The Russian visual artists Ivan Govorkov and Elena Gubanova, a husband and wife based in Saint Petersburg, have been working and exhibiting together since 1990. From September 13 through December 11 of this year they animated the American Academy with their artwork, as holders of the AAR’s Joseph Brodsky Affiliated Fellowship, now in its tenth year.
Govorkov and Gubanova staged two installations—bordering on live performances—in Academy spaces, in the Bass Garden and Cortile of the McKim Mead & White Building on Saturday, October 2 (“Roman Graffiti”), and in its Cryptoporticus on Thursday, December 2 (“Arachne”). They combined the latter event with an open studio, where the media extended to video.
Particularly notable were Govorkov’s drawings in pen, in pencil (“I set myself the task of not lifting the pencil from the paper while drawing”, explains the artist of “Arachne”), in black string (on walls) and in white string (on ground surfaces).
This fall Govorkov also created white string drawings for the square in front of the church of S. Pietro in Montorio on the Gianicolo, and in the Circus Maximus (below: photo courtesy of the artists).
Make sure to save this date. With the support of the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund (JBMFF), the American Academy in Rome will present a tribute to Joseph Brodsky (1981 Resident) on Friday, March 18, 2011, featuring readings and reminiscences by writers include the Nobel Laureate poet Derek Walcott and the poets Mark Strand (1983 Resident), Adam Zagajewski, Roberto Calasso, and others.
The March 2011 Tribute marks the second event that the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is cosponsoring with the Academy this current year. The evening of Friday, October 1 saw the launch of an anthology of work from the years 2000–8 by Fellows of the Brodsky Fund, who hold residence at either the AAR or the Villa Medici of the Académie de France à Rome.
The location on October 1 was the campus of the Università degli studi di Roma la Sapienza at the Villa Mirafiori—itself a former home of the American Academy in Rome (the School of Fine Arts was located in the Mirafiori from 1907 to 1913). Cohosting the evening with the Brodsky Memorial Fund was the university’s Dipartimento di Studi europei, americani e interculturali; a lively audience of some sixty people attended, including the poet Mary Jo Salter, Alexei Grinbaum, Russian representative of the Brodsky estate, and AAR Affiliated Fellows Ivan Govorkov and Elena Gubanova.
Remarks were delivered in Italian by Maria Sozzani Brodsky and in English by Ann Kjellberg, both of JBMFF, as well as by La Sapienza associate professor Claudia Scandura and (in Russian) by Irina Prokhorova, editor and publisher of New Literary Observer Publishing House in Moscow. Prokhorova announced that her foundation would begin awarding grants for the translation of Russian literature into other languages. Reading poems in Russian were the inaugural Joseph Brodsky Fellow Timur Kibirov, as well as inaugural juror Sergei Gandlevsky, among others.