sashaburenkov

[sashaburenkov]

Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, writer and art director of exhibition projects on topics relating to art and technology based in Moscow but active internationally. Recipient of Russia’s 2017 Innovation Awards as the Curator of the Year for the exhibition “Planned obsolescence” at Miltronic body/digital gym center, in the framework of the parallel program of the V Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, 2016.

☼ Alexander is CEO and creative director of MISFIT, decentralised think tank and consultancy, founded in Moscow, with nodes in London and Tokyo. MISFIT provides an expert platform for practitioners from various professional fields to enable cultivation of interdisciplinary projects, speed up the exchange of ideas and new knowledge production. MISFIT provides trend forecasting and research on visual culture, ecology, geopoetics, biopolitics, new urbanism, technology, scientific breakthroughs, cognitive labor, start-ups, social conflicts, subcultures, leisure, tourism, love, desire, and everything else that constitutes the extended present. Learn more @ www.misfit.pro

Education

Graduated from the St. Petersburg State University with an MA in General linguistics and Greek languages and studied new artistic strategies at the Institute for Contemporary Arts Moscow and has lectured widely in many art institutions and festivals like FutureEverything (Manchester, UK), Art Athina (Athens), Cyberfest (St. Petersburg), Microsoft Art Week, National Center for Contemporary Art Moscow, Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Rodchenko Art School, ICA Moscow, Garage museum of contemporary art, Art & Science Day, Skolkovo Institute, Art Management Department of the RMA Business School to name just a few. He writes on contemporary art and visual culture in various periodicals and has contributed to numerous publications (Aroundart, Colta, Afisha, Moscow Art Magazine, Lookatme, Calvert Journal, Dialogue of Arts etc). 

Career

Creative director of the international exhibition of post-internet art Mythology Online in Polytechnic Museum, Moscow (2012)

Сurator of international group exhibition of social media art Workers’ Club (Office space at Lubyanka square, Moscow, 2013)

Curator of the V-A-C Foundation (2013-2016) 

Curator of international group show Planned Obsolescence in the framework of the parallel program of the 5th Moscow International Biennale of Young Art (fitness club Miltronic, Moscow, 2016) 

Chief curator of the experimental project space ISSMAG gallery (2016-2017) working mainly with post-internet art from the post-Soviet world (New Soul by Sasha Manik (2017), You Are Like Me in My Youth, Only Better by Liza Chukhlantseva (2017), Yesterday is the New Tomorrow of Daria Melnikova (2017), Baptism by Fire by Yura Shust (2017), Tales of Order 2. Wayward Chronicles by Arnold Trautwein (2017)

Curator of the video section and group exhibition of video art CITIZENSFIVE at the international fair Art Athina, Athens (2017)

Chief specialist of the Regional Development Directorate of the National Center for Contemporary Art (ROSIZO-NCCA) (2017-2018) (Shiryaevo Biennale. Central Russian Zen (together with Roman and Nelya Korzhovs, National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2017), roaming exhibition of unrealized art projects of artists from Russian regions «Big Country, Big Ideas» and discussion platform in frame of NEMOSKVA project (12 cities across Russia: Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Nizhniy Tagil, Tyumen, Tomsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan Ude, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, 2018)

Curator of the Innovation Art Prize nominees’ group show (Russian Lenin State Library, Moscow and online at www.2018.artinnovation.ru, 2018)

Curator of Sofa Skidan’s solo show Transverse Hyperspace (Fragment gallery, Moscow, 2018), 

Member of the Expert Council of the VI Moscow International Biennale of Young Art (2018)

Expert of the grant program of the GARAGE museum for young artists working in the field of contemporary art (2018)

Curator of the international exhibition Going Unconscious / Trembling / With Eyes Open / I See You / Surrender, HSE Art Gallery, High School of Economics (2018)

E-mail:

sashaburenkov (AT) gmail.com

[sashaburenkov]

Going Unconscious / Trembling / With eyes open / I see you / Surrender November 14 - December 9, 2018Opening November 13, 7 pmHSE Art Gallery12 ulitsa Malaya Pionerskaya 12, Moscow

http://art.hse.ru/gallery Participants: Angelo Plessas, Lou Drago, Philipp Ilinsky, Actor’s Section of the Oppressed, Alexandra Konnikova and Alberts Alberts, Anna Kravchenko, Katya Reshetnikova, Vera Schelkina, Kristina Petrova, Museum of Sensory Practices, Kirill Savchenkov, Alisa Smorodina, Sofa Skidan, Sasha Puchkova, Vik Laschenov, Vera Schelkina and Dmitry Volkov

Curator: Alexander Burenkov

«Going Unconscious / Trembling / With eyes open / I see you / Surrender» (curated by Alexander Burenkov) is the second project of HSE Art Gallery at the Faculty of Design at the Higher School of Economics. It will present the work of young Russian and international artists exploring the new “ritual” of the exhibition and the process of mediating the art of social relations between people through performative, choreographic, sports practices, works that take the form of a collective session of “quantum meditations”, cyber and board games, hacker workshops, satsang meetings, collective listening sessions, Tai Chi, Wushu and Gypsy sessions. These demonstrate new artistic forms of unity, communication, community, participation and the formation of a single collective body of spectators and participants.


Leading Russian representatives of the “new performative turn” were invited to participate in the project. They have made significant contributions to discussions on the rethinking of the ritualized nature of exhibitions in the context of so-called Western art, leading to the idea that the exhibition space has taken on a new “individualized character” (to use the term of theorist and historian of exhibitions, Dorothea von Hantelmann).

The practice of exhibiting artists actively contributes to the rethinking of what now constitutes an artistic object, and whether we can expand our understanding of objects of art and relation to them, thereby challenging many aspects with regards to their documentation, concepts of ownership, transmission and the inability to repeat the action of identical situations or meetings. An almost non-material exhibition, its works consist of a series of events and meetings, performative actions and activities, which will maintain a dynamic and changing structure, and a platform for dialogue, interaction and research of new collective experiences of presence and rituals.Taking the form of an exhibition with a minimal number of visible objects and acting as a space for intangible experiments with collectivity, «Going Unconscious / Trembling / With eyes open / I see you / Surrender» will explore the updated form of the interaction between performances, choreography, collective games, musical sessions, sports and the exhibition space, which became one of the most significant events in the field of art in the second decade of the 21st century. In the period from 1958 to 1964 there was a historical, “performative turn” that marked a whole galaxy of artists simultaneously turning towards the performance genre on different continents. The “new performative turn” of recent years has become a global artistic phenomenon denoting a paradigm shift, as a result of which performative dance, choreography and sports practices are increasingly entering the modern museum, demonstrating new forms of interaction between the viewer and artwork, often self-referentially considering economic and political conditions of this shift. New artistic performative projects oppose the artist’s standard performance criteria and demonstrate the resistance to commercialization, which has engulfed the object world of art over the same period and is a perfect product of the intangible economy of experience, in which memory itself is the main product. The exhibition, developing through time and complemented by “traces” and “remnants” of performances, will incorporate a series of events and the remaining traces and gestures, as well as an inventory for performances. It will become a platform for activation by modern performative practices that reveal new ways of intangible presence and nonverbal communication through shared physical and spiritual practices.

The title of the exhibition “Going Unconscious / Trembling / With eyes open / I see you / Surrender" refers to Brian Eno’s musical composition of the same name, “Going Unconscious”, in which the words “Going Unconscious / Trembling / With eyes open / I see you / Surrender" are pronounces. Eno’s creative vision as a musician, artist and philosopher is based on the conviction that the main spheres of human life — religion, sex, toxic substances and art — make a person lose control (“surrender”) over his life, feel the power of the unconscious over himself. “The Eno Manifesto”, in the struggle against the generally accepted ideals of modern life, suggests that success comes only from control, from science, crafts and technologies that make people less human, thus losing touch with themselves. Instead, the secret of personal happiness is said to lie in the ability to “let go” to the art of “surrender”, by which the body and psyche must be realized in relation to a full range of possibilities. The exhibition “Going Unconscious / Trembling / With eyes open / I see you / Surrender" explores the nature of collective performative, choreographic and sound art practices and their relationship to the format of the exhibition – a temporary reality that provides the necessary conditions for a physical meeting between people and works created in real time.

Within the framework of the project, the performance projects of the New Zealand sound-experimenter Lou Drago and the Greek artist Angelo Plessas will be shown for the first time in Russia. Working at the intersection of contemporary art, sauna art and queer theory, Lou Drago is one of the founders of the XenoEntities Network (XEN), a Berlin curatorial team that focuses its research on the study of queer, gender and feminist research and their interaction with digital and technological cultures. XEN holds one-day events, ranging from film shows to discussions and speeches on such philosophical and theoretical topics as post-humanism, xenofeminism, cyborgs and prosthetics, surveillance technologies, virtual reality, and so on. Lou is the author of Transience, a monthly show at Radio Cashmere, in which she invites artists to create ways to alleviate the anxieties of heteropatriarchal systems of oppression through music. The concept was partly inspired by the theoretical work of Mark Fisher and the general shared feeling of non-inscribability in the patriarchal neoliberal form and the subsequent loss of hope in the future. General anxiety can be interpreted as a tool of neoliberalism that can prevent many of us from being able to communicate with other people in order to raise awareness of the structural injustices that alienate us. In a society where security seems impossible, the only constant we can rely on is change. In Meetings with the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad teaches us that the world is a dynamic process of intra-activity and materialization, a constant disruption and the flow of an agency. The Buddhist Law of Impermanence states that nothing in this world is everlasting. Both of these points of reference led Lou Drago to the realization that every aspect of life, physical and mental, and perhaps this transition is the only thing we can rely on. The project “Suspending Time: Meditations for accessing alternate space / time in music” presented in Moscow (“Delayed Time: Meditations for achieving alternative space / time in music”), created in the summer of 2018 in Berlin for the parallel program of the exhibition “Welt ohne Außen. Immersive Spaces since the 1960s ”at the Martin Gropius-Bau Museum, will present the continuation of Drago’s artistic search in the form of collective sessions of meditation and listening.

Angelo Plessas is one of the pioneers of the European post-Internet art scene. In recent years, he has been creating projects ranging from collective performances and artists’ residences to educational initiatives and nomadic artistic communes. One of the latest projects of the artist - The Noospheric Society - a platform for relaxation in contemplation, digital detoxification, a therapy session, a place to study our bodies and minds. For the first time in the autumn of 2016, a public program that preceded the opening of the documenta exhibition in Athens, the sessions of “quantum” meditation, interpreting the ideas of the controversial New Age theorist José Argülles, will be held in Moscow in the last days of the exhibition.

