One has to understand that the threat of being invaded is always in the air, in fact, invasions have a strange habit to reactivate and show its dark side. The next wave of invasion occurred in August 2008 with the aggression of the Russian Federation on Georgia, which inevitably has an impact on our political and cultural contexts.

Strengthening collaboration among individuals and institutions was a sort of consequence, just to mention transborder cooperation between KSAK (Center for Contemporary Art from Chisinau, R. Moldova and VECTOR from Iasi, Romania and joint project “RO-MD/Moldova in Two Scenarios” presented at the PERIFERIC Biennial can be interpreted as a response the invasion in Caucasus.

In 2008, as part of this collaboration Ghenadie Popescu carried the installation “Mămăligă” on wheels from one capital (Chisinau, Republic of Moldova) to another (Iasi, Romania), bridging two cities and regions divided by a border. Perhaps his trip was an effort to mark the sense of separation after Romania became an EU member in 2004, the other is to interact with Romanian cultural context, which suddenly became inaccessible.

In the last decade the representatives of independent culture from the Republic of Moldova went from having limited access to international funds provided by ECF (European Cultural Foundation), Pro Helvetia Foundation and few EU states in the frame of Eastern Alliance, to strictly limited or no budget/DIY type of activities. The situation didn’t improve after the political regime was changed from the oligarchic type of governance led by Democratic coalition of Vlad Plahotniuc (PD) and Vlad Filat (PLDM) to a center right party of Maya Sandu (PAS) oriented toward EU integration. Under the new political leadership a set of Cultural Policy papers are still pending approval at the Parliament and the Status of Artist is not yet defined.

The annexation of the Crimean peninsula by Russian military forces in 2014 evolved into direct military aggression from 24 February 2022 that resulted in the seizures of Eastern territories of Ukraine by the Russian Federation and military confrontation. The current invasia is ongoing and the Republic of Moldova as a state and society is deeply impacted by the consequences of war.

Internally the situation doesn’t look brighter. Twenty years after the project “InvAsia”, the recognition of the independent cultural sector and a number of NGOs practicing and advocating for contemporary art and socially engaged art practices as its role in the society remain uncertain. Most funding continues to come from sources other than local or national. There are no programs to support the cultural civil society in the long term with spaces and opportunities to carry out activities on a permanent basis. This is the case of several collectives and initiatives including and not limited to Teatrul Spalatorie, KSAK Center for Contemporary art, Center for Cultural Projects Arta Azi, etc.

The performances of Teatrul Spalatorie voiced a strong criticism of EU integration processes and its bureaucratic system correlated with the phenomenon of corruption, as a result the collective chose exile after they lost the space for rehearsal and presentation. Currently their plays are hosted and supported by various independent initiatives from Romania and Germany. During the Political Theatre Week at the Replika Educational Theater Center, organized by Macaz Teatru Coop (November 20 – 26, 2019), Teatrul-Spalatorie presented two new plays. Presented in Bucharest, the “Gospel according to Mary” and “Requiem for Europe '' have in common the sabotage of "official" discourses by deconstructing them. Some recent plays and the performances of Teatrul - Spalatorie, developed in Germany, includes: "Symphony of Progress" – a play about exploitation and inequality, made in collaboration with the theater Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) in Berlin, presented in 2022; and “Playing on Nerves. A Punk Dream” premiered in 2023 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin.

The status of artist in the Republic of Moldova is uncertain and its practice is unstable, similar to the status of independent NGOs. Many of visual artists, practicing contemporary art media, emerged from the trainings, seminars and art labs offered by the SCCA before 2000 and after (Soros Center for Contemporary art (1986-1989), later KSAK Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau established in 2000) for example, the CarbonART summer camp, where participants could experiment with new media. In many ways, this model is typical for Moldovan contemporary art, where the artist acquires material from different sources, be it the KSAK Center or residencies abroad.

In these circumstances the local political elite and Ministry of Culture‘s bureaucrats didn’t  perceive the independent sector as a full-fledged actor in the cultural context and provides strictly limited to NO support at all to its representatives, simply ignoring them. Recently established Coalition of the Independent Cultural Sector from the Republic of Moldova - an umbrella organization that unites the representatives of the independent cultural scene in order to consolidate it and which aims to improve the legislation in the field of culture through advocacy activities got some external support to develop its agenda only recently, and only as a response to the war in Ukraine and eminent threats to the security and the existence of Moldova state.

The war and current invasion continues to demonstrate the failure of a cultural system based on state ideology, where culture becomes the instrument of implementing and replicating such a model. In these circumstances the access to public funds and other resources provided/distributed by the Moldovan authorities (MC) is ridiculous and the status of independent NGOs is becoming more precarious and unstable.

