The artist group Blue Noses consists of two artists, both coming from Russia’s province: Vyacheslav Mizin, performer and architect from Novosibirsk and Alexander Shaburov, artist and writer from the Sverdlovsk Region (Yekaterinburg). They came together for collective work at the very end of the Yeltsin era, in 1999. Blue Noses is speaking on behalf of the largest part of Russian society: the “common people” who are everywhere yet virtually invisible. Russian and Soviet culture never sympathised with the masses in reality, only on ideological level; for politics, the community of people was a kind of revolutionary mass, a crowd that could be controlled and influenced. During the times of Perestroika this part of the society was named “the aggressively quiet majority”. Yet, this common people are with which Blue Noses decided to associate themselves. They became the voice of this social class and expressed its point of view on the world and reality. They portray and play those “little men” in their videos and photos with a lot of humour.
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Lenin Turning in his Grave - From the series "Little People"
One of those emblematic works is the video installation Little People: looking into the simple cardboard boxes, one can see their life. Little people hold mass-meetings, fight each other, serve as cannon-fodder and fill mass graves with corpses.
