Politics of Rotation is a durational performance in which artist Polina Kanis  works as a pole dancer. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the very possibility of artistic practice was put on hold for Kanis. Her search for a personal and artistic response led her to a strip club, marking the start of a long-term performance that culminated in the project Politics of Rotation. The performance spans a year of rigorous training, preparing Kanis’s body to enter the closed, strictly regulated system of the strip club. After passing a casting, where conformity to the idealized female body under the male gaze is scrutinized — Kanis began working as a pole dancer in the club.

 

Сonfronted daily with rigid yet ambiguous rules, power hierarchies, repressive gender policies, and the regulation of women’s bodies, Kanis investigates the ideological, social, and personal transformations of the female body in Russia under the oppressive normalization of war. Through her work, the artist reconstructs the club’s unwritten but universally understood rules, guidelines that govern every aspect of a strip club employee’s existence. Politics of Rotation is not only an exploration of the strip club as a microcosm of authoritarian society but also a study of movement itself. The rotation around the pole becomes both a metaphor for authoritarian regimes and a means to transcend them.

 

The project includes photographs taken by Kanis during her three-month stint in the strip club, reimagined rules of conduct for strippers, and a re-enactment of dance movements performed in the club’s interior. Key to the project are not only the precision and continuity of the stripper’s movements but also the moments of failure and imperfection that disrupt the idealized dance. As Kanis rotates around the pole, twisting and bending, she momentarily disrupts the vertical hierarchy, suggesting the potential for rupture — of the body, of the world, and with it, the possibility of change.