ABC-Lynching

"As an artist, I do believe in political engagement and the voices of the repressed as a poetics. In the ABC-lynching video, I was basically working with linguistic and, therefore, social aspects. I observed and watched hundreds of found footage from Occupy Pedofilyai, a nationwide organization, where diverse young pro-activists from more than 50 cities, from the whole Russian country and Ukraine, as well as Kazakhstan, catch ‘pedophiles’ and crush them out. Those videos were my only source to research the phenomena of male lynching, or let’s say, bullying, approved by the majority of Russians. 

In 2013, 78% of the respondents in Russia believed that gays and lesbians were sick, immoral or psychologically disturbed people. Following the trend, many people earned money using the tag ‘homophobia’, because it is obviously profitable. One of the lucky businessmen is Maxim Martsinkevich, or ‘Tesak’ (which means ‘big knife’ in Russian), a famous Neo-Nazi activist who founded Occupy Pedofilyai, which claims to catch pedophiles. However, in reality, the social activists lure and torture LGBT people. In 2012-2013, the popularity of Occupy Pedofilyai was amazing, and by reading the comments below the videos, uploaded on YouTube, RuTube and Vkontakte (the Russian Facebook), it's possible to understand that the regular audience in Russia basically accepts this attitude.

One of the goals of my work was to bring the phenomena of Occupy Pedofilyai to the Russian contemporary art scene, because Tesak’s figure was kind of a skinhead, an extreme activist who represented the right wing's discourse.

However, few people know that, despite the actions carried out by Occupy Pedofilyai, none of the activists were brought to trial. After my video, the only discussion was an interview with Russian artist Shyfra Kazhdan on the Russian website colta.ru.

For ABC-lynching, I worked for a long period with the videos, but I couldn’t get a proper form to explore the idea of the bullying language. In order to explore the language and lingual transformations, I listened to the key questions asked by the 'activists' to the victims — I put ‘activist’ in quotation marks because I can barely call these actions activism without any negative connotation. All of them have quite the same working scheme: they ask the victim the same questions and carry out the same aggressive actions on all videos. So, I divided the video into typical questions, and repeated them. Thus, the list of deconstructed questions examines a social relationship in Russia with LGBT, immigrants, rich and poor people."

Maria Kramar in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (July 2015)