Alexey Kallima: Dead Man's Suit
There still exist those bizarre geographical areas in the world, where popular brands, against all careful market positioning strategies, undergo mystical sort of transformations and acquire most unexpected meanings. Russia is definitely such a place.
I remember, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hunger for freedom had been somehow temporarily confused with the desire for everything Western-made. McDonalds, which was one of the first multinationals to sense the opportunity, opened its first diet-killer in Moscow in 1990 with an unbelievable now success: people were queuing for hours to chew into their first hamburger of freedom. The Luis Vuitton bags, which I assume are popular elsewhere thanks to their symbolic value of wealth and prosperity, in Russia, due to the terrifying popularity of their counterfacts, became a symbol of really, really bad taste. So it comes as no surprise that Adidas sport outfits in Russian context also do not signify whatever they are supposed to signify in the West. In Russia, they somehow became associated with the mafia.
The works of Chechen-born Alexey Kallima, who fled Grozny in 1994 after the war has started, are widely known for their political references. Kallima is the only artist in the scene working with the theme of Chechen war; recently he won the most prestigious prize in Russian contemporary art for “Chelsey-Terek” – a giant work made in fluorescent paints depicting an imaginary scene from the perfect world where a Chechen soccer team beats the Blues 6-2. Another of his projects is a mural portraying the mythical virgins awaiting the Chechen war martyrs in paradise. However, here I would like to look at his works from a point of view of brand deconstruction.
There is a shadowy side to fashion, as there is to every zone of human activity. Every violence-oriented movement in history has developed its own fashion style: the Godfather-look, the skinheads, countless variations of military outfits, etc. The Russian classic street mafia dress code is a combination of a sport outfit (preferably three-striped), a very short haircut and a gaze that quite plainly conveys an absolute worthlessness of human life. In Kallima’s graphic series “Adidas” we see deadly everyday adventures of characters, who in Russian public consciousness are immediately recognized as “those Chechen bandits”. As in every respectable country, in Russia, in addition to the actual Russian mafia, there are all kinds of national mafia groups, but the one ran by Chechens is the most devilized in the media due to the war campaign. Kallima plays with this negative myth using the contrast between the fashion brand and the reality of its surprising target group.
Kallima’s style draws on the whole history of figurative art, especially the expressionist tradition. His virtuously executed drawings take time to digest, to figure out the details through the seeming mess of charcoal strokes. There is a dead man with a row of ants running into his mouth and out through the eyehole; a man holding a knife to someone’s throat; and another, sharing his smokes: all of them, dead and alive and soon dead, wear Adidas outfits. The human figures are melting into background: the only element that remains clear and definite throughout the whole series are the three stripes. As if the stripes were a constant, a solid shape into which the stand-in characters were placed temporarily, only to die swiftly and be replaced with the next party. The “dead man’s suit” concept, so much loved by the first punk generation, is twisted into a “dying men’s suit”, an outfit that most probably outlives its owner.