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EMIGRANT BILLIARD CLUB: from Kherson to Berlin
June 16, 2005 in Berlin (Germany) the installation “Emigrant Billiard Club” by Kherson artists Elena Afanasyeva and Maksym Afanasyev was opened in frame of the international exhibition “The Free Will”. A total of 381 artists from twenty-seven countries submitted concepts detailing their ideas and visions of the theme “free will”, and how they proposed to implement them in the context of “twenty years of Glasnost” and the bunker located under arena Berlin. Competent jury selected the best 30 visual art-projects and 16 performances for this project.
The exhibition is the first ever held at the site – a former cold-war bunker in what was once the “death strip” surrounding the Berlin Wall between Kreuzberg (formerly West Berlin) and Treptow (formerly East Berlin ). Mikhail Gorbachev was the guest of honor and opened the exhibition.
The installation “Emigrant Billiard Club” are based on that fact that for a long time emigrants were the “icon” of free will for Soviet citizens. Many things that were forbidden during Soviet times are permitted and widely popular today. On the other hand, many things that people perceived as a revelation in the past merely sound trite and banal today…
The installation is a large, home-made ridiculously crude table with a hammer and sickle on the surface that has been transformed into a billiard table. The billiard balls bear the portraits of Soviet emigrants. Two billiard cues are also made of rough-hewn wood. The viewers job is to try to get the ball into “foreign-country” holes and thus gain membership in the “Emigrant Billiard Club”.
The exhibition will take place till the end of August 2005.
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