Art, rather than politics, will be a means by which panelists and a student aim to mend the rift between Russia and America this weekend.
“Illustrating Russia: Comic Art, Graphic Narratives & Book Illustration” will be a series of presentations by artists hoping to shed light on the recent phenomenon of graphic narratives in Russia. The event will be held in Royce Hall on Friday evening and will be free and open to the public.
The three panelists, Julia Alekseyeva, Victoria Lomasko and Vladimir Zimakov, are all artists who have worked closely with Russian history and culture, said Sasha Razor, the event’s organizer and a doctoral student in the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures. In recent years, the public discourse on Russian-American relations has been dominated by allegations of corrupt individuals and political collusion – the simplified picture of Russia is noticeably absent of average Russian people, Razor said. “Illustrating Russia,” she said, aims to change current perceptions of Russia’s culture being an afterthought to its politics with graphic narratives through the nuanced perspectives of both Russian and Russian-American artists.
“(‘Illustrating Russia’) captures different types of genres of graphic narrative,” Razor said. “Different techniques that (the artists) are using, and also the subject matter itself – the areas of human experience that (they) choose to focus on, from graphic memoirs to contemporary events, political strife to literature.”
Razor said she organized “Illustrating Russia” with the support of her department to present the graphic narrative genre as an evolving platform for giving Russian people a voice. Graphic narratives, which utilize the interaction between text and image to tell a story, have been in a constant state of change alongside Russia, Razor said. Since his election in 2012, Vladimir Putin and his controversial administration has spurred Russian artists to utilize graphic narrative as a tool for resistance, she said.
For example, Lomasko co-curated “Feminist Pencil,” an exhibition in Moscow that displayed the works of several feminist artists. Razor said the exhibition, which highlighted many ongoing women’s issues, contributed to feminism becoming a topic of discourse in Russia, aiding Lomasko’s goal of chronicling the stories of underrepresented people and protests in Russia. Instead of looking to academic scholars to discuss the constantly evolving landscape of Russian graphic narratives at the event, Razor said it was better to look to the artists themselves.
In addition to depicting the lives of Russian people, Razor said she wants the event to resonate with Russians living in America, especially those reside in Los Angeles. The two other panelists, Zimakov and Alekseyeva, are Russian-American artists whose families migrated to the United States, which makes their perspective of Russia more relatable to American audiences, Razor said.
Zimakov, an illustrator and professor of art and design at Lasell College, has created book covers and illustrations for the works of several Russian and American authors, including Nikolai Gogol and Margaret Atwood. He said he specializes in printing techniques such as linocut and silkscreen for their bold-yet-minimalistic appearances; he had been drawn to such techniques as a child after seeing the works of several famous Russian engravers and printmakers.
Having lived in the United States since he was twelve, Zimakov said he has encountered negative subliminal perceptions of Russia. For instance, whenever Zimakov mentioned he was from Russia while growing up, some immediate responses would involve Russia’s supposedly freezing weather, subtly denoting a negative connotation, as the first thought associated with the country was its harsh weather. By discussing his work and illustrations with Russian authors, Zimakov said he aims to spark interest in Russia as a producer of many literary and artistic works, instead of merely a “cold country.”
“I think that the students that come to hear the lecture will see that Russian culture has so much to offer,” Zimakov said. “With the artwork, with the authors (that I work with), they would become more curious about it and go beyond just politics.”
One of the purposes of “Illustrating Russia” is to address how much of Russia’s negative reputation often revolves around its government and politicians, but not its people, Razor said. Alekseyeva, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, debuted her first graphic novel “Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution” in 2017, which tells the story of her great-grandmother Lola, who lived through the entire term of the Soviet Union.
“Soviet Daughter” is a retelling of Lola’s memoirs of her life in the Soviet Union, designed to be more palatable for a general audience. The original memoirs were written with very casual language, so adapting them into a graphic novel was more effective for helping readers visualize life in the Soviet Union, Alekseyeva said. Deciding the novel’s artistic style was another long process of trial and error for her, she said, but Alekseyeva ultimately selected a monochromatic palette with a less realistic style in order to evoke the sense of nostalgia one feels when viewing old black-and-white photographs, which often contain small imperfections and lack the definition of modern photographs.
“If you present things in a certain way, you’re able to connect to an audience that wouldn’t normally find something as meaningful,” Alekseyeva said.
Through “Illustrating Russia,” Razor said she wants audiences to see Russia not as a nefarious political entity, but as a diverse country with real people and real stories. Additionally, she hopes audiences will learn from the experiences of people who have had to endure and resist Putin’s presidency.
“We get to see how minorities live, prostitutes, people in penal colonies and how protest camps look,” Razor said. “(The event) really shows you how it is for the common people in Russia and who else lives there and what stays in the margins.”