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Leonid Tishkov
(Russia)
Uman, 2016
Installation,
mixed media
The concept of “displacement”, introduced into psychoanalysis by
Freud, is a tendency of the human mind to forget traumatic experiences which,
however, is not entirely possible to achieve. Displacement tends to return in a
changed form such as recurring nightmares and horrors. Therefore, in order to
outlive the grief a person has to make a certain effort and its first phase is
“processing” which implies acceptance of your memory and recognition of the
fact that a certain traumatic event has really taken place. Lately the theory
of psychoanalysis has been enriched with a new discovery. As it turns out, the
traumas, especially the ones that have not been overcome, can be inherited by
your descendants who may start experiencing them as their own. Marianne Hirsch
calls this phenomenon post-memory. Many of Leonid Tishkov’s works, in which he
addresses his family history and his parents’ tragic biography, corroborate
this idea. In the early days of the war, in August 1941, the artist’s father
Alexander Ivanovich Tishkov found himself in the Uman encirclement, where the
Sixth, the Twelfth, and the Twenty-sixth armies of the South and the South-West
Fronts were surrounded by the Germans. As a prisoner-of-war he spent a long
time in the camp at Uman and later was moved to Stalag 326 in the district of
Stukenbrock where he was liberated by the American army. In December 1945, he
returned to his home in the Urals having spent time in the NKVD camp Borisenko
at Frankfurt-on-Oder where he had undergone “filtration”. He never talked about
his war experiences, probably because he had signed a secrecy paper, or maybe
because he had simply “displaced” those events from his memory. His son became
obsessed with the task of reconstructing those events through “processing”.
Leonid Tishkov managed to find in the internet the report of his father’s
interrogation by the NKVD. The report shed much light on the circumstances of
his imprisonment. Leonid also collected scanty but scaring evidence left by the
survivors of the Uman encirclement. Finally he came across a German photograph
with the following inscription: “Negative № 1.13/22. Uman. Ukraine. Russia.
Date: 14 August 1941. 50,000 Russian military have been collected in Uman.”
Tishkov studied the picture closely trying to find his father among the
prisoners, but he failed and printed out an enlarged photograph on paper. His
archive also contains a photograph of his father in military uniform made
shortly before the war, and a black button from that uniform which he
discovered in his mother’s lifetime collection of buttons. That button became a
fetish for Tishkov and finally he made a bronze monument out of it. Having
identified himself with his father he saw in his life the fate of millions of
similar lives reflecting the fate of his generation. His father’s generation
had been immortalized in Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Fate of Man, one of the best
works of war prose. That was how it occurred to Tishkov that the name “Uman”
suggests associations with the word “human” and all that is associated with
humans and humanity in most European languages.
Viktor
Misiano
From
brochure TIME AND SENSES. Trauma, memory, oblivion, knowledge. Project THE HUMAN CONDITION SESSION III
Exhibition
“The Haunted House” December, 1, 2017 – January, 28, 201 in
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