About
Reading Lenin with Corporations is an artist’s project realized in a format of reading seminar for corporate employees. Based on idea of Yevgeniy Fiks and produced by Yevgeniy in collaboration with Olga Kopenkina, and Alexandra Lerman, the seminar aimed to bring together artists and corporate employees to discuss V.I. Lenin’s text Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism at the intersection of contemporary politics, art and culture. The readers group included the employees from major corporate establishments ranging from investment banks to an art foundation: Linda Park, a project manager for a corporate funded art foundation, Alex Girshman, an analyst for one of the major investment banks, Kaan Nazli, a political adviser for a Wall Street consulting firm, Raymond Nadeua, a free-lance marketing strategist and writer, and Ali Hossain, a TV channel’s director. The seminar was held at PS 122 Gallery in New York City on the weekly basis in September-October, 2008. Several artists and cultural practitioners were invited to moderate seminar’s sessions, such as Gregory Sholette, Anton Kozlov, Stephanie Rothenberg, and Karen Hakobyan (two people requested to be unidentified). Each session focused on a chapter from Lenin’s book (the seminar used a copy published by International Publishers, New York), which was discussed in the context of the modern philosophical and political debates on Imperialism.
Background
In 2006, Yevgeniy Fiks sent copies of V.I. Lenin’s book Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism to one hundred global corporations as a donation to their corporate libraries. The letters of rejection or acceptance of this gift were later published by Ante Projects as a part of project Lenin for Your Library?
A departure for project Reading Lenin with Corporations was the fact that several corporate libraries did accept Yevgeniy Fiks’ donation of Lenin’s book, and therefore, their employees became its actual or potential readers. Building on this assumption, Yevgeniy, curator Olga Kopenkina and producer Alexandra Lerman, organized a series of reading sessions for corporate employees to discuss Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Lenin and global economic crisis
The agenda of seminar’s organizers was a genuine attempt to understand the current state of Imperialism following up Lenin’s account of this phenomenon. The seminar was supposed to discuss the implications and limitations of Lenin’s book, and more broadly, the effectiveness of Leninist analysis of Imperialism today.
But as the project continued, the focus of the discussions had shifted towards the global economy, which in September 2008 fell off a cliff – a fact that made Lenin’s text more relevant than ever since book’s release in 1917. The reading was mostly focused on Lenin’s criticism of Imperialism and its harrowing consequences so blatantly revealed by the current economic crisis.
Although reading sessions were closed for general public, they were recorded and showed at PS 122 Gallery in October 2008.
“Reading Lenin with Corporations” continues to function as an active archive accessed through this website that is to be updated with more data and reflections on global economy as it is read along the lines of Lenin’s book. We don’t however promote an apocalyptic vision. Instead, we would like to debunk the assumption that capitalism as the only possible system and stimulate the discussion about what can be done as an alternative.
Reading Lenin with Corporation group
Send us your suggestions and comments:
readinglenin@gmail.com