Project Event Schedule:

November 13 | 20.00 - Philipp Ilinskiy / Oscillate Yourself Ether Reading November 14 | 20.00 - Alisa Smorodina / Speculative Hacker Workshop November 20 | 20.00 - Sofa Skidan / Awareness of Unawareness is Awareness November 21 | 20.00 - Actor’s Club of the Oppressed / Unity November 22 | 20.00 - Anya Kravchenko / Everything That Concerns Us November 23 | 20.00 - Katya Reshetnikova, Vera Schelkina and Kristina Petrova / CO-TOUCH November 24 | 12.00 - 16.00 - Lou Drago / Suspending Time: Meditations for accessing alternate space/time in music November 24 | 17.00 - Museum of Practices of Sensation / Sense of Sound November 25 | 15.00 - Vik Laschenov, Vera Schelkina and Dmitry Volkov / 24 superforms November 27 | 20.00 - Kirill Savchenkov / Fireworks and Gunpowder November 28 | 20.00 - Sasha Puchkova / Syntax November 29 | 20.00 - Actor’s Club of the Oppressed / Unity December 7 | 20.00 - Alexandra Konnikova and Alberts Alberts / Ritual to Blur Borders December 8 | 12.00 - Actor’s Club of the Oppressed / Unity December 8 | 16.00 - Vik Laschenov / Choir of Wish Fulfillment December 10 | 20.00 - Angelo Plessas / The Noospheric Society

http://design.hse.ru/news/778 http://aroundart.org/2018/12/04/19-noyabrya-2-dekabrya/ http://artuzel.com/content/stanovyas-bessoznatelnym http://thevyshka.ru/20876-sdatsya-iskusstvu/

[sashaburenkov]

NEMOSKVA symposium-on-tour and roaming exhibition of unrealized projects of artists from Russian regions «Big Country, Big Ideas» in 12 cities August 12 – September 9 2018 Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Nizhniy Tagil, Tyumen, Tomsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan Ude, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok

National Center for Contemporary Arts as part of ROSIZO with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation initiates a long-term project for interregional cooperation in the field of contemporary art NEMOSKVA (More than Moscow).

Partners: Strategic Partner: The Vladimir Potanin Foundation Official Sponsor: PJSC SIBUR Holding Co-Organizer: BOZAR Center for Fine Arts (Brussels, Belgium) With the support of The Agency of Strategic Initiatives to Promote New Projects

Commissioner: Alisa Prudnikova

NEMOSKVA (More than Moscow) has been initiated in 2017 as a strategic project for the development of contemporary culture in the Russian regions for the period from 2018 to 2022. Its goal is to build horizontal links, to promote regional artists and curators, to study the current situation in the regions through professional dialogue and creating new possibilities for international partnership. The State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSIZO aims at uniting the experience of cultural development accumulated by regional branches in the cities of Russia and presenting the actual image of the regional contemporary art at the Russian and international cultural scenes. In August-September 2018, the International Traveling Symposium NEMOSKVA will be held in 12 cities of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Among its participants are Gabi Ngcobo, Curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art (Berlin, Germany); Cosmin Costinas, Executive Director of the Para Site Center (Hong Kong, China); Sarah Wilson, Professor at the Courtauld Art Institute (London, UK); Inke Arns, Director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein (Dortmund, Germany), and many others. A total of about 60 Russian and international contemporary art experts will visit Niznhy Novgorod, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Tyumen, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Khabarovsk, and Vladivostok. Every city will host discussions, interviews, portfolio reviews, and a traveling exhibition. In partnership with the Delegation of the European Union to Russia within the framework of the program “Public Diplomacy. EU and Russia,” a program of open lectures on contemporary art by European curators is prepared. During the Symposium, experts will select ideas for exhibition projects of 2019–2022. The NEMOSKVA exhibitions will be presented at the BOZAR Center for Fine Arts (Brussels), in Moscow, in Russian regions, in the CIS and BRICS countries.

Curator of the discussions in frame of symposium-on-tour: Alexander Burenkov

International participants of the discussions in frame of the symposium-on-tour: 

Inke Arns (Germany), artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), Dortmund; Darya Bocharnikova (Russia – Belgium), head of Eastern Europe and Russia desk at The Center for Fine Arts BOZAR, Brussels; Antonio Geusa (Italy-Russia), curator, critic, head of Education department at the ROSIZO-NCCA, Moscow; Lidiya Gryaznova (Russia), curator, chief specialist at the Department of Art Programs of the North-West branch of ROSIZO-NCCA, Saint Petersburg; Amin Gulgee (Pakistan), artist, curator of the Biennale in Karachi; Dehlia Hannah (USA)​, research associate of the Olafur Eliasson Studio, curator and philosopher; Elena Ischenko (Russia), art critic, chief curator of the Center for Contemporary Art "Typography", Krasnodar; Valentinas Klimašauskas​ (Latvia), program director of the Center for Contemporary Art  Kim?, Riga; Riyas Komu (India), artist-animator, one of the founders of the Kochi Biennale Foundation; Kestutis Kuizinas (Litva), director of the Center for Contemporary Art (CAC), Vilnius; Monica Narula (India), artist, participant Raqs Media Collective; Gabi Ngcobo (South Africa), curator of the 10th Biennale in Berlin; Michal Novotný (Czech Republic)​, director of the FUTURA Gallery, Prague; Paul O’Neill (Ireland), director of the Center for Contemporary Art PUBLICS, Helsinki; Christiane Paul (Germany), curator of the Whitney Museum, New York; Nadim Samman (UK)​, director of Import Projects gallery, Berlin; Basak Senova (Turkey), curator, designer; Ekaterina Sharova (Russia), art critic, curator; Roger Thorp (UK) editorial director for Art and Children’s Publishing at Thames & Hudson; Sarah Wilson (UK), professor of the Courtauld Institute of Arts (University of London); Cosmin Costinas (Romania),  executive director and curator of the Center for Contemporary Art Para Site (Hong Kong); Marina Fokidis​ (Greece), art director of the Athenian Kunsthalle; Asrin Haidari (Sweden), curator, one of three artistic directors of the Luleå Biennial 2018; Bart van der Heide (Nitherlands), Chief Curator of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Carl Honoré (UK), journalist, writer, founder of the movement "slow time"; Ekaterina Kaplunova (Russia – Belgium), an International artistic policy advisor at the Centre for Fine Arts Bozar, Brussels; Elena Kasimova (Russia), independent curator; João Laia (Portugal), ), independent curator and writer; Samuel Leuenberger (Switzerland), the founder and director of the non-profit exhibition area SALTS, Birsfelden; Maria Lind (Sweden), director of Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Veronika Misyutina (Russia), Head of the Center for Welfare and Philanthropy Moscow School of Management Skolkovo; Anna Smolak (Poland), independent curator; Monika Szewczyk (Poland), independent curator and lecturer; Maria Udovydchenko (Russia), independent curator; Sofia Victorino (UK), head of educational and public programs at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Xiaoyu Weng (USA), associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Alexandra Artamonova (Russia), journalist, art critic; Leyly Aslanova (Russia), curator at the Foundation for the Development of Contemporary Art and Culture "Don", Rostov-on-Don; Iara Bubnova (Bulgaria), Director of the Center for Contemporary Art, Sofia; David Elliott (UK), Vice Director and Senior Curator at the Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art (RMCA), Guangzhou; Kate Fowle (UK), chief curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; director-at-large at Independent Curators International (ICI); Anna Ilchenko (Russia), curator at V-A-C Foundation, Moscow; Elisa R. Linn & Lennart Wolff (Germany), members of the curatorial team of KM Temporaer; Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov (France), curator at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Diana Machulina (Russia), curator, artist, art critic; Dieter Roelstraete (Belgium), curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society (University of Chicago); Simon Sheikh (UK), curator, writer, Director of MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London; Matthew Stephenson (UK), consultant in art and culture; Elena Tsvetaeva (Russia), art-manager, curator, artist, director of the Baltic branch of the ROSIZO-NCCA, Kaliningrad; Kathleen Weyts (Belgium), curator at BOZAR, Center of Fine Arts, Brussels.

Curator of roaming exhibition of unrealized art projects «Big Country, Big Ideas» in 12 cities: Alexander Burenkov

The objective of the exhibition «Big Country, Big Ideas» is to bring forth the uniqueness and versatility of the art from Russia’s regions for both the wider public and the international professional community, highlighting the creative potential in Russian cities beside Moscow. Equally important, it introduces new names into the global art context. The ideas for still-unrealized projects by regional artists range from models to drafts, to sketches in both traditional media and digital technologies. The exhibition helps to get the attention of both local authorities and the general public in order to nd solutions to overcome obstacles in production that face artists today. The modular architecture of the exposition, designed by one of the leading young architectural bureaus in Russia, the Rhizome Group, is specially devised for displaying art projects that have not been realized yet. The size of the exhibition varies according to the venue and the number of local unrealized ideas incorporated. It also includes an extensive parallel educational program: a discussion platform, work- shops, portfolio reviews and meetings with artists and art critics. Internationally renowned curators and researchers in contemporary culture give lectures in each city, presenting both practical insight about realizing projects in the eld of contemporary culture, and analysis of the most popular global trends in contemporary art.

Artists: Alexey Martins, Vladimir Chernyshev, Stas Bags, Gorod Ustinov Collective, Andrey Syaylev, Elizaveta Chukhlantseva, The Provmyza Group, Lyudmila Kalinichenko, Pavel Otdelnov, Sergey Poteryaev, Artem Filatov, Glafira Severyanova, Ivan Galuzin, Kirill Kryuchkov, Kirill Koteshov, Yury Gudkov

www.nemoskva.art

https://www.flashartonline.com/2018/10/nemoskva/

https://www.colta.ru/articles/mosty/18936 https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3719580 http://www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/5958/ https://daily.afisha.ru/brain/9874-komu-nuzhna-neft-iskusstvo-drugoe-delo-puteshestvie-po-transsibu-v-poiskah-talantov/ https://tvkultura.ru/article/show/article_id/279586/ http://tv2.today/Istorii/Tut-vam--nemoskva http://www.cultradio.ru/brand/episode/id/57958/episode_id/1907111/ http://www.cultradio.ru/brand/audio/id/63085/

[sashaburenkov]

Fragment Gallery is proud to present Transverse Hyperspace, the debut solo exhibition of Sofya Skidan, curated by Alexander Burenkov. Тhe exhibition will be held as part of a Parallel program of the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. A recent graduate of Moscow’s Rodchenko School of Multimedia and Photography as well as a professional yoga instructor, the artist works with a specific selection of materials, techniques and subjects to forge a relationship between Eastern spiritual practices and modern critical theory. Tapping into the complexities of postmodernity, Skidan raises questions around updated understandings of identity within today’s technogenic culture, as well as the crisis of nature and the fast-approaching environmental tipping point in the age of the anthropocene — conditions that theorist McKenzie Wark has called a “metabolic rift”, to borrow a coinage from John Bellamy Foster.

The starting point for the new works presented within the exhibition was the artist’s reflections on how the ways of thinking, the work of memory, and the perception of temporality, the body and identity have changed in the era of circulation and the continuous production of information. Inspired by the ideas of Donna Haraway, Eugene Thacker, Timothy Morton and Rosi Braidotti, Skidan attempts to set up a laboratory study of a new kind of physicality that seeks to erase gender boundaries and the alienation of the virtual body from its physical carrier. The artist harnesses representations of sexuality as a means of eradicating identity and the projection of a unified structural memory. The artist builds her video works through the medium of live broadcasts and “stories.” This tactic constantly reinscribes her within the digital landscape of the social network Instagram, thus alienating her from her physical body and generating a new image of sexuality, while at the same time uncovering the potential for interaction between several body-avatars, freed from a defined gender identity and engaged in new processes of self-knowledge.

Organized as the dimly-lit transit space of a laboratory, the exhibition restages selected aspects of the transitional state of culture on the way to the dystopian world of the future (“the world without us”), with the help of recovered artifact-ruins and landmarks that could be used as triggers for the recovery mechanisms of memory. Skidan pieces together the landscape of this forthcoming world from the scraps of information left behind after unknown events, supplemented by video installations and objects. In doing so, she offers new strategies for orientation in space, the constant reinscription of one’s self within the digital landscape and the various means of sensory perception, with the help of olfactory installations (drawing on aroma as a potent catalyst for personal memories), haptic and photosculpture, immersive video environments, and a suit designed as the uniform of the stalkers who will inhabit the earth in its near post-human future. One of the key works of the exhibition — a series of photosculptures bearing distorted images of natural landscapes — is offered up like the ruins of the digital environment, the speculative memories of the artificial intelligence of the future recalling the “lost paradise” of the nature of the past.

