Circuses, the Caucasus, and Contemporaneity: Interview with Taus Makhacheva

Through her dynamic multimedia works, Moscow-based Taus Makhacheva, whose family hails from Dagestan in the Northern Caucasus, comments on issues related to identities, homelands, memories, and post-Soviet modernity. For example, with a menu that included edible paper and a lollipop shaped like Vladimir Lenin’s head, her performance Stomach It: Menu and Performance (2017) interrogated the politics of food and the Soviet regime's starvation of Ukraine and the Caucasus from 1932 to ’33. Her acclaimed video Tightrope (2015), of a man walking a tightrope across a deep canyon while holding copies of paintings from the Dagestan Museum of Fine Art, highlighted the precarity of museums and cultural heritage. Both Tightrope and Stomach It were shown at the 2017 Venice Biennale’s international art exhibition, “Viva Arte Viva,” as meditations on how the present is continuously shaped by sins of the past. Among Makhacheva’s more playful pieces is an ASMR spa, presented at the 2017 Liverpool Biennale. There, visitors received facial treatments while a cosmetologist whispered stories of artworks that have disappeared throughout history. Quick Fix, which debuted at the 2019 Armory Show in New York, involved Makhacheva’s alter-ego, Super Taus, engraving blank trophies for lucky visitors who won at a dice game, celebrating their unrecognized accomplishments. Built into all of these works is a sense of empathy and irony, cultivated through the collaborative processes that bring the projects and performative experiences to life. 

• Azerbaijan
• Russia