Lenin Cake in the coffin and the city of the Sun from pasta: the exhibition "This is not food" was opened in Moscow "

The ERA Foundation has opened an exhibition "This is not food", prepared from the works of modern Moscow artists on a culinary theme.

Creating this project, the curator Olga Lopukhova proceeded from the realities of the Moscow art scene, which is influenced by conceptualism, in which the culinary discourse was one of the important, and from the realities of Russian life in general. Where sausage (in the sense of its presence in stores) serves as a universal scale, along which they measure the depth of the crisis of stagnation and the growth of the success of democracy, and the main issues are discussed in tradition in the kitchen, Kommersant writes.

This is indicated by the "kitchen suprematism" - a photo series of "blue noses", where slices of sausages and bread are folded on plates in replicas of the geometric constructions of Kazimir Malevich. Whereas socio-political changes in the country can be traced on two work: the perestroika portrait of the sausage of the brush Sergey Vorontsov and the famous Dodefolt poster Andrei Logvin with the inscription "Life was a success" laid out with black caviar in red.

The food problem is considered at the exhibition in a wide context. To someone, the food reminds of death, as Alexander Gnilitsky, in the picture of which the ranks of cans with pickles are likened to columbaria, to someone-about the best manifestations of life, like Tatyana Lieberman, in the photographs of which melons and bananas reveal their erotic essence.

One gives a reason to speak out on the topic of geopolitics, for example, the AES group in the video “Yellow cooks, white eats”: on two screens - literal illustrations for the name shot in a Chinese restaurant. Another to think about the nature of the authorities, as Yuri Shabelnikov, who has embodied the metaphor "Lenin in you and in me" in the 1997 action, when an 80-kilogram cake in the form of Lenin in the coffin was eaten by the artist and spectators.

Conceptualists Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagin found metaphysical meanings in a loaf of bread, of which their "Russian idea" is composed of bricks. Leonid Tishkov built the city of the Sun "Ladomir" from pasta. In the ironic video of Alexandra Mitlyanskaya, various kitchen procedures, from ignition of a gas burner to squeezing minced meat from a meat grinder, turn into a visual ballet to the music of Tchaikovsky.

Olga Chernysheva on her canvases reproduces pictures from a culinary book showing how to knead and roll out the dough, but it seems that this is a brief manual to create the world. Maria Chuykova made an installation on the topic of interethnic conflicts: from the boxes piled in the corner of vegetables, scraps of bazaar discussion are reported - voices with a variety of accents are discussing who "entered" ".