Suite (212)

Born into a Jewish family in Moscow in 1971, Yevgeniy Fiks moved to New York in 1994. His conceptual art reacts to amnesia about the USSR in the post-Soviet space, resisting nostalgia and commodification in favour of recovering repressed histories, especially those of LGBT and Jewish people; he also looks at the relationship with the USSR and the USA before and during the Cold War, and at histories of the American left, suppressed since the McCarthy witch-hunts. In this Suite (212) Extra, Juliet talks to Yevgeniy about his exhibition Mother Tongue at London’s Pushkin House from March-May 2019, dealing with the underground slang spoken by Russian gay men in the 1970s and 80s, and his wider practice. SELECTED REFERENCES PROJECTS BY YEVGENIY FIKS (https://yevgeniyfiks.com/) Song of Russia (2005-7) Lenin for Your Library (2007) Monitoring Lenin’s Sales on Amazon.com (2007) Communist Party USA (2007) The Communist Guide to New York City (2008) American Cold War Veterans’ Association (2009) A Gift to Birobidzhan