Nadezhda Gribkova publishes “Out of Nowhere: Emptiness and Aesthetic Feeling in the Works of Collective Actions”
Nadia Gribkova publishes "Out of Nowhere: Emptiness and Aesthetic Feeling in the Works of Collective Actions" in Athanor vol. 39!
An article-length version of Gribkova's Master's thesis, the paper examines the early works of Soviet conceptual performance art group Collective Actions, founded in 1976, and focuses on the way the group employed the concept of “emptiness” as a motif throughout its practice.
Collective Actions, the paper argues, takes one of conceptualism's dominant tropes—that of nothingness, dematerialization, boundlessness—and articulates it in a tangible, workable, and localized tension within the formal confines of a work of art.