Comix Influx Blog: More on Nés en URSS

I was talking a bit more to some people about the Nés en URSS exhibition. Unfortunately, by comment consent it was the worst of the
exhibitions (and would have been poor even in a lesser year for exhibitions). This is a shame as I, like many people was looking forward to it, having no prior knowledge of Russian comics. The only person I spoke to who was vaguely enthusiastic about it was Sarah McIntyre, and she lived in Russia for a year or two, and can read Russian.

That said, I did think there were a few interesting artists in the exhibition – in particular, Oleg Tishenkov, Varvara Pomidor and Lena Uzhinova. All of those are worthy, I think, of a little further research. As I say in the report, one of the big problems in my opinion was that the pages shown were, at best, extracts of a longer story, sometimes just randomly selected pages, and at worst, random selections in the wrong order. Maybe Blutch was right about showing comics in galleries.

Oleg Tishenkov did a comic about his memories of growing up in the Sputnik era, which looked pretty interesting. Sarah McIntyre tells me that Oleg Tishenkov is on LiveJournal at http://olegti.livejournal.com/ (apparently LiveJournal originated in Russian, and so Russians are very big into it.)

Varvara Pomidor also did a story about her childhood. She had a more simplistic style, reminiscent of Anke Feuchtenberger, but painted her strip on top of period newspapers and magazines. It was a nice effect, but impossible to follow due to the exhibition not including a contiguous selection of pages. You can see the Feuchtenberger influence in these oubapoian building blocks, and you can see more of Pomidor’s work (with translation) here.

Lena Uzhinova did a full colour strip, in a more traditional euro-alternative style, with an allegorical, violent-fairytale type story. I’m finding it difficult to find many examples of her work, unfortunately, but she has appeared in Stripburger, apparently, so there’s a recommendation.