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irma_klo at action of solidarity with the artist Oleg Mavromatti
We, a group of friends, and attic and Art With Affinity, we want
support the artist, Oleg Mavromatti, who was in severe situation.
Now he is in Bulgaria and awaits extradition to Russia, where he was
criminal case in connection with the artistic action "Do not believe
eyes" in 2000. In Russia, he was charged under Article 282 of the Penal Code in
inciting ethnic and religious hatred. Now Oleg has expired Russian passport
and ends Bulgarian residence permit. At home it is just waiting for
prison. We ask the Consul General Bulgaria, Mr. Kazakov show
humanity and not to go in the wake of the Russian authorities. We ask that you provide
Oleg Mavromatti political Asylum and thereby free it from political
persecution. The artist must be free! Freedom Mavromatti!
ruffe at post 
“Russian prison means death for people like me,” said Oleg Mavromatti, a filmmaker and performance artist.
Mavromatti, 45, fled to Bulgaria in 2000 after the Russian Orthodox Church complained about a movie he was shooting in which he is crucified. He was accused of violating a criminal code that includes inciting religious hatred and denigrating the church, an offense punishable by as much as five years in prison.
Last month, the Russian consulate in Sofia refused to renew Mavromatti’s passport.
“They gave me two options,” he said in a telephone interview from his apartment in Sofia. “Either I voluntarily fly to Moscow and stand trial or Interpol comes after me.”
Mavromatti’s case highlights what human-rights activists see as a return to Soviet-style censorship, with a resurgent Russian Orthodox Church playing a central role and the Kremlin supporting it.
Last month, four artworks by Avdei Ter-Oganian were temporarily withheld by Russian authorities from an exhibition at the Louvre Museum in Paris because, a Culture Ministry official said, they incited religious hatred. This summer, two prominent art curators were found guilty of the same crime because several works in the “Forbidden Art” exhibition they organized in 2007 were considered offensive, including a depiction of a Christ figure with a Mickey Mouse head.
“Some people may find a particular work of art offensive or disagreeable, however this cannot be the basis for restricting the right to freedom of expression,” said Denis Krivosheev, a researcher on Russia at Amnesty International in London.
Recession, Iraq War
Mavromatti has spent the past decade in Sofia and New York where he regularly showed at Exit Art , a nonprofit exhibition space. In his performance-art pieces, his subjects have included the financial crisis and the war in Iraq.
After Russian authorities released Ter-Oganian’s work, the Prague-based artist announced he wouldn’t participate in the Louvre show unless Mavromatti’s passport is renewed.
In New York, Mavromatti’s backers include U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand , Exit Art director Jeanette Ingberman, art dealer Ronald Feldman and Mark Rothko ’s son Christopher Rothko. All of them have written letters to immigration officials in Bulgaria and to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in support of Mavromatti’s application for the humanitarian-refugee status he would need to enter another country.
After learning on Sept. 11 that Mavromatti’s passport wasn’t renewed, Ingberman called Feldman, who had campaigned on behalf of Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.
“It’s a dangerous sign that democracy in Russia is struggling,” Feldman said. He and Ingberman buttonholed Gillibrand at a reception and told the senator about Mavromatti’s plight.
“Time is running out,” said Feldman. “We want to forestall his deportation. We don’t want to fight this battle in Russia.”
To contact the reporter of this story: Katya Kazakina in New York at kkazakina@bloomberg.net .
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net .
victor_korb at Свободу Мавроматти! 
Insider "Salt" in the world of radical mutants of Art - Dmitry Pimenov - spoke with
«Man differs from the animal's ability to urinate in the fire."
Photo: BioNihil
- You're a month ago, urinated on the eternal flame at the monument to emigrants from the countries of the Warsaw bloc. As far as I know, it was a protest forgiving prosecution your colleagues, artist Oleg Mavromati, the Russian authorities?
- Except for the basic meaning of all my shares - a personal challenge to the power, I would still demonstrate the discovery of revolutionary theory. Man differs from the animal the ability to urinate in the fire. Superman is different from the human ability to urinate into everlasting fire.