Who would think that twenty years after our cultural context will be challenged with a new series of invasions? Unfortunately during 2021 the Mongolian artist Hujagochir Mijidochir left us and therefore will not be able to reinstall his complex installation “Invasion against Invasion”, which would have been a powerful and necessary statement against the current series of invasions.

January 2024

The establishment of a new order

During one of my recent trips to Mongolia I realized profoundly the importance of a Buddhist ritual—the Tsam ceremony. The ceremony, which is in fact a mystic performance, is a form of sacred dancing during which the horrifying forces are unleashed; a number of Lamaist Buddhist deities participate in this horrible fairy action. In those scenes, which we could observe and which are considered demonic manifestations emerging from morbid spirits, only an Asian can recognize their true meaning—the defensive, combative spirit of the beneficial divine power and the exteriorization of an inner world, which the Asian will have to confront upon death and which are shown to him so that he can identify them at that moment of intimacy. This is a scene of initiation including scenes of violence in which Mahakala (The Great Time), the most venerated guardian gods, the great destroyer who, after summoning a nefarious dark spirit into the sacrificial statuette, stabs it with a dagger (kila), which is a liberating gesture, an act of violence that breaks the bonds which have imprisoned the spirit in an inferior incarnation, freeing the spectator from faith in an illusory personality. Shown to the public only during complex religious ceremonies, which usually take place at the beginning of a new cycle (the spring) in front of a temple on a spot marked and used exclusively for these rare occasions, the offering is destroyed in order to annihilate the negative accumulations and initiate a new cosmic order. This experience introduces and explains to us the hidden energies contained in the phenomenon of invasion in its extroverted formula of terror and destruction, which has pulverized empires and dynasties. This statement also has a direct reference to the InvAsia project, which took place in Moldova at Orheiul Vechi in 2001. As an individual experience of an artist and curator, the event was a provocation pursuing a new order in the ideological options of the curatorial policy and, implicitly, of the artistic environment in Moldova. As this thesis was materialized upon the completion of the project, it meant for me a vertiginous mental projection which made me realize instantly that prophecies exist and made me feel equally frightened and perplexed in the face of this statement.

But in order to elaborate on the things mentioned above, I would like to present some details of the context and evolution of InvAsia.

Re-Orientation

The psycho-geographic component of historical invasions consisted of a large and complex background saturated with the imprints of cultural memory; the latter, however, represented only a part of the driving force behind our intention. In order to make the reason for which I started the project more clear, it would be useful to analyze the evolution of the social-political and cultural environment of Moldova in the last decade, as well as the processes that had led to the changes preceded by the “opening” and “democratization” of society after 1989. It was also due to those changes that the artistic environment was “nourished” by the spontaneous appearance of the Center for Contemporary Art in 1996 (called SCCA back then), which was the baby of the Soros Foundations network—a specific and familiar phenomenon in the countries invaded by this act of philanthropy. The appearance of the Center spurred the artistic environment and introduced an “exotic” strand in it by the events of contemporary art planted into the cultural-artistic environment of Moldova. The SCCA projects were mainly selecting/inviting representatives of the Western culture and “esthetics”, carrying out a natural process of recovering and reconnecting to the current context of international contemporary art. This process was led with passion by the Center’s ideologists, who were brimming with energy and self-assertion. At the same time, local consumers were swallowing Western brands and products. As the invasion of Western products, now as well as then, has been overwhelming in terms of spread, from information (news, advertising, international media), to culture (films, music, literature, etc.) to consumer products, ending in the possession and “Westernization” of the local identity and self-respect by the effects of globalization, an absolute capitulation and, hence, victory of the West over the East has occurred.

The projects organized then by SCCA brought together a group of visual artists, some of whom had a distinct personality and who were extremely nimble and energetic, while others seemed to be lacking in orientation and theoretical means. I could mention some successful projects of that period, such as the performance festival “Gioconda’s Smile” (curator Octavian Esanu), the project “Kinovari Imitatsia” (curators L.Dragneva and L.Macari), and also yearly projects such as the “CarbonArt” summer camps, the “Videomarathon” video festival; while some events lacked coherence and integrity, others were outright confusing, especially the SCCA annual exhibitions. The Center was undergoing continuous transformations, which resulted in the migration of a large number of personalities, which meant an openness to the ideology of Western institutions, also by the Center’s participation at many international events; this brought the Center out of anonymity and put it on the imaginary map and into the international circuit.

