If you're into men's accessories, one of the first things that will strike you while visiting the Estonian Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition (located in Palazzo Malipiero, San Samuele Square, Venice) is a display containing a pair of soft leather gloves and a green fedora hat.
Your perceptions will immediately change, though, when you discover these are not simple accessories with an aesthetic value, but pieces charged with symbolic meanings. The leather gloves and the hat are indeed props, objects that serve as proof in a wider criminal case, the main subject of the pavilion.
Estonian artist Jaanus Samma's "Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman's Tale" revolves around the story of a war hero and family man, kolkhoz (collective farm) chairman Juhan Ojaste (1921-1990).
Accused of homosexual acts, Ojaste - better known as The Chairman - was expelled in 1964 from the Communist Party. He was subjected to a trial and sentenced to one and a half year in a labor camp.
Having lost his family, job, social status and dignity he eventually moved to Tartu where he only had access to low-status jobs. In Tartu he became part of the local gay community where he was known for his outrageous behaviour. He was killed in 1990 probably by a Russian soldier and male prostitute.
The accessories in the display case are therefore charged with specific meanings - the leather gloves mark the beginning of the end; the hat is a trademark of the Chairman's new identity in Tartu.
The court case started indeed when a friend of the Chairman, a restaurant waiter, accused his younger lover of stealing his gloves. This triggered another drama since the lover, fed and angered, went to the police and accused the Chairman and the waiter of homosexual activity.
After the trial, the Chairman moved to Tartu, where he lived an active gay life, cruising in the parks and public toilers: in the later 1960s, due to his trademark green fedora, he could easily be spotted lurking around town.
The display case also contains a wedding ring, hinting at the Chairman's status, a tube of vaseline, and money referring to a key deposition by a witness who claimed he had been paid 3.50 roubles by the Chairman for anal penetration during a one-off encounter.
Another display features a series of torture instruments, and the cabinet is surrounded by disturbing and provocative videos shot in collaboration with screenwriter and director Marko Raat that document three episodes in the life of the Chairman, "Public Toilet", "3.50 Rubles" and "The Trial".
While the videos and the audio installation inside an opera balcony (a reference to the decadent aesthetics of opera) in an alcove of the palazzo represent the arty part of Samma's project, the archival materials from Soviet Estonia in another section of the exhibition provide a sort of less arty and more tangible documentation of the Chairman's existence and of his work.
In one picture the Chairman is shown talking to two milkers, then he is portrayed after his arrest, while a page of a newspaper recounts his murder.
Visitors who want to know more about his life can also stop in the small library, where they can read the excerpts from his court file. On a wall, a timeline of the events in the life of the Chairman chronicles instead his achievements in the war and as Chairman of the kolkhoz in the Elva district, documenting his trial from January to July 1966.
The pavilion is a perfect example of how the archaeological approach to archival research (and Samma did an in-depth research as he seems to know a lot about the Chairman: in his timeline there is even written that he imported in 1986 a VCR player and started organising porn nights...) is actually producing interesting installations. Yet this is not the main point of this project.
Samma highlights how Ojaste was indeed murdered a year before Estonia regained independence and homosexuality was decriminalised, and this final point reshifts his story from personal into the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
The Chairman's criminal case - told from a microhistorical perspective - becomes therefore a wider and global story of LGBT rights and human right violation in the past and the present, a denunciation of all forms of discrimination (The Chairman's face is erased in one picture, hinting at the fact that he could be anybody), reminding us that art is not just a game of power and money played by wealthy people, but it is a vehicle that can be used as a way to provoke and prompt critical thinking, embrace co-existence, and acknowledge and respect differences.
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