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Dora García’s work Red Love, which draws from the life and work of Alexandra Kollontai, is on view at Tensta konsthall until September 23, 2018. For the academic year 2017–18, Konstfack’s CuratorLab and Tensta konsthall engaged in a collaborative research project on the life and work of Kollontai. The research project acted as a springboard for García’s new work, using reading sessions as a major tool. Each of the four reading sessions hosted guests who brought suggested readings and made presentations, including: the writer Agneta Pleijel; the medical doctor, writer, and activist Shabane Barot; artist Petra Bauer with researcher and critic Rebecka Thor; political philosopher Michael Hardt; writer and philosopher Oxana Timofeeva from the collective Chto Delat?; Aaron Schuster; García herself; and the initiators, i.e., the head of CuratorLab Joanna Warsza, researcher Michele Masucci, and myself, the director of Tensta konsthall.

Among Kollontai’s most read texts are “The New Woman” (1913), “Make Way for Winged Eros” (1923), and “The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman” (1926), as well as the short novels Vasilisa Malygina (1923) and Red Love (1927). The latter is a psychological study of sexual relations in the early Soviet period, which has given García’s exhibition its title. Vasilisa Malygina was published in English together with the short stories “Three Generations” and “Sisters” under the title Love of Worker Bees, which was widely read in the West throughout the 1960s and ’70s. “Make Way for Winged Eros” was written as a response to many letters she received from young workers with questions on how to conduct life under socialism. She describes how historically different material conditions have determined and regulated love and sexual relations in society. While “The New Woman” deals with the psychological aspects of an emancipated working woman who belongs to no one but herself and yet is a member of community based on trust and solidarity, “The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman” is an account of her own experience. The three stories in Love of Worker Bees, written in unadorned prose with proletarian readers in mind, give examples of the tensions between old ideals and new sexual lifestyles after the Revolution, as well as the power of solidarity between women.