Accelerate!

From January 23 to February 5, 2017, the Triumph Gallery is hosting the exhibition “No Human Grace” by Alexey Taruts , which addresses the problem of depicting the foreign in the media and modern culture. Natalia Protasenya talks about the image of a stranger and a person’s loss of humanity.

In his project “No Human Grace,” Alexey Taruts addresses the topic of representation of the image of an alien in popular culture, trying to bypass the logic of exclusion. One of the first to point out the excluded position of zombies in the context of the triumph of capitalism was the American director George Romero. Subsequent attempts to conceptualize the image of mutants, vampires and aliens through art were made many times, but did not advance beyond criticism of the idea of ​​domestication and forced adaptation. Taruts suggests looking at interplanetary mutants as a product of capitalist overproduction, capable of overcoming the situation of the Agambenian camp (total, “camp” control of the neoliberal economic system over man) in the logic of accelerationism. The exploitation of the image of a monster in popular culture is nothing more than an attempt by Western civilization to strengthen the foundations of its own hegemony. The study of the figure of the other/alien has a long tradition in philosophy and social anthropology (existentialism, ethics of the Other, critical race theory, queer and creep theories, psychoanalysis). At the heart of most conceptualizations of the image of the other is the fear of the alien, the other - the fear of merging or absorption by this other. The aliens combine both the rejected image of the excluded, who does not fit the definition of “human,” and the alluring image of the posthuman, marking the end of human logic.

Irrational fear of the fruits of one’s own rationality makes a person lose that very humanity, turning him from a victim of an alien attack into an executioner guarding the borders of the human race. The very specificity of the view here is extremely anthropocentric, which makes us recall the rigid normativity of identity politics, which secretly despises differences. The fear of denial of the universal value of humanity is adjacent to the unconscious desire to visualize the triumph of technology. This schizophrenic duality fully manifests itself in popular culture through the image of the posthuman.