Jameel Art Centre will be showcasing the work of Russian artist Taus Makhacheva in her first retrospective exhibition in West Asia, bringing together works created over the past thirteen years, including a new site-specific commission.
Titled ‘A Space of Celebration’, the exhibition brings together works from 2009 to the present, making visible the vast ensemble of practitioners Makhacheva has collaborated with. Charivari (2019) looks at the visual culture of the Caucasus through its circuses, bringing about spectacle, wonder and fantasies of the future.
Here, the artist revisits and retells complex histories through a cast of characters and objects, including her alter ego, Super Taus. Makhacheva humorous and contextually grounded installations involve flawed gymnastics training arenas, Soviet-era circuses, wedding halls and suspended mountain ranges. In her works, facts meld with everyday myths, troubling the notion of cultural authenticity and making way for the fantastical. Makhacheva layers light-hearted tales with the uncanny and the unexpected, and occasionally, with incommensurable tragedy.
Much of Taus Makhacheva’s stories emerge out of the North Caucasus and the Caspian Sea, specifically the Republic of Dagestan. Over the course of her career, she has looked at the making and remaking of history and heritage, as the region was undergoing its post-Soviet recomposition.
Makhacheva has recently exhibited in at the Biennial of Difficult Heritage, Volgograd (2021); Yokohama Triennale (2020); Lahore Biennale (2020); Kaunas Biennial (2019); Lyon Biennale (2019); Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018). Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the P. S. Gamzatova Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts, Makhachkala; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco, among others.
Taus Makhacheva: A Space of Celebration will be on show from 23 February, 2022 to 14 August, 2022 at Jameel Arts Centre.