Calvert22’s third exhibition will be Re-Imagining October, curated by Mark Nash,
writer and curator, and Isaac Julien, artist and film-maker. The exhibition will feature
work by both emerging and established artists from Russia and Eastern Europe, all
of whom include the moving image in their artistic practice.

As the title implies, Re-Imagining October will explore the ways artists have re-
imaged and re-imagined a shared history of being part of the Soviet Union. This
relationship may be direct, as in the case of Dmitry Gutov, a participant in the
Lifshitz Institute group, who seeks to explore the continued relevance of Marxist
aesthetics today, or Vadim Zakharov whose photographic works such as Red
Square behind Black Square echoes the work of the historic Soviet avant-garde in
its formal composition. Re-Imagining October will demonstrate that the relationship
to this past can also be much more indirect, as in the video installations of Gluklya
and Tsaplya’s Factory of Found Clothing projects, which draw on traditions of
cinema and theatre which can be traced back to Sergei Eisenstein.

Re-Imagining October will include films by artists who visited the former Soviet
Union: Abderrahmane Sissako’s October reflects on the experience of African
students in Moscow in the 1980s whilst Derek Jarman’s Imagining October explores
connections between Soviet and Thatcherite homophobia on either side of the
Iron Curtain. The exhibition will also feature Almagul Menlibayeva's Exodus
from Unconditional Love and an element from Kristina Norman's After-War
installation, both shown at this year’s Venice Biennale.

Mark Nash was a co-curator of Documenta 11, (2002) and also curated
Experiments With Truth at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia in 2005;
Pere Portabella, at MOMA New York in 2007; and The View from Elsewhere (with
Kathryn Weir) at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney 2009. His book
of essays Screen Theory Culture was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. He
is Professor and Head of Department, Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of
Art, London.

Isaac Julien is an artist and film-maker. Julien is represented in museum and private
collections throughout the world, including Tate, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, the
Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Brandhorst Museum. His
curatorial credits include Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty in 2008 at the Serpentine
Gallery, London, which subsequently travelled to Kunsthalle Zürich and Kunsthalle
Wien. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 and was winner of the
PERFORMA Award in 2008.