Vyacheslav Akhunov: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 060 (100 Notes-100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen-100 Gedanken: Documenta (13))

During the Soviet regime, the artist, author, and philosopher Vyacheslav Akhunov hid his notebooks in stables and barns, in murals and matchboxes. For the artist, the notebook is an autonomous artistic medium. Between 1973 and 2000, he archived more than three thousand of his ironic, visionary drawings and collages on paper for two hundred projects. In this notebook, one finds excerpts from works dated between 1974 and 1982. Leeza Ahmady's introduction to Akhunov's drawings and collages, which the artist refers to as "art-facts," interprets and reveals these as sensitive forebodings of the fall of the socialist era and as a contemporary document conceived to outlast the present. Vyacheslav Akhunov was born in 1948 in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. Leeza Ahmady is a freelance curator living in New York; she is the director of the New York Asian Contemporary Art Week and Agent of dOCUMENTA (13).… (more)