Conference | Prigov’s Distant Planets: A Presentation of the Project

Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov (1940–2007) was one of the central figures of the Moscow conceptualism. Working at the intersection of poetry (visual and sound), prose, collage, drawing, performances, and installations, he was able to literally give voice to this art movement.

Prigov belongs to the generation of artists who entered the arena of Soviet culture in the second half of the 1960s – 10 years after the start of the radical social and cultural changes associated with Khrushchev’s so-called Thaw. It was in the late 60s — early 70s when unofficial art finally took shape and developed its own system of rules and modes of behaviour that were radically different from the mechanisms of the established Soviet culture. For the first time in many years, the developments in Soviet art – in its unofficial form – coincided with the developments in global art sharing its cultural mentality and style. This period is also associated with the emergence of conceptualist ideas in Soviet culture. Two principal factors shaped the new generation of artists: the realisation that all styles and trends in the field of culture operate as languages of description, and the understanding that high art can utilise all forms and configurations of the everyday language as its raw material.

The project Prigov’s Distant Planets was realised by the Prigov Foundation in 2021. Since 2011, the Foundation has set itself a goal to document and showcase Dmitri A. Prigov’s estate. In 2019 it actively began engaging Prigov’s legacy in a dynamic development by means of co-creation and dialogue with other artists and the audience. Prigov himself shifted between different genres of culture. His own artistic strategy included collaboration with other “cultural workers”.

The presentation of Prigov’s Distant Planets will start with short videos in the style of Prigov’s famous Addresses to Citizens, which he made for mobile phones in the early 2000s, followed by the videos of several international artists who originally participated in the Prigov’s Distant Planets project. These artists were invited to use their imagination to travel to far-away planets orbiting other stars, where Prigov might have been reborn as a resident of a very different world, and attempt visualising the new products of his unearthly creativity. What kind of extraterrestrial is Prigov? Is he a poet, a writer, an artist, a philosopher, or a scientist? What do his works look like and what do his writings sound like? Are they accessible to our perception and understanding? Can we catch a glimpse of Prigov in these works — the Prigov we used to know on Earth?

The first presentation of the project took place at the Yeltsin Centre in Yekaterinburg in May 2021 where it was realised thanks to the efforts and engagement of the Art Director of the Yeltsin Centre Art Gallery Ilya Shipilovskikh and his team, most of who had to leave Russia and now live in exile in different countries. At that point in time, it would have been difficult to imagine that the ideas and issues addressed in these works would take on such significance in the light of the current situation in Europe. Freedom, independence and peaceful cocreation are ideals and values that underlie Prigov’s oeuvre and shape the activities of the Prigov Foundation.