The exhibition will be accompanied by collective yoga sessions, combined with lectures on dark ecology and posthumanism, and performances by guest lecturers and artists, in keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the creative and curatorial approaches. The class schedule will be announced separately.

Parallel program:

26 July 20:00  Joint performance by Sofa Skidan and Vasily Sumin

Human perception includes various modalities. Performance by Sofa Skidan and Vasily Sumin is the first practice in the cycle of events within the framework of the exhibition Transverse Hyperspace and it’s a synergy of physical and spiritual yogic practices, the impact of which will be distributed to all three senses, touch, vision and hearing. The environment and its response are an important part of the interaction and adaptation of the subject. In the performance, the environment will become responsive and sensitive to all the nerve impulses of the participants, proving in practice that physical practice is just as performative as the sound environment.

Vasily Sumin is an artist working at the junction of various media: sound, text, programming and engineering. Student of the School of Multimedia and Photography. Rodchenko.

Admission is free, by registration. The number of participants is limited (up to 20 people).

2 August 20:00 

Lecture by Ekaterina Nikitina "Anthropocene ecology: the need for becoming earthly" and collective yoga classes with instructor Sofa Skidan

We live in troubled times, which we call the "sixth extinction", the era of great accelerations and the destructive impact of anthropogenic factors on the environment. The current environmental crisis can be interpreted as a result of a crisis of thinking about the place of man in the world and his relationships with non-human Others. Post-humanism denies human uniqueness, but does not deny people their special position among living things. We have the opportunity to take actions aimed at creating a more harmonious relationship with the non-human. Anthropocene embodies the intertwining of two temporality: the geological time of the Earth and the history of mankind. This cohesion can serve as a starting point for anthropocentric thinking, which requires us to develop a new ethic, a new sensitivity and a revision of our relationships with other beings. In formulating her response to the anthropocene, Donna Haraway calls us to become "chthonic creatures", "those who are not safe" and because of her vulnerability is capable of an affective response to multiple creatures inhabiting the bio- and the geosphere. At the lecture, we will talk about what it means to become "earthly" and "wild" under the conditions of the anthropocene, and what possible simpoysisnye scenarios are offered to us by researchers.

Ekaterina Nikitina is Doctor of Arts in Literary Studies (Ph.D.), Silesian University, researcher in the critical theory of post-humanism.

Admission is free, by registration. The number of participants is limited (up to 20 people).

9 August 19:00

Performance practice by Anya Kravchenko "Remote touch"

The artist and choreographer Anya Kravchenko will propose to the participants a series of speech instructions-protocols: auditions and live speech, which offer images that transform the perception of participants and invite to joint movement in space. Protocols appeal equally to sensory and intellectual experience, creating a situation of reflection and reinvention of identity in motion and in the landscape of works by Sophia Skidan. Kravchenko's work will propose to the participants of the event what the manifesto of xenophyminism calls "the sea of ​​procedures that soften the armor [patriarchy of white supremacism] and dismantle its defenses".

Anya Kravchenko (born 1985, Berdyansk) is a choreographer, dancer, curator. She studied history and theory of art at the Russian State Humanitarian University (2009-2014, Moscow), received an international scholarship danceWEB (2015, Vienna), graduated from the master's program on choreography e.x.e.r.c.e. (International Institute of Choreography in Montpellier). Since 2015 he has been creating his own choreographic works, presented in Russia, France and Switzerland, in which she is looking for new forms of perception and interaction. Lives and works in St. Petersburg.

Admission is free, by registration. The number of participants is limited (up to 20 people)

Exhibition dates: July 19 - August 20, 2018 Address: Bolshoy Kozikhinsky Pereulok, 30 Opening and press-show: July 18, 19:00 Curator: Alexander Burenkov

http://fragmentgallery.com/transverse-hyperspace/ https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/russia-contemporary-artists/ http://artguide.com/posts/1549 http://aroundart.org/2018/08/29/antropotsen-kak-insta-istoriya-o-sofe-skidan/ http://youngart.ru/parallel-programme/parallel-programme-2018/

[sashaburenkov]

Exhibition of nominees for the Innovation Award of 2018 9 April-13 May 2018 Opening April 9, 20:30, Russian State Library, 1 entrance

Opening April 9, 20:30

There is an opinion that the specific genre of the exhibition of nominees of the award, whose composition is determined by the choice of an expert jury, does not imply any curatorial utterance, and instead of compositional and conceptual integrity, the exposition should serve purely utilitarian purposes of providing equal conditions for the presentation of all nominee projects. At the same time, the search for new comfort conditions for the viewer is inevitable, as well as the violation of traditional conventions of the exhibition format, in order to replace information stands with information that is not easy to understand with archival material (photo and video documentation of projects, texts, catalogs, accompanying materials) came a new spectator experience.

In 2018, the exhibition of the nominees of the award will take a hybrid character that is adequate to the modern post-Internet state of culture, passing both in the physical space of the halls of the Russian State Library (where art works in two nominations for artists - "Artist of the Year" and "New Generation", interacting with interiors, showcases and furniture of the library), and online - in the form of a virtual library of media files with documentation of projects of all nominations of the award (read it It will also be in the library - in the legendary reading room No. 3, which opened in the beginning of the year after the restoration, the largest in Europe). For the first time, most of the exhibition will be held in the cloud store online - on a specially created site and integrated online sharing services such as Dropbox and Google Drive, becoming, in fact, the first exhibition of contemporary art in Russia, and possibly in the world, which will take place on such platforms, thereby making information about nominee projects available to the widest possible audience. The exhibition raises the question of the possibilities and forms of digital archiving of exhibition and educational projects and consists of the profiles of all the nominee projects with comprehensive archive of materials on cloud services documenting the different stages of project existence (from drafting and draft sketches to media reactions and catalogs) and accessible for free acquaintance, study, download.

Cloud services, digital clouds are repositories without forms and boundaries that have emerged for more than ten years and have become firmly established both in the research and the everyday environment of our lives, represent a relatively new form of existence and storage of information in our lives. Most of the "escape" from reality to the "cloud", the exhibition inevitably raises the question of where the art work ends and its documentation begins, and how the project can continue its life after its completion - online and offline. In a world saturated with online communication networks and visual blogs, the documentation of art works acquires a different degree of visibility and recognition, spreading through new channels of distribution. The exhibition of nominees for the Innovation Prize in 2018 does not hide the fact that it is for the most part an exhibition of archival copies, photo documents, multimedia files, accompanying descriptions, reproductions, scanned images or 3d-sketches. But what does the original project mean in the contemporary artistic context? Maximum mobility and reproducibility are essential for the existence of art today, and the logic of reproduction means that images are constantly transcoded, retransmitted, alienated from original artwork, changed and re-assigned to new viewers. Today, images are stolen, torn from the context and adapted to their needs, and no copyright measures can prevent this.

What form should archive copies take and what should be the conditions of their opposition to digital oblivion and survival in the aggressive situation of online competition for user attention? The economy of the "poor image" (in Hito Steyerl's terminology) and the circulation of images is more than the ability to download: you can save the files, watch them again, even remount, improve the quality if you find it necessary, and the results will circulate further. The economy of attention with its opportunities for direct global distribution and its ethics of remixing and appropriation makes it possible to participate in production for a much larger number of people than it was before. It enables the user to actively participate in the creation and distribution of content and drags it into production. The user becomes an editor, critic, translator and co-author of the original project or image. Last year exhibitions, art and educational projects are revived and reconstructed as pictures of documentation, derivatives of their source codes, bad pictures, casts from originals, at the request of their creators or in spite of it.

Changes in the logic of production and the dissemination of contemporary art lead to the situation that the online presence becomes increasingly important for art. Viewing the photo documentation of exhibitions online has turned into a routine routine accessible to all, substituting for itself viewing of art alive. How much are the exhibitions of nominee projects of the award, recontextualized and placed in a different exhibition environment, especially virtual, effective, and individual works of artists are representative for the entire nominated project? And where is the watershed between reality and fiction in the visual documentation of exhibitions? Asking these questions, specially for the online exhibition of nominees for the "Innovation" award, the artist Sara Culmann created photo galleries of non-existent virtual exhibitions that artistically interpret projects in the "Project of the Year" nomination.

At the opening of the exhibition with an audio-visual performance will perform the art collective Strange Attractors (Albina Mokhryakova, Sofa Skidan, Katerina Shiryaeva), working on the border of experimental music and contemporary art. Artists will create a site-specific media performance simultaneously in the physical and online space, interpreting the work of the Innovation Award nominees through choreography, digital collages and VJ-ing. Exploring new spectra of perception on the border of natural and digital, Strange Attractors interact with the viewer both in the mode of direct involvement in the performances, and through online broadcasts.

Participants of the exhibition in the Russian State Library: Dmitry Volkostrelov, Dmitry Renansky, Egor Fedorychev, Igor Samolet, Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov, Kirill Savchenkov, Valery Aisenberg, Vladimir Logutov, Eugene Granilshchikov, Sergei Kishchenko, Khaim Sokol

Curator: Alexander Burenkov

http://2018.artinnovation.ru/ http://www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/5566/ http://www.mk.ru/culture/2018/04/10/vystavka-nominantov-na-premiyu-innovaciya-prevratila-leninku-v-artkvest.html http://vm.ru/news/480400.htmlhttps://tvkultura.ru/article/show/article_id/242088 https://snob.ru/selected/entry/136269 https://www.metronews.ru/novosti/moscow/reviews/chitateli-leninki-prinyali-raboty-sovremennyh-hudozhnikov-za-chast-remonta-1395155/ http://www.ng.ru/culture/2018-04-11/7_7209_innovation.html http://di.mmoma.ru/news?mid=3127&id=1366 https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3621891 https://snob.ru/selected/entry/137227

[sashaburenkov]

“Shiryaevo Biennale. Central Russian Zen” 31/08/17–08/10/17

Media preview with exhibition curators: 31/08, 5 p. m. Exhibition opening: 31/08, 6.30 p. m.

On August 31, 2017, “Shiryaevo Biennale. Central Russian Zen” exhibition will be opened in the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, part of ROSIZO. The project of Samara branch will be the third one on the regional project site of the NCCA in Moscow. The exhibition is a metaphorical reflection on the experience of the oldest active international biennale of contemporary art in Russia, which has been held since 1999 in the ancient Russian village of Shiryaevo on the Volga bank, one of the most beautiful places of the Samara bend surrounded by the Zhiguli Nature Reserve on all sides. The Shiryaevo Biennale was intended and carried out as an international experimental project by famous Russian curators Nelya Korzhova and Roman Korzhov, the founders of the Samara Regional Public Charity Foundation “The Centre for Contemporary Art” with active contribution from Hanns-Michael Rupprechter and the Stuttgart Union of Artists from Germany as well as a group of artists from Kazakhstan headed by Rustam Khalfin.