We should say that the Center’s activity was generously nourished by funds constantly disbursed to the Center by the mother-foundation in 1996-2000, which explains the energy with which some events were organized. But this support ran dry suddenly after a shrink in the financial policies in the East European countries of the Soros network; this led to a sort of apathy in SCCA’s activity. The implementation of projects became another problem for curators, and in this difficult situation they had to look for alternative funding sources.

Under these circumstances the InvAsia project, as a counter-discourse was meant as a re-orientation from complex Western influences towards others—from the Far East and Central Asia—which exist virtually and only have to be activated by energy vectors. These vectors contain enormous energies, power fields and influences that can be re-activated only at the cost of evoking terrifying and catastrophic events for the Western civilization and order—just remember the horrible events provoked by nomad invasions which changed the direction of the world. Thus, the current invasion was used as an excuse to import a vital component that would complement and spur (by its complexity and force) the evolution of the artistic environment.

I should also mention that an entire range of artists, known and integrated into the international circuit, from Japan, China, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong-Kong as well as from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, Iraq are a powerful argument that supports our thesis by the force and specific nature of their art, the complex values of the philosophy and culture they represent, but also by the means and problematics that are indigestible for the Western logic.

The Asian vector was also a natural impulse for everything that meant the spirituality, philosophy and difference of Asian culture. Our discourse was to be an invasion carried out exclusively by cultural means brought along by participants from Central Asia and the Far East, as well as from East European countries marked by Mongolian Tartar invasions.

The invaders from Shehr-al-Djedid (The Old City)

I structured the project so as to create two distinct groups of people: on the one hand, participants from countries with nomad features, real invaders with unmistakable personalities who had come from Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Siberia/Russia, and on the other hand there were those from countries with sedentary features, which had suffered the consequences of nomad invasions: Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Yugoslavia.

On the site of the historic, 14th century settlement Shehr-al-Djedid of the Golden Horde, a tent camp was set up following the principles of a nomad camp; for a week the camp hosted a cultural invasion. That was a time in which we worked and lived together in a nomad atmosphere, sitting by the fire night after night, telling endless tales nourished by the smell of steppe plants, by the taste of food cooked by the Mongolian and Kazakh participants, being smoked through by the smoke of the fire and stained by the red Butuceni wine, Butuceni being a community which had survived the Mongolian Tartar invasion.

The events of September 11 happened synchronously with the InvAsia action, which took place between 15-23 September 2001, having a strong impact and marking the entire group of “invaders” from the Orheiul Vechi camp. The projects presented at the end of the event had a specific mark and connotation, which we could have hardly anticipated.

The “invaders” also contributed substantially to supporting the Asian vector. The front line of this discourse saw the “POL POT” action by the Kazakh artist Yerbossyn Maldibekov, who continued here in Moldova the string of brutal objects and installations, importing his unmistakable Asian spirit of the absurd and controversial visual culture, expressed by the people buried alive, thus obtaining a macabre cocktail made of human heads sticking above the ground, and severed horse hoofs, all this forming a terrifying composition.

The reference to the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot is not accidental, since he was engaged in atrocities during the genocide of 1976-79, which are comparable to current methods used in Islamic countries of the former socialist world: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. Fake democratic and liberal governments use intimidation methods and repressions as well as censorship against intellectuals and the opposition, thus annihilating any forms of resistance.

A different discourse was made by Hujagochir Mijidochir (Mongolia), who tried to hijack the idea of invasion by making an anti-invasion with his complex installation “Invasion against Invasion”, made of bow arrows suspended above the remnants of a Tartar bath situated next to the Raut river, signifying a multiplication of vectors by which he simulated a hijacking of the connotations of an invasion. This image was fully filled by the smoke that wafted like fog above the vestige, impregnating the atmosphere of the place with a smell specific to the steppe, obtained from burning dried horse excrements—a technique used in Mongolia for more prosaic purposes such as cooking and mellowing down the tent house-“ger” (“yurt” in Russian).

The Mongolian artist also played the role of double, or shadow, for Igor Shcherbina’s (Moldova) project, who speculated his transformation into “The Mongolian and I” (Transl. from Russian: МОНГОЛ-и-Я, which was also the title of his project). All the phases of this action were reported by the artist in a slide-show story. The performance of the two artists continued after the closure of the camp by Hujagochir’s gesture, when he covered with a marker Shcherbina’s entire body with Mongolian signs and texts, thus turning him into a carrier of mobile graffiti. The action continued in Chisinau in a conference room at the closure of the project, where the Mongolian artist drew again on Shcherbina’s clothes and skin, but this time the drawing was accompanied by texts read out by the Moldovan artist, which included random conceptual references to the term Mongolia.

