And the deception that wrapped us up

“Invisible difference” in “ARTStrelka-projects”

As part of the first Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art “Stop, who’s coming?” The exhibition “Invisible Difference” opened. The curators of the exhibition, Alexander Evangeli and Sergei Khachaturov, invited three artists to play the game “don’t believe your eyes” and radicalize the issues of modernity “not by depicting the visible, but by making visible” (Paul Klee) the mechanisms and meanings of reality.

The exhibition was housed in two halls. The first room is occupied by works by Zhanna Kadyrova and Diana Machulina. The second is given to the installation of Irina Korina. All works surprise with their scale and sense of large plastic form. Monumentalism is usually at odds with contemporary art, and it’s nice that in the case of Korina, Kadyrova and Machulina, everything, as they say, has grown together. The epithet “neo-Amazons of the neo-avant-garde” is quite applicable to them. Visitors are greeted by Jeanne's work - a huge sea shell with a pink belly. “First I had an idea for the material, then I was looking for an image of the composition,” explains Kadyrova. The material of her work is plastic, which is used for cladding bathrooms, ceilings, or, more specifically, a fake building material. According to the curator of the Gospel, “Zhanna Kadyrova’s object is a blatant invasion of the aesthetics of construction into the structure of the sublime, in fact its catastrophe. Its object refers to the context of formation, which turns out to be the bearer of style, aesthetics, ideology and characterizes Moscow under construction and the very unstable, energy-rich state of man in the city.”

Diana Machulina decided to enlarge a tiny photograph from the Trud newspaper in 1985 to the size of a picturesque fresco for the material dedicated to the celebration of the anniversary of the Victory. The photo shows a meeting of the presidium in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. Under a huge sculpture of Lenin. Ahead on the podium is Gorbachev. The photo was not chosen by chance: because of it, many newspaper employees were fired. The problem was that in the original version, the Secretary General's rostrum was shifted far to the right. But I wanted it in a grand manner, in the center. With the help of editing and retouching, the podium was moved. But the number was not entirely successful. A recognizable bald head appeared both above the podium and on the table in front of the officials. They forgot to retouch it. Half of Mikhail Sergeevich’s face lies like a strange phantom in the hands of the people’s servants. Power sharing in the truest sense of the word. The blurry faces in the picture and the gray newsprint are quite adequate to the feeling of the agony of the Soviet state. The painting occupies almost the entire wall of the exhibition hall.

The surprise of the first hall was the visual unification of the two compositions. The flow of Diana Machulina’s painting into Zhanna Kadyrova’s composition was in no way intended by the artists at the stage of their creation. “At the creative stage, I had one problem - the problem of drawing many faces of an overly numerous presidium,” admits Diana. However, the long tables of the presidium echo the spiral turns of the shell, the completion of which suddenly resembled the tower of the Third International. This is how the theme of utopia and dystopia of communism arose. The nomenklatura of the USSR, the servants of the people, dashingly twist themselves into the spiral of a simulated synthetic shell organism and disappear into its parodic pink womb. Everything is rhymed and coloristic (grisaille, “newspaper” color of the picture and gray and blue - sinks, white walls and gray floor imitating tiles).

The search for another “invisible difference” between reality and its simulations is suggested by the work of Irina Korina, which has been awarded a separate hall. Her “Izba” was created for the series “Nervous Ground” and is a huge imitation object. From the same fake synthetic materials that are used today in the construction and decoration of offices and housing, a house with fake logs was “cut down” (fiber rings for sewer pipes covered with film with wood patterns). The hut looks like illustrations from fairy tales, but there are some plastic roots growing out of its window. Either the nature of the house is mutating in its own womb, or the hut is simply sick of the fake. We try to deceive ourselves by remembering utopias of life in accordance with nature, advertising loyalty to traditions, past idylls and roots. And the simulated nature of this advertising, officially supported nostalgia, is obvious.

“Invisible Difference” can be seen in the “ARTStrelka-projects” gallery until July 31.

Petr LARIONOV