The exposition will be based on the archive of the biennale; photos, videos, objects and installations from the personal collection of Nelya Korzhova and Roman Korzhov. However, at the same time, the exhibition goes beyond the traditional retrospective and creates an idea of the biennale’s authentic image for the widest audience. The conceptual solution of the exhibition is a large-scale video chronicle of the project, as well as the exhibition hall covered in river sand and stands from quarry stone mined in Shiryaevo for the last 200 years — it is a total installation representing a kind of mental map of Shiryaevo. The exposition gives an opportunity to feel the unique atmosphere of the biennale, reflects the ideas of contemplative and performative nature of the event and becomes a starting point for a conversation about the history of its creation.

The strategy of the Shiryaevo Biennale is aimed at finding new forms of contemporary art communication in social environment. The form of the main biennale project, “creative laboratory” and “nomadic show”, is Nelya Korzhova’s original idea uniting the Eastern concept of nomadism, referring to free movement, wandering, and the Western concept of a “show”, a public presentation. The space for creation display during the “nomadic show” is the entire village of Shiryaevo with the surrounding landscape: the Volga, mountains, mines, lake shore, village houses and streets. As an artistic phenomenon, the “nomadic show” stands closest to mystery play evolving in time and space and changing the experience of those who participate in it. It makes visitors follow a unique route and experience the meditative qualities of the Central Volga landscapes, a kind of “Central Russian Zen” reflecting the biennale’s setting for contemplation, intangibility, emptiness, and absence of any tracks left behind.

The Shiryaevo Biennale offers not only an alternative to the traditional functioning of art within the framework of the “white cube” concept, but also a strategy of independence from the vertical of power in art. Created by “artists for artists” the biennale turned out to be resistant to shocks and succeeded in surviving as a special experience of international co-creation. The condition of artists’ living in the houses of local residents is seen as a way of creating a perfect environment for artistic expression. The main idea of this experiment is to give an artist a chance to start working from scratch without feeling the pressure from his or her established image and the art market technologies.

Today the Shiryaevo Biennale is the best internationally known contemporary art event in the Samara Region. Throughout the years the biennale has hosted artists and curators of special programs from Russia, Kazakhstan, Germany, France, Great Britain, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Denmark, the USA, the Netherlands, Singapore and Norway.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an educational and performative program both in the building of the Moscow branch of the NCCA and in the city space.


Artists Hanns-Michael Rupprechter, Ulli Berg, Andreas Bar, Juergen Kierspel, Regis Pinault, Marlene Perronet, Rustam Khalfin, Sergey Maslov, Georgy Tryakin-Bukharov, Zauresh Madanova, Galim Madanov, Nelya Korzhova, Roman Korzhov, Oksana Stogova, Francisco Infante, Nonna Goryunova, Angela Arsinkey, Vanessa Henn, Viktor Vorobyov, Vito Pace, German Vinogradov, Tutti Frutti group, Evgeny Ryabushko, Elena Vorobyova, Erbolsyn Meldibekov, Jonas Valatkevicius, Martin Rogers, Nata Morozova, Vladimir Logutov, Andrey Syaylev, Kira Subbotin, Natalya Syzgantseva, Nikita Volchenkov, Vito Pace, Ilya Polyakov, Natalya Elmanova, Sergey Krivchikov, Alexey Zaytsev, Stephan Koeperl, Sylvia Winkler, Ellen Rein, Natalya Fomicheva, Alexandr Ovchinnikov, Elena Morozova, Peter Haury, Elke Hammelstein, Iris Hellriegel, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Vazgen Rakhlavuri-Tadevosyan, Gerd Viedmajer, Viktoria Lomasko, Diana Machulina, Diego Sarramon, Natalya Samkova, Anna Orekhova, Alexandr Korneyev, Alexey Kallima, Arpine Tokmajan, Sergey Balandin, Artem Ivashkin, Ignat Daniltsev, Vitaly Stadnikov, Oleg Lyuboslavsky, Svetlana Subbotina, Joe Lee, Yulia Zhdanova, Ruediger Schestag, Yuri Albert, Anna Brochet, Bertrand Vallet, Gero Goetze, Marie-Helene Dubreuil, Yulia Zhdanova, Romain Gibert, Mari Kartau, Alexey Kostroma, Gert Mezger, Sabine Pfisterer, Emmanuel Rodoreda, Krishna Subramania, Mare Tralla, Anfim Khanykov, Matthias Holland-Moritz, Alexander Schikowski, Jochen Gerbert Schloder, Zvetofor group, “Escape” program, Georg Zaiss, Anna Korzhova, Andrey Kuzkin, Emilie Pischedda and Valentin Souquet, Haim Sokol, Oksana Stogova, Manfred Unterwerger, Wolfgang Spaeth, Greta Weibull, Klas Eriksson, Ingela Ihrman, Kalle Brolin and Kristina Muentzing, Elena Dendiberya and Anatoly Haiduk, Janno Bergman, Andrus Joonas, Martina Geiger-Gerlach, Kathrin Sohn, Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb, Rosa Ruecker, Ivan Lungin, Pia Maria Martin, Susanna Messerschmidt, Astrid Nylander, Calle Holck, Johanna Karlin, Swetlana Heger, Katrin Hornek, Martial Verdier, Gabriel Feracci, Lewden Martin, Sybille Neeve, Ciro Vitale, Alexandr Zaytsev, Mikhail Lezin, Ivanhoe, Vladimir Arkhipov, Serious Collision Investigation Unit Coalition group (Felix Gmelin, Alan Armstrong, Joakim Forsgren, Mikael Goralski, Amanda Hårsmar, Ronak Moshtaghi, Kjersti Austdal), Paulo Paes, Radesign group (Anton Rakov, Yulia Ratieva), Darya Emelyanova, Dmitry Kadyntsev, GKP group (Vitaly Cherepanov, Anna Mineeva), Dominika Skutnik, Marek Frankowski, Antibody Corporation (Adam Rose, April Pollard), Eryka Dellenbach, Merzedes Sturm-Lie, André Talborn, Alexey Trubetskov, Olga Kiselyova, Alisa Nikolaeva, Nicolas Courgeon, S’ilTePlait group (Bernard Touzet, Théophile Péju, Pierre-Loup Pivoin, Raphaël Saillard), Club Fortuna group (Kurdwin Ayub, Xenia Lesnievski, Julia Rublov, Sarah Sternat, Maarten Heijkamp, Nana Mandl, Thomas C. Chung), U/n Multitude group (Nikita Spiridonov, Elena Zubtsova, Ilya Fomin), YUNRUBIN group (Joanne Pang Rui Yun, Jonas Rubin), Maria Kryuchkova, Ilya Samorukov. Films by Hanns-Michael Rupprechter “Multivitamin Cocktail”, 1999, and YUNRUBIN group (Joanne Pang Rui Yun and Jonas Rubin), Singapore/Denmark, “Dollar Hauler on the Volga”

Venue: National Centre for Contemporary Arts (13/2 Zoologicheskaya Street) Curators: Nelya Korzhova, Roman Korzhov Co-curator: Alexandr Burenkov Architects: “NOVOE” Architectural Bureau

http://www.ncca.ru/articles.text?filial=9&id=349 http://www.ncca.ru/events.text?filial=2&id=4252 http://www.colta.ru/articles/art/16875 https://syg.ma/@knowitall/shiriaievskaia-biiennalie-sriednierusskii-dzien

[sashaburenkov]

Arnold Trautwein "Tales of Order Vol. 2: The Wayward Chronicles"

On July 11, ISSMAG gallery will open the first personal exhibition in Russia of the Russian-German artist Arnold Trautwein "Tales of Order Vol. 2: The Wayward Chronicles" (July 12 – 25).

The artist continues his formal searches, begun in the student exhibition "Tales of Order" (Rodchenko Art School, April 2017), which resulted from his studies at the video art department in the course under Dmitry Venkov and Kirill Preobrazhensky. In his graphic works, artist uses references to the aesthetics of comic books, manga, Asian calligraphy, geek and snickerhead culture, collector culture, the world of franchised fantasy movies. Drawings, collages, and sketches, often similar to storyboards for a film, are exhibited in various forms and variations: as brochures in stitched folders, textures on cardboard boxes collected by the artist, as well as inserts, — that amount to an original combination of drawing and sculpture.

The artist refers to aesthetics of the marketplace by using commercial plastic and cardboard packaging materials, including toys and furniture, to cover with it his drawings and sketches. The drawings of the artist with original subframes-sarcophagi take the form of "shelf sculptures and arrangements," inheriting experiments with this medium from both the 1980s neo-geo (first of all, Haim Steinbach) and contemporary commentators on commercial aesthetics and commodity overproduction (Josephine Meckseper, Camille Henrot, ITEM IDEM). The artist frees from a purely utilitarian role items from the domestic and pragmatic world of construction and repairments—shelves, mounts, and plastic wrapping film—through its re-exposure: in a game with materials, Trautwein partially scans "real" surfaces of wooden and plastic objects and includes them in textured photo prints for cardboard boxes.

The title of the exhibition, "Tales of Order Vol. 2: The Wayward Chronicles," is based on a contradictory notion of cataloging and systematization of something fantastic and fictional. This is reflected throughout the practice of Trautwein in the various ways he overlays DIY aesthetics, infantile sketches derived from comics and cartoons, upon an orderly installation structure. In the first exhibition of the series "Tales of Order" the shelves were arranged in analogy with a typical library or a store stand. In ISSMAG, the artist plays with the exhibition space of the gallery, as well as the size and position of the shelves and cardboard boxes that are excessively elongated or exaggerated. This creates the effect of unexpected fantastic mutations of everyday objects. Interacting with the interior of the gallery, his sculptures recall natural environment, mimic various textures, transfer surfaces from the exhibition space to printed cardboard, adapt to the corners, stretch and adapt to the specifics of the walls, thus generating an ironic effect.

The mise-en-scene of the exhibition is organized as a show-window demonstrating props for an epic fantasy film that has been filmed or not yet filmed, which unfortunately the viewer is deprived of the opportunity to watch. She or he can get the impression of it only by observing scraps of storyboards, script, sketches, and sculptures. The rapidly growing popularity of the genre of unboxing, manifest in numerous videos of unpacking a new product, usually of consumer electronics or digital technology, has in recent years passed from the life of geeks with their interest in computer games, technical innovations, and fan tokens, into new segments: food and beverages, clothes and shoes, mobile devices and other gadgets. Perhaps, packing his drawings into boxes, Trautwein offers a new genre of unboxing: unpacking the dimensions of the infantile and fantastic, where maniacal pursuits and daydreaming are released.

On the second floor of the gallery, the video "NATT" (19 min, 2016, Berlin/Leipzig) will be shown. This is Trautwein's first movie, which can be seen as a transition from painting and graphics to working on feature film. A short film revolving around a kafkaesque plot: a young woman has to learn three signs for her new office job. Neither the type of work everyone is doing nor any person’s names are specified. Gradually, the signs she learned start to disfunction, although everyone around her carries on as usual. Aside from telling this story, a certain fusion of media was of interest. Drawing served as a base for the script as well as an actual prop: the documents the protagonist is skimming through are pencil-on-paper works from the artist’s sketchbook.