The event was also dominated visually by Veacheslav Mizin and Evghenii Ivanov’s video and photo staged projects, who presented in a form specific to the Novosibirsk (Russia) group the true face of “conqueror enemies” of the “Siberian Mujaheddins”—a grotesque mask which resonated, I thought, with the cliché manifestations common to the European (Moldova included) environment. The “Talibans” and “Osama” faces are subjects that have informed the international media after the September attacks.

The discourse of Alexandru Antik (Romania) continued in the same key. He presented a miniature mock-up of his project by using an old Tartar object so well embedded in the Romanian expression “to give the skin to the priest.” This was a reminiscence of the remembrance ritual in the house of a dead person by sticking a banner out the window with the skin of a horse, but Antik substituted the skin by cut-outs of InvAsia participants’ photo images.

The Hungarian artist Szabolcs Kisspal used the tricolor for his project called “Rever”. The colors of the banner were inverted by a video camera into their negatives. Kisspal had traveled all over the world showing the “negative” facets of many countries, among which there had been USA, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, etc.

Two artists, Piotr Wyrzikovsky (Poland) and Nenad Andric (Serbia) organized a mute, passive and static performance, which was part of the scientific conference at the National History Museum in Chisinau. In this way the artists objected to the dry presentations by scholars and other theoreticians. The Polish artist managed to make an exceptional presentation—a night projection onto the vertical cliffs at Orheiul Vechi of a video film in which a Makarov gun was being charged and discharged. The sound and visual effect were very well placed in the landscape, through their dry sound in the night.

Other invasions

Shortly after the InvAsia action finished, the InvAsia exhibition took place in December, whose objective was to exhibit the participants’ projects as part of a permanent exhibition at the Archeology Museum in Chisinau. Thus, the entire documentation of the project—video and photo works, installations, mock-ups—were exhibited along with archeological pieces from the Mongolian Tartar invasion of the 13th-14th centuries. Some of those pieces were exhibited as part of the permanent exhibition, while others were placed there for the first time specially for the artistic event. Thus a merge of times and cultures took place during the cultural invasion at Shehr al Djedid, whose importance and significance have yet to be assessed.

Some time later the InvAsia catalogue was published. It included aspects of the project as well as presentations made during the scientific conference. The publication didn’t only report on the event, but also showed a clear and coherent vision on the artistic environment in Moldova and the international context in which the present cultural invasion took place. The entire series of events ended with the 18-minute documentary Invasia, made by Stefan Rusu in his capacity as a video artist. The film was a visual essay rather than just a documentary on the project; it was about invasions in culture, history, politics and the socio-political context of Moldova.

The InvAsia continued in September 2002 in Mongolia, where an international project called “Intersection” took place. The project featured artists from Moldova, Hungary, Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Mongolia. The project was about a reconstruction of Mongolian history, culture and philosophy, as well as a cultural reply offered by the project’s curator, Hujagochir Mijidochir, president of the New Art Association. I took part in this action as co-curator, by selecting a part of the participants, but also as a visual artist with my video piece “Cold Mind, Clean Hands and Hot Heart”, dedicated to Suhe Bator and Choi Balsan, and with the Invasia documentary. The films were projected at night onto the walls of the Buddhist monastery Choijin Lamma in Ulaanbaatar. This was an action with exorcising connotations, as it presented the repressions and atrocities suffered by the Buddhist monastic community at the hands of those two Mongolian leaders during the formation of the new political elite and creation of a satellite state nicknamed as a 16th republic of soviet union.

The InvAsia project and film were widely publicized. In 2002 alone they were presented in Istanbul/Turkey at the “Black Sea Travel Agency” ArtCenter, at the mobile international workshop “Non-Silk Way- Asian Extreme” in Almaty/Kazakhstan, at the international project “Intersection” in Ulaanbaatar/Mongolia, at a video festival “Dreamcatcer” in Kiev/Ukraine, at the VI-th edition of “Videomaraton” festival, Chisinau, the 2-nd edition of “Cronograf” documentary film festival from Chisinau/Moldova, the international symposium “Synthetic Light” in Cluj/Romania, the Periferic conference in Iasi/Romania, and it also had to be presented at the “Algambra” film festival in Bishkek/Kyrgyzstan but the film didn’t reach that event yet.

Thus, the invasion continues…

(Initially written for Kurak art & culture magazine, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan)

InvAsia of 15-23 September 2001 was organized by the Center for Contemporary Art [ksa:k], Chisinau, carried out by the independent curator Stefan Rusu, with financial support from OSI Budapest’s Cultural Link Program, Pro Helvetia Foundation and Soros Moldova Foundation (Arts and Culture program).