Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Appropriated Interiors, Deborah Schneiderman,Anca I. Lasc,Karin Tehve, Editör, Routledge, London/New York , New York, ss.32-50, 2021
In 1982, when Yuri Andropov, then general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, initiated a decree stating any act towards using the living space “against the interests of society” would be counted as anti-Soviet and “any man” doing so would lose their “propiska” and be exiled from Moscow, a group of Moscow unofficial artists, named Moscow Nonconformists, had been preparing their first exhibition for what they called the “APTART Gallery” to take place at the apartment of one of the artists: Nikita Alekseev.
This study concerns the unique case of APTART, underground non-exhibitions held in once-communal rooms of artists and the experience of transforming the communal interiors of Soviet Moscow apartments into a zone of underground artistic existence between 1982 and 1984. The history of the APTART is tied directly to the history of communal apartments.
The uncanny Soviet project of communal apartments was the heart of the great Soviet revolutionary experiment of collective living. Originally initiated with the idea of designing “socialism in one building” and turned into an institution of social control, the communal apartment had been the base for establishing the status quo and a microcosmos where the Soviet communal bodies were shaped between the 1920s and 1980s. The legacy of communal interiors during the Stalinist regime as symbols of the total dissolution of private life into a new public was shattered through the 1960s, when kommunalki were privatized by Khrushchev’s Thaw, offering Soviet people a modicum of privacy in their rooms—under, of course, the state surveillance—while still encouraging a collective way of living in the public sectors of communal apartment complexes. At the end of the 1960s, this modicum of privacy led to an environment with just enough freedom for the emergence of an underground culture of intellectuals. Through the 1970s and 1980s, big Soviet cities witnessed alternative appropriations of once-communal interiors by these underground groups, one of which is the Moscow Nonconformist circle.