In the latest twist in a series of art world scandals that have gone to the heart of Church-State relations, a Russian artist who had been critical of and was criticised by the Russian Orthodox Church has disappeared without a trace.
Anna Mikhalchuk, a 52-year-old feminist poet and artist who works under the name Alchuk left her home in the western Berlin district of Charlottenburg on the afternoon of 21 March and has not been seen since, German police said in a statement. She has lived in Berlin since 2007, when her husband, Mikhail Ryklin, a philosopher, accepted a post at the city's Humboldt University.
Police have combed a lake and gardens near her apartment and turned up no evidence of foul play so far, but Ryklin told The New York Times he feared that she was targeted. "There were religious fanatics who really hated her," said Ryklin. He said it was not easy for German police to imagine that someone could be targeted for their artistic activity, because they think, said Ryklin, "It can't happen here."
Alchuk was tried, and acquitted in 2005, on charges of inciting religious hatred after a contemporary art exhibition called "Caution! Religion" opened at Moscow's Sakharov Museum in 2003. One of the exhibits depicted Jesus on a Coca-Cola advertisement with the words "This is my blood" written in English.
The exhibition was ransacked by activists from a Russian Orthodox church in central Moscow. They damaged or destroyed many of the works. Alchuk's piece was a composition made of medallions that she found when cleaning out her apartment during a move and intended, she said at the time, to explore questions of salvation and religious belief.
The museum's director, Yuri Samodurov, and curator, Lyudmila Vasilovskaya, were convicted and fined, and not those who attacked the institution.
Samodurov said he thinks, however, that Alchuk was most likely the victim of a crime unrelated to art.
"A person left their home and disappeared. This happens," he told Ecumenical News International on 31 March. "Anna Alchuk was acquitted by the court," recalled Samodurov. "The court acknowledged that she was not an organizer of the exhibition."
Still, he said that the situation in the Russian art world is becoming increasingly tense.
"I think the process is moving towards clericalisation," he said. "It's becoming more complicated and frightening to resist," said Samodurov. "You can see what's happening in the sphere of education, although there is some real resistance there and it seems to me that there is some real reaction by society, but in the sphere of art everyone is afraid."
The museum, which survives on grants from the United States and Europe, is named after Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb turned human rights activist. Much of the museum's work is devoted to cataloguing and displaying information about Soviet atrocities and is virtually ignored in Russia.
The museum received unprecedented attention after it turned to art. At a meeting in Moscow of the Church and Society Commission of the Conference of European Churches to address human rights issues in a religious context, Metropolitan Kirill of Kaliningrad and Smolensk, who heads the external affairs section of the Moscow Patriarchate, said the offence against religious beliefs caused by exhibitions such as those at the Sakharov Museum was also an abuse of human rights. "This is blasphemy," said Kirill.
Samodurov said in 2007 that Russia is "turning into an Orthodox Saudi Arabia". He was addressing a new round of criticism against the Sakharov Museum over an exhibition called "Forbidden Art", which displayed works on political and religious themes that had been banned from display in State museums around Russia.
