One Cannot Be Too Careful, Brighton, Berlin, St. Petersburg
Exhibition on censorship and self-censorship: Brighton, UK (2017); Berlin and the feminist version “Eve’s Ribs”, St. Petersburg (2018). Curated by Maxim Evstropov.
About
2017 — Exhibition about censorship and self-censorship One Cannot Be Too Careful (Brighton, UK).
2018 — Exhibition about censorship and self-censorship One Cannot Be Too Careful (Berlin, Germany; feminist version “Eve’s Ribs”, St. Petersburg, Russia).
Curated / framed by Maxim Evstropov, the project gathers artistic responses to prohibition, caution, and the everyday ethics of speaking under pressure — including the delegated performance Tsar’s Shit presented in Brighton.
Further reading: Maxim Evstropov on SYG.MA — “A prohibition/offense is so human…”.
Tsar’s Shit, Ir:c Solza, 2019
Delegated Performance, Culinary Re-enactment, Site-Specific Action
Staged as a delegated performance and site-specific culinary intervention, Tsar’s Shit explores the intersection of political subversion, bodily abjection, and institutional critique. Conceived by the artist and executed in absentia via a precise set of instructions (re-enactment), the performance involved feeding the audience a specially prepared dish symbolizing the toxic, consumed, and internalized authority of autocratic power.
By removing the artist’s physical body and delegating the act of feeding to local participants within an informal, underground space in Brighton, the project interrogated how imperial propaganda and state violence are somatically ingested, processed, and normalized by the collective body.
Event Documentation
One Cannot Be Too Careful (Berlin, Germany), 2018
One Cannot Be Too Careful (feminist version “Eve’s Ribs”, St. Petersburg, Russia), 2018
The Whole Project:
Interview with Max Stropov
The curatorial team for the exhibition "As If Nothing Happens" currently consists of four people: Anya PS (Brighton), Alexey Tolstov (Minsk), Daria Apakhonchich, and myself, Max Evstropov (St. Petersburg). Curating is not our primary activity: Anya is a movement performer, Alexey is an artist and writer, and Daria and I are also primarily artists and performers, representatives of the {Rodina} group. In short, we are artists who, due to various circumstances, are not content with focusing solely on our own work and who want to create large, collective projects independent of governments and major art institutions. Our team came together, one might say, thanks to the work of the {Rodina} group.