- Well, you're not the first thought to exercise such read his superhuman start. And before you artists, used to openly urinated on the shrine. Where is, in fact, a revolution?
- you can not revolutionary cause. You'll also feel the taste, sex and harmony. You will die at the end of life. But whenever you talk about love, justice, beauty - you will lie dirty and shameless. If you do not make the Revolution. Spinoza deduced Theorem morality. I have my own theorem: "The only form of contact with the government - a conflict. " Proof: The power - evil! "Evil is not extinguished with forgiveness, as trying to cheat us iudeohristanskie trends. But criminals, based on Theorem does not angeloeony they fascinates souls their spirit of violence and sakraliziruyut institution of property.
- Let's go back to angeloeonov and fascinates shower to a more mundane matter. How much and what you drank before the action with the eternal flame, to help so lavishly? Because you were even able to to extinguish it!
- A bottle of beer "Sternburg.
- One?
- Well, actually, I hate beer. So, by the way, the first time in ten years to drink.
- I know that basically you're working solo, alone. As this is combined with a project of the revolution? Revolution because it collectively.
- A revolutionary theory gradually refuses to service the wider population. Jacobins cry to all people. Marx narrows its audience to the working class. Lenin appeals to the party professional revolutionaries or to a "conscious minority". A Brazilian theorist of urban guerrilla warfare Carlos Marigella altogether satisfied "Single-fighters." You can add that I do not work alone. Here in the action «Who will deliver me from this body of democracy» to me had a friend who nailed me nailed to the flag of the United Nations in Ifa-Galerie, himself I could not do it. For the cross suffering need outside help (laughs) . And we did it in guerilla warfare, without coordination with the gallery. They called police, and we then another around the corner looking at drove debris.
- This is what fashion is now so - grovel? Mavromati, Herzliya, now even you are. Directly as jogging in the Soviet Union.
- [Philosopher Walter] Benjamin belongs to the aphorism: "Be happy - then do not be afraid, getting to know yourself themselves. Self-crucifixion - the best way to get acquainted with each other. Variant of madness, perhaps. Only referring to the madness, as his mirror, the revolutionaries will be able to understand their own desires. Modern society denies the right of a mad frenzy, declaring it "a mistake of sociality", trying to hide the revolutionary potential madness. It may be folly to say more about reality than painful rationalism. In the words of Thomas Munzer, "to keep your feet firmly stepped on the ground, should head to flee across the sky. " The French Revolution freed from the oppression of the bourgeois relations of the feudal system. Russian revolution tried to free proletariat from bourgeois oppression. The Coming Revolution, named Armageddon, free madness.
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«Poetry could save the Soviet project. When I kissed the bust of Petőfi, I just wanted to express it. "
Photo: BioNihil
- You say, the Russian revolution is only trying to liberate the proletariat. That is, the October draft was so-so and failed?
- carefully examine the actual situation will determine who betrayed the revolution the legacy of Lenin and Stalin and who had fallen into opportunism. They were and are and, unfortunately, will be revisionists. In the Soviet Union, they abolished the dictatorship of the proletariat and restored capitalism, but at first (until late 19
- I look at you and think: on the background of the community of Russian artists you look outsider mutant. They are still far more to such freethinking.
- Yes, I have a mutant. Your Russian artists - they are huckster and burgers that, for example, clearly manifested in the history of the boycott and neboykotom Exhibition in the Louvre - philistine fuss! Boredom! Life is short - philistinism forever, and only those mutants, as I Mavromati, for example, can do something to oppose this world, but they themselves fasten diamonds aces on his back. So I did share DNA Pipe: collecting DNA samples from people for their transfer to terrorists (to use a conspiratorial view), I smoked the blood and nails through the tube, and now Oleg [Mavromati], like Panikovsky, a man without a passport and it would not prevent someone else DNA.
redkhmer at Open Letter to Patriarch Cyril 