Curated by Alexander Burenkov

http://www.ofluxo.net/tales-of-order-vol-2-the-wayward-chronicles-by-arnold-trautwein-at-issmag-gallery/

http://aroundart.org/2017/07/17/10-16-iyulya/

[sashaburenkov]

CITIZENSFIVE

26 – 28 May 2017

Artists:

Philipp Timischl / Christopher Kulendran Thomas & Annika Kulmann / Albert Soldatov / Manolis Daskalakis-Lemos / Sasha Litvintseva / Alexey Vanushkin / MSL & Jaakko Pallasvuo / Pakui Hardware / CORE PAN / Beny Wagner / Jacky Connolly / Elizaveta Chukhlantseva / Lawrence Lek / Stephanie Comilang / Sara Culman / Viktor Timofeev / Jesse McLean / Eleni Bagaki / Erica Scourti / Bogdan Ablozhnyy / Louis Henderson / Valinia Svoronou / Graeme Arnfield / EKKE (Egor Kraft, Pekka Tynkkynen, Karina Goulbenko, Alina Kvirkveliya) / Patrick Staff /  Egle Kulbokaite & Dorota Gaweda / Felix Kalmenson / Jasper Spicero / Hannah Perry

Curated by Alexander Burenkov

In January 2013, Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker who had been working for several years on a film about surveillance and monitoring programs in the US in the wake of 9/11, received an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who called himself "Citizenfour." In it, he offered her insider information about illegal wiretapping practices of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies.

Since then the world has drastically changed. In the post-Brexit world governed by both post-truth politics and sharing economy, the new urgencies of migration and resettlement as well as the changing concepts of citizenship and nationality and related to it new forms of anxieties emerge to restructure our lives. It’s not only creative prosumers roaming the world or Londoners moving to Athens for affordable rent, but also platform citizenship and social networks that are giving birth to the new digital, nomadic post-Snowden generation, “citizensfive” living a world in which everything is constantly visible and boundaries between the private and the public are blurred. Invisibility has been lost to the digital revolution — but why should that matter?

The idea of temporary spaces of habitation is something that we are experiencing in our daily lives. As we keep plugging more and more into car-sharing vehicles or Airbnb rooms, people own less while becoming more nomadic and less attached to anything like a stable home. This is one aspect of a transformation that is also causing a great amount of pain and anxieties in terms of the forced mobility, precariousness and insecurity, roommate after roommate. On the other hand, there is enormous potential in terms of public space in those small, private places. The only way Edward Snowden was able to do what he did was because he was in a «non-place», transit space of a hotel room 1014 at the Mira Hong Kong, a chic, «eco-friendly» hotel in Hong Kong’s shopping and entertainment district. A screening room of the exhibition CITIZENSFIVE designed as a hotel room referring to a typically blank transit space, where the videos by contemporary artists screened on a large LED screen will replace the «fake news» of modern TV channels, and will take a look at the reality beyond post-truth bubble, constructed by media, corporate, and state interests.

In the age of universal acceleration, our mind and body change, adapting to the environment in which we find ourselves. Blurred boundaries make us rethink our identity, we rethink our goals as human species and our citizenship is also lost in translation and found in transitional spaces of inter-zones, non-places of airports, hotels and Airbnb flats. In somato-, techno- or biocapitalism the body is no longer integral, but is fragmented and penetrated by new technologies that, in Paul Preciado’s parlance, are «soft, featherweight, viscous, gelatinous». Technology and hyper-capitalism have produced us – artists and all – as its «users».

The artists of the video section deal with themes ranging from surveillance politics, precarious lifestyle, hyperconnection and disunity at the same time, the problems of other dimensions of lost corporeality (no longer a «body without organs», but a virtual «body without flesh»), global communication networks and local communities.

Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Annika Kuhlmann in theirs video from their long-term artwork in the form of a startup «New Eelam», are wondering what could a new Eelam be if the idea of a self-governed state based on equality for all its citizens was imagined as a distributed network rather than a territorially bounded nation. New Eelam is based on re-engineering some of these structural operations of art and some of the property relations at the very heart of the present economic system - through collective access rather than individual ownership.

Sasha Litvintseva’s «Evergreen», follows an immortal traveller’s journey through failed and aspirational utopias , a series of uninhabited theme parks, postmodern museums and abandoned cities that signify islands of dislocated time, somewhere in a possible future Japan. Such wanderings allow Litvintseva to create a mesmeric experience, that subtly suggests the perpetual struggle for a perfect society and how the unquenchable desire of civilization to document itself, is perhaps driven by an unconscious awareness of its looming demise.

MSL & Jaakko Pallasvuo’s «Bridge Over Troubled Water» reimagines 1960s musical duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel as time-travelling protagonists whose association with a more hopeful era is at sharp odds with our increasingly precarious contemporary existence. Named after Simon & Garfunkel’s best selling album, Bridge Over Troubled Water follows them as they navigate past, present, and future post-human landscapes. Together they experience personal and ecological loss, entropy, and the impact of our insatiable fossil fuel consumption.

The character of Albert Soldatov's «Main Road» is in some kind of prostration, confusion, being exposed to alien forces, it turns off the usual route, its path is distorted and influenced by global media viruses, penetrating into everyday reality from the outside and infecting the character. The impact of these memes is unclear and unrecordable, only by changing behavior one can determine that something has gone wrong. We can notice the actions of atomized subjects, but do not interpret them, regardless of whether they are strange or ordinary. Their actions are dictated by the hermetic logic of the media entity.

Pakui Hardware's «Imprint»  speculates about imprinting as a form of shaping someone’s memories and experiences. Imagines a scenario when it is possible to ‘imprint’ into someone’s memory experiences that never took place. This way making it impossible to distinguish between real and imaginary things. How will be able to deal with this when we become digital subjectivities? In the era of Anthropocene, imprint has become a term that encompasses the interaction between physical bodies, materials and surfaces as well as between invisible but yet transforming forces such as flows of Capital. Thus imprint is both an intimate proximity between materials, bodies, surfaces and at the same it is a play of forces: there is always the one who presses the other, the softer, which functions as a surface for the other’s hard body (both political and material). It also incorporates temporality – the converge of the past, present and the future – because it requires time to become an imprint, to make an imprint.

Philipp Timischl's «Problems» is thematically and formally embedded in the American series “In Treatment” that deals with the problems of psychotherapy patients and those of the therapist himself. Framed as an image inside an image of the opening sequence of the series—a blue, watery streak swirling across the screen—a dialog commences through the addition of various sequences from the series that do not lack urgency and intensity. However, due to the source material— originally ranging for example from events on an English estate in the 18th century (“Downton Abbey“) to the present in the south of the United States (“True Blood”)—, various actors and actresses and a wide variety of emotions the film is characterized by complete misunderstandings, abrupt subject changes and meaningless data noise.

Patrick Staff «Weed Killer» was inspired by artist-writer Catherine Lord’s memoir The Summer of Her Baldness – a moving and often irreverent account of the author’s experience of cancer. Contrasting a monologue, in which an actress reflects upon the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy, with comparatively otherworldly sequences, including choreographic gestures shot with high-definition thermal imaging. The video suggests a complex relationship to one’s own suffering and draws into focus the fine line between alternately poisonous and curative substances.

With the UK cast out of the EU, Dalston has degenerated into post-apocalyptic delirium at Laurence Lek's «Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit edition)» video. This is a drowned world of the near future, filled with the ruins of metropolitan life: forgotten nightclubs, DIY art installations, neon-lit music venues, Election booths, Turkish snooker clubs and luxury penthouses. Building upon Lek’s original project for Open Source 2015, this site-specific simulation brings together multiple histories of the area into a single zone. As the player roams around, fragments of European voices appear: samples from Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Lars Von Trier’s Europa speak to them about the nature of dislocation. It is a gradual, but relentless, meeting of past, present, and future.

Jasper Spicero's "Behind The Scenes" is a personal look at the process of filming "Centers In Pain" at Wapato Jail, a maximum security facility built 9 years ago in Portland, Oregon. After it’s completion in 2004 Wapato was abandoned due to a lack of operating funds, and it has been idle and in pristine condition for 10 years and has never once housed inmates, remaining empty aside from a small janitorial staff that maintains the plumbing and washes dusty bed sheets. To carry out "Centers In Pain", one in a series narrative works by Jasper Spicero about Rehabilitation, Correction, Infrastructure and Trauma, the artist rented for 4 days prison Wapato. Occasionally a film crew is allowed to enter for a small fee. The project culminated in a screenplay for an imaginary movie, documentation of the sculptures installed in the prison, and a short film documenting the life of an alienated tribe of people living in a contemporary Panopticon by its own rules.

Sara Culman' s digital video «Props for daily misunderstanding» investigates the political sensibility of objects included in daily household ritual of modern citizens.  The artist puts the focus on individual items, called "props", which simulate human relations concerning the problems of a geopolitical treaty. The image rendering system used in video games, as well as the subjective camera's view, the so-called spectator mode, is put on the basis of the image visualization, which is a mode of the observer in which there is a physically impossible operator floating like  a spirit above the photorealistic world.

Viktor Timofeev's «Continuum» is a short computer-generated video that centers on the relationship between two entities that populate a deserted landscape. These are a group of cockroaches and a pack of hovering drones existing in a symbiotic relationship, engaged in constant observation, mutual surveillance and pursuit of one another without ever coming into contact. The video cuts between first person views of both entities, attempting to elicit an empathetic response to both positions.

Erica Scourti's «Body Scan» captures the process of photographing various parts of the artist's body and parsing them through a visual search app, which attempts to identify them and link to the relevant online data. A documented gesture of mediated intimacy told through iPhone screenshots, the video narrates an exchange between lovers, while making literal the objectification of female bodies on the Internet.

Graeme Arnfield's «Sitting in Darkness» explores the circulation, spectatorship and undeclared politics of contemporary images and new forms of anxieties. Out of the darkness a sound emerges. It echoes and drones. Terrified people take to the streets in search of its source. They get their cameras out and document the sky, searching for an author. We watch on, sitting in darkness, our muscles contract and our pupils dilate.“I hope the camera picks this up.”

The screening program will confront our uneasiness at being swept along by the digital tide, with a view to better understanding of our modern hyperlinked society by offering new perspectives on conceprtualizing our contemporary identities, it will broach the question whether the self is even more otherworldly than we fear it is.

Venue: 

Faliro (Tae Kwon Do) Pavilion, Athens – Greece 

Moraitini 2, Faliro Pavillion Hellenic Olympic Properties, Paleo Faliro 175 61

http://www.artathina.gr/

http://www.flashartonline.com/2017/06/art-athina-athens/

http://www.aqnb.com/2017/06/21/32-international-video-artists-respond-to-new-urgencies-citizensfive-at-art-athina/

https://www.facebook.com/events/2022611044633477/

[sashaburenkov]

Jura Shust

Baptism by Fire

ISSMAG Gallery

May 16 – June 10 2017

Opening on May 16 at 7 pm

On May 16, ISSMAG gallery will open the first personal exhibition in Russia of Belarus-born Belgium-based artist Jura Shust, Baptism by Fire. In his artistic practice, Shust refers to the ways how Soviet and modern myths and rituals correlate with science, technology development and the processes of modern hyper-capitalism.

