KAZAN. INTERPRETATION 

Mixed media. 2017

The residency prompt, “A New Local History,” tasked contemporary artists from Moscow with a paradoxical mission: to arrive in Kazan and “discover” the local identity of the Tatarstan region within a mere ten days. Driven by the art market’s trend of “discovering provincial talents,” a Moscow gallery sponsored the project, seemingly eager to extract cultural capital from a region with its own presidency, language, and distinct history—a territory conquered by Ivan the Terrible yet historically marginalized by the Russian “center.”

The project unfolded in two attempts. In the first, The Center Remained in Moscow, I acted as an “online historian,” directing the entire expedition remotely through Google Search algorithms. Rather than engaging with the city directly, I mapped Kazan through its algorithmic visibility, identifying “popular” locations and points of interest as defined by search ranking systems. In the second, I was deployed to Kazan as a “human drone.” I followed the coordinates generated in the first stage, physically visiting these algorithmic sites and documenting them with a deliberately neutral, mechanical gaze—without emotion, interpretation, or contextualization.

This split methodology mirrored the power dynamics embedded in the residency itself: between the digital gaze of the center and the lived reality of the periphery. What emerged was a performance of extraction—where “local history” is pre-filtered by search engines and then reenacted on the ground as a hollow verification exercise.

To extend the critique, I conducted informal interviews with other participants, revealing the subtle colonial undertones embedded in the premise of the project. Presented as a bureaucratic report, borrowing the visual language of state administration, the installation was ultimately removed following a visit from the main sponsor.