A digital interpretation of the artworks Project for the modification of a monument from the Communist era (1999, computer-assisted drawing, 11*8,5″, private collection), and Untitled Installation (Statue Dangling from a Crane) (2002, communist monument, crane) by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid through the medium of Augmented Reality.

“What Is to be Done with Monumental Propaganda?” This question was posed by the Russian expatriate artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid in a call for proposals in 1992, when, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, communist monuments suddenly became symbols of a past that was to be overwritten.

The title, Project for the modification of a monument from the Communist era, is not suggestive of any particular monument. The one that was chosen to carry out the project with, however, couldn’t have been more iconic: a sculptural representation of Lenin, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution and the first head of the Soviet state. It was presumably a relatively easy task to source a toppled bronze statue of a soviet ex-leader twenty years ago. Infusing it with new meaning as an act of recontextualization, on the other hand, remains a conceptual artistic intervention.

Instead of exercising memory erasure, Komar and Melamid’s approach keeps history in limbo. The suspended statue depicts an ambiguous situation where it is indeterminable whether the moment refers to its erection or to its removal. In any case, it puts the former revolutionary’s image out of function and impedes propagandistic intention.

Through the use of Augmented Reality, both the literal suspension–the hanging of the statue–and the figurative suspense–the very ambiguity of the situation–is transposed into the digital realm. Though invisible to the naked eye, this iconoclastic act of sculpture displacement becomes perceptible while using a hand-held mobile device.

The AR interpretation of Komar and Melamid’s artwork is featured in the digital re-modelling of Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, an exhibition that took place in ZKM | Karlsruhe in 2002 and is being used as a case study within the framework of Beyond Matter. Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality (2019-23), an international, collaborative, practice-based research project.

Under the umbrella of this project, the exhibition Matter, Non-Matter, Anti-Matter. Past Exhibitions as Digital Experiences presents the digital models of two past exhibitions, wherein, among many other things, AR Statue Dangling from a Crane is on view at the Tirana Art Lab from June 26, 2022 until August 28, 2022.