Cosmologies at Play

For her first solo exhibition in Germany, Polina Osipova transforms the project space Neun Kelche into a playground with Cosmologies at Play. In her installation, Polina brings Chuvash cosmologies into dialogue with Soviet playground typologies, whose visual language drew on space travel as a central symbol of identification and a promise of the Soviet future. In Polina’s playground, too, the slide becomes a rocket, while the playhouse, encircled by a ring, takes on the shape of Saturn and simultaneously recalls Sputnik 2, the spacecraft that carried the dog Laika into space in 1957. A small model of a planetary system sits on the seesaw, while small rockets can be played with in the silver-rimmed sandpit. From the mid-1950s onwards, standardised playground equipment based on state-developed designs was produced on a large scale and distributed across the entire Soviet Union. Across vast geographical distances this created a shared visual vocabulary, some remnants of which survive to this day. Comparable cosmic playground structures could also be found in the GDR and in East Berlin. Some visitors may therefore be reminded of their own childhoods. However, the works created for the project space only appear to quote this historical visual language at first glance. A closer look reveals that Polina has altered their materials and surfaces, dressing, covering and extending the playground structures with textiles, metalwork and photographs from her family archive. This layering, assembling and connecting of different materials and fragments of memory is central to her practice. Chuvash craft techniques, ornaments and inherited stories have long formed an important visual point of reference in her work. Familiar shapes of rockets and planets become objects whose surfaces continuously reveal new stories, weaving collective memory together with the artist’s own. During her youth, Polina was surrounded almost exclusively by Chuvash people, yet many identified themselves as Russian and concealed their Chuvash background. After moving to St Petersburg, she became aware that her Chuvash heritage was met with ignorance or racist stereotypes. Within this colonial Russian framework of thought, she increasingly and deliberately placed her Chuvash heritage at the centre of her artistic practice. The Chuvash are a Turkic-speaking people who predominantly live in the republic named after them, Chuvashia, south of the Volga in Russia. For centuries, they remained in the margins of dominant historical narratives: as participants in uprisings, objects of ethnographic description and victims of repression, particularly from the 1930s onwards. Their pre-Christian cosmology describes a seven-tiered universe in which ancestors live on as stars. This conception was later overlaid by the Soviet narrative of the conquest of space. One of the best-known Chuvash figures is the cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev (1929–2004). In 1962, he travelled into space aboard Vostok 3 as the first Indigenous person ever to do so and later married Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. As a regional figure of identification, Nikolayev also anchored the Soviet conquest of space within a local context. The cosmos was one of the central spaces onto which the Soviet Union projected its future, symbolising technological progress, expansion and a society oriented towards what was yet to come. For the Chuvash, the ancestors are the stars themselves. The cosmos thus becomes a mystical realm in which the Soviet future encounters the world of the ancestors, gradually overlaying it with a new conception of progress and expansion. Polina Osipova reverses this colonial overwriting, turning the playground into a place where childhood, ancestral knowledge and the night sky come together again. Small metal plaques line the opening of the rocket slide and cover the surface of the playhouse like armour, evoking earlier works by the artist. Hovering between jewellery and talisman, metal repeatedly becomes a protective surface in her work. At the same time, the individual plaques recall icons framed by a layer of metal. A riza, also known as an oklad, is a thin, usually silvered or gilded metal covering placed over icons in the Orthodox tradition. It is worked and pierced so that only the face and hands of the depicted figure remain visible. It protects the painting beneath from soot and ageing caused by candles and incense, while also serving to venerate the person represented, such as Christ or a saint. Polina not only takes up the protective function of the riza, but also alters its relationship between metal and image. Some metal plaques become richly worked image surfaces in their own right, while others open up to reveal photographs beneath. In place of saints, female figures repeatedly appear. But who is the woman beneath the cosmonaut’s helmet? A female genealogy runs throughout Polina’s practice, connecting personal family histories with inherited and mythological narratives including those of the so-called Volga Amazons; legendary female warriors whose stories are situated in the Middle Volga region, including present-day Chuvashia. These personal archives now enter the realm of sacred images. In Polina’s universe, the veneration of ancestors once again moves to the foreground, displacing the Orthodox cult of saints. Through this decolonial artistic reversal, Polina places Chuvash culture at the centre and simultaneously questions the dominant position of the Russian Orthodox Church. In doing so, the artist develops further a contemporary version of techniques of ‘reversal’ practiced by her ancestors, who, already in the 18th and 19th centuries — during the period of forced Christianization of the Chuvash — gouged out the eyes of icons or turned them around, recognizing in them keremeti: spirits of the "Russian god" believed capable of causing harm. At the same time, Chuvash people and other population groups were for a long period prohibited from working with metal. The seesaw is the only element in the exhibition made entirely from steel and produced specifically for the exhibition. From the seventeenth century onwards, Chuvash access to iron as well as the practice of blacksmithing and silversmithing were restricted, particularly in order to prevent the production of weapons. Nevertheless, metal remained an important part of Chuvash material culture, for example in jewellery and clothing. At the centre of the seesaw, Osipova arranges a small planetary system. With every movement of the playground structure, its order shifts as well. Polina’s cosmos is therefore in constant motion, and her future stories that may collide within it are still waiting to be told.