Abstract:

Through examining Uzbekistan-based artist Elena Korovai’s 1932 papier-mache panel “March 8”, this essay investigates how the form, content and material serve as evidence of a socialist and feminine message of progression, modernization, and liberation. This essay situates Korovai’s practice with contemporary artists like Aleksandr Deineka, Oksana Pavlenko, and Mikhail Kurzin on the one hand, and on the other hand with historical and cultural tradition of papier-mache craft and pulp industry in Samarkand and Central Asia broadly. Papier-mache’s versatility, malleability and availability makes the medium capable of imitating or reproducing materiality of sculpture, flat surface, and ornament. In making lacquer panels with papier-mache, Korovai’s choice of material, then, may be situated in the context of Central Asian (or Samarkand) paper craft tradition. what Korovai got out of the mesmerizing shimmer of the paper paste ornament was not a frozen-in-time romanticization of the Oriental tradition, but rather an inspiration from the material level to incorporate paper craft in socialist art making. The process of making March 8 reflected the artist’s experiment to use pulp as a national material to make socialist content and generate a spatial effect.