The Youth House 

Tightrope, Dagestan

Swinging himself up in the air, a tightrope walker carries paintings from one cliff to another up on a high canyon. The dramatic landscape are the highlands of the Caucasus Mountains and the brave and skillful performer of Dagestani origin is Rasul Abakarov, a member of the fifth generation of a family of tightrope walkers, striving to preserve his cultural heritage. In the autonomous region Dagestan, tightrope walking is a tradition. It served as a form of movement between remote mountain villages, and has become a valued local craft. The 61 paintings Abakarov is delicately carrying are all reproductions of works from the collection of the P.S. Gamzatova Dagestan Museum of Fine Art. 

The act of tightrope walking is the skill of maintaining balance, a metaphor underlying Makhacheva’s film. The decolonial thinker and writer Madina Tlostanova has pointed out that the Dagestani artists behind the paintings had already walked a tightrope in their work, negotiating between their training in classical academic tradition, the imperatives of Soviet realistic style, Western influences, and depictions of local subjects. Yet the most poignant mediation the artist addresses is the act of balancing between an inherited tradition and the decision to walk an unusual, risky path, as concerns both the artists and our art institutions. AR