The idea of the exhibition was born as a result of the artist's study of the ethical meaning in the early Soviet culture of the symbolism of fire as one of the most important metaphorical tools of secularization and the way of purification from the past, embodied in drawings created by Shust with the help of activated charcoal. More often than not, conversations about the symbolism of fire are conducted in the context of the denial by the Bolsheviks of Christian traditions, especially Orthodox traditions, and even mockery of them. It is from this position that today, for example, the well-known fact of the creation of the first crematorium in Russia in Petrograd, 1919-1921, which seemed interesting to the artist, is estimated today. The storyline of historical events in many respects confirms the militantly atheistic meaning of all the actions of the Soviet authorities connected with the construction of this institution, however, the construction of a crematorium for its immediate initiators and executors was also an expression of the socio-cultural position of the "industrial man". The Decree of the Council of People's Commissars "On the removal of monuments erected in honor of tsars and their servants and the drafting of projects for the memory of the Russian socialist revolution" was an act of deliberately destroying historical memory, the initial stage of desacralization of the past as a whole and the cult of the dead in particular, because in most cases, the monuments were the materialization of the ritual of worshiping the deceased person's personality, that’s why the construction of crematoria in the early Soviet period was viewed as part of the plan for monumental propaganda. At the same time, many intellectuals in that historical period strongly gravitated towards the concepts of destruction of the traditional world order, a kind of sacral sacrilege, a demonstrative overthrow of the spiritual symbols of the past. On Russian soil, a new culture, a new aesthetics of expediency, was clearly ripening and emerging, in the system of which an important role was assigned to the process of destroying all the old, obsolete, not corresponding to the accelerated life rhythm of industrial society. This nascent culture extolled the symbolism of fire as a method of purification from the past.

The study of these historical collisions inspired the artist to create specially for the exhibition in ISSMAG a series of pictorial drawings made on the gallery walls with activated charcoal. The Soviet tradition combines in them with recognizable plots of many teachings and philosophies that swept the post-Soviet space in the late 20th century: from the symbol of the lotus, the embodiment of purity and enlightenment of the Buddha, and the image of a girl practicing Jala Neti, washing the nose, purifying exercise of yoga to improve breathing, described in Ayurveda, to the plot of spell of water for happiness from the Soviet TV screen “Yunost” ("Youth"), the baptism of a newborn, a glass of Soviet champagne and the image of a strict Moidodyr, hero of cult Soviet cartoons.

The central position at the exhibition will be occupied by three key works of the artist. The first one is Spirit Intoxication, installation of inverted wine glasses, in which alcohol is replaced by a cleaner of toxic green for washing dishes. The second one is Newton's Cenotaph ("Newton's Cenotaph"), an installation of broken circular mirrors placed in cardboard boxes from pizza, referring to the unrealized project of the French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, who created drawings of an imaginary spherical gravestone monument to Newton, under which there should not be the ashes of the deceased. And the third one is the new work Baptism by Fire, created specifically for the exhibition.

Many works Jury Shust, in its form and shape, resemble, one way or another, monuments or tombstones. This impression was provided by Exo-Oblivion, one of the most memorable works of last year's 5 Moscow Biennale for Young Art (installation of motorcycle helmets, broken beer and wine bottle roses and eggs installed on pieces of building granite) dedicated to the decipherment of archetypes post-modern digital rights. The same shape of monument was in the original version of the installation Spirit Intoxication, exposed by the artist on the granite slab topped with a stepladder. This is how a series of printed on aluminum dibond digital prints Daily Life Relics ("Relics of everyday life") looks surprisingly similar to the gravestone plates with carved graphemes of everyday objects, remaining in the shadow of everyday life. Drawing the projection of the future through the prism of the past, Shust sees in the toast, pronounced over a glass of champagne, and the New Year's tradition of burning papers with desires an archaic attempt to predict or program the future, and in turning to the mirror (the water's surface) - the practice of divination and the associated mystification.

The second floor of the gallery is dedicated to the display of a new video by Jura Shust, Noosphere (2016-2017, 7:17 min) with documentation of the artist's performance performed in one of the underground historical shopping malls in the center of Brussels, which is in ruins because of Financial crisis. The artist, who drinks water from a futuristic fountain in a deserted and abandoned fading shopping center in the center of the economic capital of Europe, clearly appeals to the myth of Narcissus, which is interesting to Shust in the interpretation of Marshall McLuhan, who used the myth to describe the work of technology and the transition from the "pre-mirror era" to the modern world of techno-capitalism. Like Narcissus, who fell into a stupor due to his acquaintance with parallel world, meeting with new technologies that become a continuation of our body makes our body die, to which the artist symbolically establishes a tombstone in the form of a video essay. The chosen reference to the theory of the noosphere of Vladimir Vernadsky, becomes, in this sense, not so much an optimistic anticipation of the transition from the biosphere to the noosphere as a result of reasonably controllable global planetary processes, but rather a personal attempt by an individual to find a way to escape from information intoxication and find his self-identification in the turbulence of the flows of the thinking ocean surrounding him.

Curator: Alexander Burenkov

http://jurashust.com/

https://www.issmag.gallery/shust

https://www.calvertjournal.com/news/show/8288/baptism-by-fire-belarusian-artist-jura-shust-on-myths-and-science-in-moscow

http://tzvetnik.online/portfolio_page/jura-shust-at-issmag/

http://aroundart.org/2017/06/08/yura-shust/

http://style.rbc.ru/preview/59368c0f9a79471c43381c63

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"Yesterday Is The New Tomorrow" Daria Melnikova March 21 – April 15, 2017 Opening 7 PM March 21 2017 ISSMAG Gallery On March 21, ISSMAG gallery will inaugurate Daria Melnikova’s exhibition "Yesterday Is The New Tomorrow”, the first show of a young Latvian artist in Russia. Melnikova's works result from an observation and study of daily routines, clichés and contingencies, forming an attempt to reconstruct the inner logic of these mundane episodes and reveal private experiences that once made them possible and necessary. The artist is interested in public places and their influence on the behaviour of people united by common intentions and desires, mechanisms of conception of a unified aesthetic experience in standardised environments, made possible through readymade design and architectural solutions, philistine decor and stereotypes. In the series of works "Room 1. Brewing Harmony", "Room 2. Fool's Gold" and "Room 3. Follow Me" (2014-2015) Melnikova's appeal to the aesthetics of offices, rest rooms, coffee houses and standardised churches, skilfully designed not only with consideration of functionality, but also with an aim of creating a certain state, allowed for a discussion on ultimate conformism, submission to objects, adoption of norms and stagnation of internal development under the influence of external routine factors. In the project "EX-UVIA" (2016), the artist, reflecting on the shaky concept of home that has been deprived of association with physical space, constructed a fantasy environment of an abandoned dwelling deprived of comfort and coziness, likening it to animals’ shed skin, shells or scales In 2015, Daria Melnikova was the first laureate of kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, having won a two-month residency at the Berlin Institute of Contemporary Art KW. Justifying their choice, participants of the international jury of the prize Alessio Antoniolli and Robert Leckey described the artist's language: "Daria Melnikova achieves a balance between visually impeccable and intriguing, between manual work and mass production. From exquisite sculptures inspired by modernism, in which warm, patterned fabrics are used, to clay "prototypes" with hand-made prints and deformations, Melnikova's works attracted us precisely because they seem mysterious, bold in form and not so easily verbalized." Daria Melnikova’s collaboration with ISSMAG gallery coincides with her one of the first trips to Moscow, where she will use the whole city as an artistic medium – contemporary Moscow architecture will act as a witness of time reflecting cultural and political processes and changes in lifestyle of people of different generations. In tourist photos the crooked huts of Terekhovo village coexist organically with skyscrapers of Moscow-city in the background, so do an elderly woman and her teenage grandson who are forced to live in one apartment. Presenting modern Moscow as a collage of contrasting architectural styles, technologies and values, Melnikova will create an installation from elements typical to traditional Russian wooden architecture – twisted columns, carvings, balusters – combined with modern materials – plastic, metal and concrete, searching for a possibility of a harmonious dialogue and a joint way forward, impossible without continuity of traditions. Curator: Alexander Burenkov The exhibition is organized with the support of The State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia and the Embassy of the Republic of Latvia in the Russian Federation.

www.issmag.gallery

www.dariamelnikova.com

http://aroundart.org/2017/04/17/10-16-aprelya/

http://arterritory.com/ru/novosti/6497-vchera_i_zavtra_na_odnoj_cepochke

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Lisa Chukhlantseva «You Are Like Me in Youth, Only Better"» February 21 – March 11, 2017 Opening 7 PM February 10 2017 On February 21, ISSMAG gallery will open a personal exhibition "You Are Like Me in Youth, Only Better" of the young artist Lisa Chukhlantseva, student of Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Her artistic investigation focuses on visual context of teenagers and kidults who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. Having absorbed similar social and cultural norms, they share similar stories of growing-up and experience similar problems with communication,—a generation the artist calls "angels anonymous." "Angels anonymous" of Chukhlantseva are the soul-searching teenagers procrastinating in the environment of social networks and visual aggregator platforms. They prefer comfy, personalized world of Instagram subscriptions and the public pages of Vkontakte with their pseudonostalgia for 1980s and 1990s to the grey reality of contradictory and confusing contemporaneity. It is as if referring to the period they can hardly remember, they are trying to turn back time so as to overcome the irreversibility of its direction, to turn the historical time into myth, to regain the security of childhood which they have never had or which has irrevocably gone. To the warnings on "filter bubbles" by political and Internet activist Eli Pariser—the negative side of the personalized search when websites determine which information user would like to see based on his personal data—"angels anonymous" respond by creating their own “soap bubbles” of escapism into social networks. Carefully designed visual filtration of reality allows inside this protected world of teenagers only those images and information that are pleasant to them. In response to this statement by Eric Schmidt, Google’s former head—"It will be very difficult for people in the coming years to see or buy anything that was not in some way customized for them"—they, with a smirk, put on those rose-colored glasses of their designed, online identities in touch only with other similar, fashionably compatible profiles. By ignoring the reality of the world in favor of its personalized interpretation, they foreswear love and friendship in favor of "neo-friendship" of followers and subscribers. Like the contemporary artists Rosa Rendl and Amalia Ulman, who employ staged photography to imitate the visual language of social networks, Chukhlantseva reproduces the mechanisms of identity construction in social networks at the time of maturation and self-determination with laptops and smartphones in hands into which adolescents sometimes invest more intimate relationships than in their peers. Self-expression and communication in social networks will inevitably turn (due to the very nature of these networks) conscious or unconscious tool of formation of like-minded audiences who share similar aesthetics, jargons, or outlooks. In one of her public pages at VKontakte named "Winter Solstice" Chukhlantseva uploaded a photo with commentary of her sister: "It's me, my older sister Lisa and Vera in our dacha in the country in Atlashkino. We had our happiest days of summer there. We made up a lot and did everything we wanted: amateur music videos to CDs such as "Disco Hits of 2000s," photoshoots in funny outfits, and various theater performances dedicated to our relatives or neighbors. I don't know, I remember everything too well to write my memoirs, because it has been so recent, and we continue fooling around like this." Light-hearted nostalgia tinging figures of Chukhlantseva is not "homesickness" or even longing for a metaphysical home that no longer exists or never existed, but it's literally longing for the dacha whose image becomes for the artist an incarnation of memories of carefree summer vacations spent with her grandmother away from home, an allegory of infinite freedom and unconscious play with the world. In the dialectic of normalized leisure determinant of specific conditions that are separate from the pervasive employment, dacha becomes a unique state onto which we project that which has no place in our normal, urban, adult life, everything which is so dear to the heart, and everything which is simply impossibe to throw away. Melancholy thus becomes a re-enactment of joyful, happy memories of childhood, a device to bring back childlike mood into the present. The textures of dacha and camp aesthetics on display at ISSMAG gallery serve not only to start the mechanisms of memory, but also to embody today’s Internet hypoaestetics which blur the boundaries between personal and public, virtual and real, ordinary and fancy, identifiable and anonymous. For the method of constructing the exhibition the artist employs the logic emulating blogging in public pages on VKontakte social network by inviting to participate in its public program (discussions, lectures and screenings) her friends and followers of social networks. As a second part of the project in ISSMAG gallery the artist will create an online exhibition (a continuation of the exhibition "You Are Like Me in Youth, Only Better" will open on VKontakte on February 28, the last day of winter). “It can be also mentioned in the press pelease: ‘Do not wake up—the world will burn you!’ Sleeping butterflies go round and round in the night and cannot see that they are being consumed by fire,”—Lisa sends me on Facebook a slightly altered quotation from a review of Guy Debord's film We Go Round and Round in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire with a photo of her dress decorated by a flame in tiled sequins in attachment—“Everything has started with my clothes for Outline rave that I did not put on ... I've seen too much of Guy Debord's) but wait, WAKE UP ... and yet .. I do not know ... I like it that one of the translations of the English ‘dream’ into Russian means fabulation and not sleep, in which case you do not need to wake up.” Сurated by Alexander Burenkov

