, since it is possible to examine
image systems outside of historical continuity, and therefore, free from agency. How often are we able
to confront memory free from representation and the history of ideas? It is not only that the answer is
never, but also that it is not possible. There is an alienated relationship between image and observer,
and only in the reenactment of the image as a monad in the fundamental unit of the exhibition, we gain
access to truth-making. The countless folders of photographs and exhibition instructions have even less
access to us than we have to them.

To the extent that the reenactment is always the reenactment of something that never existed before –
to reenact something for the first time, how is this to be done? – the archive itself becomes not only a
concrete object, scattered folders with photographs, but a medium in itself, except that the feedback
loop is broken once we've removed the causality of history, and we are left with nothing in concrete but
more and more, torn off images: “For us the medium, the image medium, has imposed itself between
the real and the imaginary, upsetting the balance between the two, with a kind of fatality which has its
own logic. I call this a fatal process in the sense that there is a definitive immanence of the image,
without any possible transcendent meaning, without any possible dialectic of history -- fatal also in the
sense not merely of an exponential, linear unfolding of images and messages but of an exponential
enfolding of the medium around itself. The fatality lies in this endless enwrapping of images (literally:
without end, without destination) which leaves images no other destiny than images.2”
1 Jean Baudrillard, “The Evil Demon of Images”, Power Institute Publications No. 3, 2017, pp. 13
2 Ibid. 23