Social Critique of the Soviet Regime in Ivars Poikāns' works from 1987 till 1990: A Disability Aesthetics Perspective

The Latvian artist Ivars Poikāns was one of the artists who used these approaches in his practice. Besides grotesque and dysmorphic body representations, he also depicted disability-related subjects, such as blindness and mental illnesses. Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov have explained that by generating universal cultural codes, Soviet ideology manufactured a community of 'Soviet people' with shared norms, values and limitations resulting from a deliberate political strategy, inspiring social reforms. 9 At the same time, this method also aroused fear and restrictive administrative measures concerning 'other' social groups. During the Olympics in Moscow in 1980, when a Western journalist inquired whether the Soviet Union would participate in the Paralympic games, the Soviet representative answered, 'There are no invalids in the USSR!'10 Several disability studies scholars have pointed out that, throughout the Soviet Union, people with cognitive or physical disabilities were stigmatised, hidden from the public and thus made invisible.11 Nevertheless, a particular representation of people with disabilities was created to differentiate the proper Soviet citizen from the Other. Disabled figures in visual art appeared not only as metaphors of suffering and objects of state care, which were approved thematic representations in socialist realism, but also as symbols of protest against the inequity of society and power.