https://www.issmag.gallery/chuchlantseva http://inde.io/article/3392-hudozhnitsa-liza-chuhlantseva-schastlivogo-kontsa-ne-budet-pust-hotya-by-budet-uyutno http://www.colta.ru/articles/raznoglasiya/13639 http://www.aqnb.com/2017/03/13/soap-bubble-of-escapism-pseudo-nostalgia-and-contradiction-in-lisa-chukhlantsevas-you-are-like-me-in-youth-only-better/

https://vk.com/public32432209?w=wall-32432209_650

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc_BCFCQEQs&t

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Sasha Manik «New Soul» January 11–29 2017 Opening 7 PM January 10 2017 «New Soul» is the first solo exhibition of a young musician and self-taught artist from Kazan, Sasha Manik. Experimenting with new sound and accompanying visual style since 2012, Manik managed to create an aesthetic universe unique for the Russian art landscape. It organically synthesizes Christian symbolism and psychedelic visions, grassroots folk and digital computer graphics, mystical and esoteric phenomena - such as shamanism, folk beliefs and rituals - with the ideas of cutting-edge international post-globalist musical underground. Collage-thinking is one of the key creative techniques for Manik: with the help of sampling and mixing together different, even opposite styles, the artist and musician seeks a method for producing new emotions which often border on religious and mystical experiences. Belonging to a generation and network of artists who grew up online, his artistic research, while mainly intuitive and partly unconscious, has consistently entered into dialogue with sound experimenters from all over the world, such as E + E (Elysia Crampton), ssaliva , 5starb01, Chino Amobi, Swan Meat, MESH and Why Be. As representatives of an underground movement of musicians united by a common aesthetic and, according to The Fader's Adam Harper, the creators of a new genre of «epic collage», they create poli-ethnic rhythms of twenty-first century's music: romantic R&B melodies mixed with neurotic base music, traditional songs of the indigenous peoples weaved in noise structures of car engine sounds, Justin Bieber songs and Steven Reich's pieces. Creating an original soundtrack for the experience of living in today's globalized world, they skillfully blend the esoteric with the more commercial rhythms of club music. The paradoxical combination of different layers of culture is also embodied in the biographies of the musicians themselves: one of the main representatives of the movement, as well as a great influence on Manik, is the half Bolivian, half American Elysia Crampton who was raised as an Adventist in the 1990s in Virginia and experiments equally with fluid gender and symbolic imagery inspired by traditional Latin American culture, Neo-Impressionists and biblical art. The main focus of Manik's collage-thinking is to produce a peculiar temporal mixture of native traditional (paganism and shamanism) and Orthodox Christian culture on the basis of technological innovation. Against these two traditions, the artist builds an original inner philosophy stemming from the concept of "Infinity” - the basis of the Cross", "Root Angel", "Glow", "rare reflections" that are embodied in his automatic and almost unconscious way of writing and drawing. In his visual experiments Manik tries to imagine a world in which progress is based on the reinterpretation of ancestral heritage and the human relationship with nature, which for the artist is the main source of true spiritual experience. "Nature is the mother and the home, it is a joy and sadness, monumental power and unbearably fragile and vulnerable beauty. Nature is something without which there is no notion of "psychedelia". Nature is an outlet and inspiration for artist, his boundless creative studio. This is a vibrantly fluttering in space, ingeniously designed canvas, the center of the elements, the triumph of life and death, erupting cyclically to the timelessness. Watching it, you know intuitively that everything created by human thought or hands mimics nature involuntarily. Widespread forms of natural grace, subtlety of lines, harmony of sounds is nothing else but an endless performance, ideal creative design. This is poetry, which has got its actual bodily incarnation” — Sasha Manik. Rejecting logic and rational knowledge of the world in favour of intuition, Manik and his approach to the creation of art shows that the meaning of art is not so much in the development of a new visual language but in finding the ways to create your own, new reality. The exhibition will feature graphic collages, an installation of artist’s personal belongings, a film about the philosophy and artistic principles of Sasha Manik and a new video for the single Aerial (New Soul) from the EP «Root Angel», released in November and created specifically for the exhibition at ISSMAG GALLERY. Sasha Manik himself will perform at the opening with a DJ set. The exhibition is curated by Alexander Burenkov

http://sashamanik.tumblr.com/  http://hi-net.tumblr.com/ https://www.instagram.com/sashamanik/ https://1000amen.bandcamp.com/album/root-angel-ep http://inde.io/article/2957-muzykant-i-hudozhnik-samouchka-sasha-manik-zhizn-eto-psihodelicheskiy-potok-beg-v-pustotu http://aroundart.org/2017/01/15/9-15-jan/#sasha_manik http://www.ofluxo.net/new-soul-by-sasha-manik-at-issmag-galery/ http://www.aqnb.com/2017/01/27/pagan-rituals-russias-sasha-manik-imagines-the-future-in-terms-of-the-past-in-new-soul/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-bwGRW5zlQ&t=29s

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HUMAN VOICE. TRANSLATIONS*

Virtual performance in distance, in three acts Duration: 24h In situ, eglise Saint-Eustache, Paris mise-en-scene of Jean Cocteau piece «Human Voice»

*translation - written or spoken rendering of the meaning of a word or text in another language; broadcasting; conversion of something from one form or medium into another; process of moving something from one place to another; progressive movement; interpretation

On December 29 ISSMAG gallery presented artist talk between Ekaterina Vasilieva, who talked about their performance HUMAN VOICE. TRANSLATIONS*, held in March 2015 in Paris. This contextual performance is their third collaboration and until now has not been presented in Moscow. This artist talk/pop-up exhibition will be held in form of performative event, part of which will be also the screening of Ted Kotcheff 's «Human Voice» and the presentation of performance's video documentation.

The performance HUMAN VOICE. TRANSLATIONS took place in the church Saint-Eustache, Paris, in March 2015 in the framework of the program of performances with a general name «Human Voice». The name of Jean Cocteau play, the date of the program (the eve of the Total Solar eclipse) and the place (the church) became the three contextual elements at the core of the conceptual performance, an intervention in situ, which the duo of artists of Ekaterina Vasilyeva and Hanna Zubkova made in a form of a polysemic chronotope on the intersection «gesture / text / place»

The initial play by Jean Cocteau (1930) is a monoplay for one character. A desperate woman who’s man had left her, talks on the phone with, apparently, this very man who is about to leave to the seashore with his new lover. The phantom image of this play takes place in a church, which is a place of connection, where the one who speaks is a medium of the voice of the Other, and where the one addresses to someone who is present and absent at the same time. Meanwhile the two protagonist, the performers, are located in different countries, one in Paris, another by the sea. Reflecting on the parameters of the context Ekaterina and Hanna proposed a mis-en-scene in which they used a popular contemporary communication tool - Skype app, which allows the body to obtain virtuality through the web-cam and returns to the reality in the form of a voice.

Solar eclipse is an omen perceived in religious tradition as a mystical event. It appears in the church in a form of on-line broadcast as an astronomical fact, keeps on reconstituting the dialectics of opposition and copresence of transcendency and technology.

19:00 - screening of the film "The Human Voice" by Ted Kotcheff (1960, 50 min.) with Ingrid Bergman in the title role 20:00 - artists talk with Ekaterina Vasilieva and Hanna Zubkova and presentation of video performance HUMAN VOICE. TRANSLATIONS

The series of screenings is curated by Alexander Burenkov

http://www.ekaterinavasilyeva.com/ http://www.hannazubkova.com/ http://www.ekaterinavasilyeva-hannazubkova.com/ http://www.issmag.gallery/

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PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

July 10 – August 10 2016

In frame of the parallel program of 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art Curator: Alexander Burenkov Artists: Bogdan Ablozhnyy / Anne de Boer / Eloïse Bonneviot / Racheal Crowther / Adam Christensen / Ruth Angel Edwards / Patrick Goddard / Maria Gorodeckaya / Tom Huett / Isaac Lythgoe / Frances Malthouse / Josip Novosel / Cory Scozzari / Amalia Ulman / ВАСЯRUN "Planned obsolescence" is an international exhibition project bringing together 15 leading young Russian and foreign artists who explore issues of identity formation, impact of technology on human body, and changing attitude towards the concepts of corporeality, materiality, aesthetics and beauty. Artists are questioning the way modern world makes us approach our bodies, and how digitalization, virtualization, and new means of communication affect changes in our perception of our own bodies, physical and material world.

A functioning ultrafuturistic fitness club in the center of Moscow was chosen as a place for research of modern accelerating aesthetics and the actual philosophical ideas of the theoreticians Paul Preciado and Stephen Shaviro. The artists of the exhibition were invited to create new works for the exhibition held in the spaces of the high-tech fitness center remotely in an “accelerated artistic production” mode. The period of production for this show was limited to a period of one week – artists had to work in between their other exhibition projects and commitments scheduled for this summer, during their flights between countries, on the run. Thus, the self-imposed condition for creating of the art works for the show became a commentary to the essence of the contemporaneity and the category of time as such which are currently undergoing revision, largely due to the concept of post-contemporaneity and a speculative time-complex proposed by philosophers Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik.

The title of the exhibition refers to “planned, dynamic, or built-in obsolescence” which stands for creation of a product with an unjustifiably short life span with the aim of forcing the consumer to make a repeat purchase. The process was first developed in the 1920s and ‘30s with the advent of large-scale production, when each and every minute of the production process came under scrutiny.

When analysing the contemporary situation of technological overproduction of developed capitalism, it is easy to spot the penetration of planned obsolescence tactics into the very fabric of our age. Concern over obsolescence is a feeling that penetrates and conditions our behaviour, way of thinking, purchasing power, and relationship to self, to our external appearance and identity. The obsolescence of the latter is perhaps pushed even harder than in the case with material goods, that barely manage to replace one another in the endless cycle of renewal. Accelerated capitalism, market forces and technological progress, all demand rethinking of our relationship towards radical innovation.

Since the end of the XIX century the classical idea of the body as a territory where the "I" reigns, is being destroyed. Gradually the awareness of body's control by society is becoming more important. In this new perspective of culturalism body was perceived as a construct, as a balance established between the internal and the external, between the flesh and the outer world. Compliance with the rules, daily work on the appearance, elaborate and complex rituals of interaction between people, the limits of freedom in the context of conventional style, behavior, prescribed postures, attitudes, comportment, demeanor and way to move around – that's exactly how the "production" of body by society looks like. What makeup to wear, how to paint yourself, how to dress, which tattoos to make and even how to mutilate themselves – all this becomes a sign of recognition of a gender, age group, social status, or of a desire to buy it. Even the violation of these laws reports a lot about the power of social and ideological contexts.

Vague boundaries between the body-subject and body-object, between the body of the individual and collective body, between the concepts of internal and external have been refined and complicated in the 20th century due to the rapid development of psychoanalysis. By and large, the body is just a convention, a set of mental representations, unconscious image that is created and then recreated in a different way by social discourses and symbolic systems.

Never before the human body knew the kind of change which could compete in its scope and depth with what happened to a body during the XX century. The uniqueness of the existence of the body in the XX century is defined by the ways it has been observed, many of which have been unprecedented. Never before the body has been so subservient to medical imaging technology. Never before an intimate, sexual side of the body has received such close attention. Never before our visual culture has known equivalents of images of violence against the body in a war or in a concentration camp. Never did the spectacles, the object of which it was, produce such a revolution like modern painting, photography, and cinema.

Talking now about the body, the physical "I" and identity means to raise the anthropological question of human nature. In an era when virtual bodies are spreading rapidly, when visual study of living organisms becomes deeper, when it's common to share your blood and organs, when life reproduction is programmed, when plenty of implants erases the border between mechanic and organic, when genetics are getting ever closer to the individual replication capabilities, and the ideas of post- and trans-humanism become reality, it becomes more necessary than ever to explore and test the boundaries of what it means to be human: "Is my body still mine?" In somato-, techno- or biocapitalism the body is no longer integral, but is fragmented and penetrated by new technologies that, in Preciado’s parlance, are “soft, featherweight, viscous, gelatinous.” Can artificial be beautiful? Does one need to change the body to change himself? And what will these changes provoke?

The opening will be held on July 9th with specifically designed performances by 3 artists: 20:15 — ВАСЯRUN (Moscow) 21:15 — Maria Gorodeckaya (London) 21:30 — Ruth Angel Edwards (London)

Vasya RUN training

Duration: 60 minutes Participants: Dmitry Zaschepin Denis Karpovich, 2016

Physical training for performers is as basic of a need as is training camps for athletes. Stage presence can only be achieved through continuous training of the body. The actor must not only be in good physical shape, he needs to fully monitor a complex set of reactions, and constantly avoid automatism. There is no simulator to hone these skills, so the only way to train is acting improvisation.

The participants of VASYA RUN, who in their practices strive to create 'perfect communication', develop self-consciousness and self-exploration, have repeatedly used such techniques as dynamic immersion, work with body and voice, breathing techniques, concentration exercises, attention management, classical stage training. For the exhibition the performers will try to work in front of a mirror for the first time during their performance ("Training", 60 min) – in addition to the internal censor, who is continuously judging whether the momentum is genuine or copied, an external factor will emerge. Performers (Dmitry Zashchepin Denis Karpovich) will observe themselves from the outside, thereby complicating the task. Despite the search for actor's freedom, borders, however, remain strictly defined by tasks: disclosure (plasticity training, improvisation to given music, warming up wearing headphones), management of physical force (principle of negation, search for the contradirectional gesture), presence (exercises from the series "me alone"), tuning to single body breathing, withdrawal of protecting reaction (fights based on trust, without use of direct force), becoming one whole body (contact improvisation).

Maria Gorodeckaya

Concrete slab, 2016 concrete, cigarette butts

Wax slab, 2016 Wax, rings for piercing

How to survive the art world, 2016 artist sweat, whey protein, cocaine

In her artistic practice Maria Gorodeckaya explores formation of gendered bodies; body as a platform that enables materialization of political imagination. "Gender", "sex", "sexuality", "sexual identity" and "fun" are subjects to the control of political forces. According to philosopher Paul (Beatriz) Preciado, who reflects on the reality of pharmacopornocapitalistic era, its control operates through the new dynamics of advanced techno-capitalism, global media, and biotechnology. Fitness centers, located in the heart of the process of body forming, provide numerous ways of self-improvement through diet, exercise, psychological trainings. The work of Gorodeckaya poetically combines symbols of the era: whey protein, anti-aging cream, and egg cells, as raw materials of the capitalist commodification of sexuality and reproductive system. The artist tries to show how the pharmaceutical industry, capitalism and pornography regulate and normalize subjectivity, turning individuals into bioports of political imagination.

At the opening of the exhibition Maria Gorodeckaya will read her new poems dedicated to the mentioned subjects.

Ruth Angel Edwards

Skype-performance Video, DJ-set, Skype broadcasting 2016

At the opening of the exhibition Ruth Angel Edwards has introduced a new site-specific performance. It consisted of a DJ set performed by the artist herself, accompanied by visual material, problematizing our relation to the body as an object, the body as a machine and as a symbol of the body, generated in real time. In her performance Ruth Angel Edwards referred to the fetishisized female athletic forms, treating them as popular visual metaphors, deconstructing them and creating a new, confusing and bewildering space. Also on display are the artist's stereograms printed in the form of scrolls, which are the logical continuation of the performance.

https://www.facebook.com/events/553895891463523/ http://www.ofluxo.net/planned-obsolescence-show-in-body-digital-fitness-miltronic-club/ http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/exercising-art-in-a-moscow-gym http://calvertjournal.com/news/show/6474/workout-moscow-gym-exhibition-brings-together-young-russian-and-internation http://aroundart.ru/2016/07/18/otkry-tiya-nedeli-4-17-iyulya/ http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3038032 http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3041449

[sashaburenkov]

V-A-C Foundation Pavilion “Expanding Space” (at Afisha Picnic Music Festival) 25th July 2015, 12:00 – 20:00 As part of the “Expanding Space” programme to develop art in the urban environment of Moscow, the V-A-C Foundation has invited artists to come up with projects founded on direct interaction with the audience of the Afisha Picnic, one of Moscow’s main summer music festivals which, every year for the past decade, turns the normal peace and quiet of Kolomenskoye Park into an utterly transformed place for the duration of a single day. The projects investigate the dynamics of the festival and its social, historical, acoustic and natural landscape, as well as the visitors who make up a temporary one-day community, which, in its form, constitutes ephemeral, almost immaterial artistic practices, widening the concept of the forms in which art can exist in an urban setting, including that of Moscow’s city parks and squares. All the works, created especially for Kolomenskoye Park, redefine the very concept of public art, its possibilities and variability of forms, be it in terms of a day-long participatory intervention (Yekaterina Yushkevich’s “You, me, and strangers” and Sergei Kasich’s “Hygiene”), or a social experiment in the form of a freely downloadable mobile phone application (Valentin Fetisov, Dina Zhuk and Nikolai Spesivtsev’s “Paranoiapp”), a series of “blind” tours (the Supramen collective’s “Supramen walk Kolomenskoye”), or a participatory sound art installation (Filipp Ilyinsky’s “diurnal sound fields and bodily activity”). The art projects all take place in the park space, dissolving into the holiday atmosphere of the festival, but are also invisibly present in the “Expanding Space” V-A-C pavilion: in the centre of a space created by the Moscow architectural studio Archiproba Studios, formed on the principles of the media-library and information point, headphones will be positioned with which it will be possible to hear the artists themselves telling the stories behind their projects. Artists: Filipp Ilyinsky, Valentin Fetisov, Dina Zhuk, Nikolai Spesivtsev, Supramen collective, Yekaterina Yushkevich, Sergei Kasich Curator: Alexander Burenkov

https://www.facebook.com/events/118157598525723/

http://expandingspace.ru/

[sashaburenkov]

A special commission for the FutureEverything festival: Dissolve Thursday 26th February and Friday 27th February All day, FutureEverything Conference, Manchester Town Hall

Get annoyed by social networks, but don’t want to stop using them? Disappear insensibly from the act of communication by redirecting your digital persona to your close friends! Dissolve, by Valentin Fetisov and Alexander Burenkov, allows you to leave digital space and observe your digital identity live a life of its own by handing over your control of it. It opens up a new universe of total freedom from the buzz of excessive communication in social networks without avoiding it completely and turns your friends into your alter-ego, by redirecting your digital persona to your close friends who you really trust, and initiates new conversations between your contacts who might not even know each other.

http://readytobedissolved.com/

[sashaburenkov]

Curating and creative direction of VASYA RUN, an interactive social experiment on the bounds of theater, music, and contemporary art, which the goal is to find new ways of pushing the boundaries of personality in the digital age.

VASYA RUN is a space of organic interaction between contemporary artists, amateur actors, renowned hip-hop performers, street artists, choreographers, spiritual teachers and theorists. 

These performers all agreed to the experiment after being selected from an extensive open casting call. As their main task, the project demands that they develop self-awareness, self-study and a total immersion in the work before them. It is with this goal that they created an entire platform to enable interaction and collaboration.

The first event within this platform will be “VASYA RUN. Allowing Existence to Happen,” a performance drawing word-for-word from the true stories of Moscow graffiti artists. Alongside the main protagonist who is off to Paris to “do the Metro,” we are faced with the oppression of totalitarian laws against vandalism. Confronted with our own helplessness, our only option is self-awareness.

 Is it possible for a play to not have drama at its core? The drama of “ VASYA RUN. Allowing Existence to Happen” lies in its text, but this text is really just a rhythm, something intense and independent, coming from a hidden space. What takes place on stage is the real process, unfolding before our eyes in real time. The cast includes the very teenagers, whose lived experience among these subcultures provides the substance behind VASYA RUN. When encountering this kind of reality, it becomes clear that they are living behind a thick mask. These myriad actions provide the freedom that allows participants to discover themselves as individuals. For this to happen, during the rehearsals, performers work on their own bodies, tapping into techniques for self-awareness that are based on those of spiritual teachers. These methods include dynamic immersion, breathing exercises, trance, and concentration, all applied towards a focus of one’s attention.

 At the center of the performance is the information and illusion to find oneself through words and ideas, through culture. In an effort to work with language, whose main component is pure duration, the performance team decided to cover all actions in text, presenting the audience with an experience of language and time. Also hidden are the faces of the participants, who want very much not to be seen so much as heard. 

The team:

Anastasia Batashova, Andrey Droni Anisimov, Vasily Belov, Beat-Maker-Beat aka SpaceKid, Alexander Biserov, Sasha Burenkov, Olga Ganzha, Ivan Gladkiy, Roman Gordeev, Anton Gromov, Alina Gutkina, Nikita Dedov, Ruslan Dikanev, Anatoly Esaulov, Dmitry Zaschepin, Denis Karpovich, Andrey Kim, Sergey Komarov, Michael Koshubarov, Sonia Kydeeva, Kirill Kuzmin, Evgeny Kulinich, Dmitry Kulyabin, Alisa Lyudinshina, Ivan Merkulov, Sergey Pakhotin, Denis Povagin, Konstantin Samoylov, Alex Trofimov, Alexey Shvetsov, Ernest Yakovlev, MC Check, 

http://vasyarun.ru/ https://032c.com/2014/vasya-run-a-russian-graffiti-performance-turns-into-a-program-for-spiritual-emancipation/https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/4424/vasya-run-moscow-street-theatre-performance http://svilova.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Vasya_Run_2015.pdf http://www.interviewrussia.ru/art/vasyarun-sceny-ne-budet-i-otvetov-na-vashi-voprosy-tozhe http://faceslaces.com/articles/vasja_run_nasha_glavnaja_tsel_ne_spektakli_tsel_po-1891/ http://www.vltramarine.ru/mag/culture/announce/2194