Translated material
Wandering in dots
No Translations festival took place in Moscow
As part of the “Artresidence” program, a multi-genre festival was held, which presented music, choreography, theater, and visual arts. It took place throughout the holidays and was supported by the directorate of the “Open Stage” project of the Moscow Department of Culture, ArtRaum, DEI, ArtExhibit, as well as philanthropists Artak Ohanyan and Gayane Igityan. The forum emblem is funny and symbolic in its own way: “...”. That's right: three dots in quotation marks. Next - "No Translations. No. 1. Everyday heroism." All this grammatical and semantic redundancy, in general, honestly testifies to the moving meanings of the program, perhaps not strictly formulated by the organizers, including choreographer Konstantin Grouss, artist Timofey Karaffa-Korbut, musician Fyodor Amirov. The spirit of free improvisation and recognition of different types of art in the process of communication is the main goal of the festival. And the festival accomplished this task not only heroically, but easily and elegantly.The venue was chosen accurately - the stage of the former Anatoly Vasilyev Theater on Povarskaya. An old Moscow house with a labyrinth of passages. Stages, halls, antique lampshades, dressing rooms. In the courtyard (a real Moscow one) the artist Andrei Kuzkin sat and made a work for everyone who wanted it as a keepsake: he glued a voluntarily donated small object to a thick sheet of paper. The red frame at the corners was decorated with mysterious numbers, the logic of the combination of which is known only to the intuition of the artist himself. We can say that Kuzkin gave out a kind of conceptual tickets to the No Translations action.
Choreographic groups such as “Po.V.S. Dances” and Zero Dance Gallery performed in the theater hall. The complex plastic score subtly correlated with the visual images of the fest. Radically modernist sound, including the use of a prepared piano and even sound telepathy, was provided by Andrei Suchilin, Anton Efimov, and Fedor Amirov.
The exhibition itself is one of No Translations’ great successes. The rich visual range was ensured by the polyphony of genres, styles and the courageous mixing of masters of different generations. Sculptural cacti by Alexander Povzner took up residence in the dressing rooms. The classicist exedra of the foyer was decorated with exquisite paintings by Yegor Koshelev in the late Baroque style on the theme of the artist’s family. Video works were shown in dark pavilions, especially the ironic one about Lily Brik's lovers from Andrei Bartenev. Paintings hung in the large halls where dancers and musicians performed. The neo-Fauve canvas with a plot from the Christian cycle of Timofey Karaffa-Korbut precisely rhymed with the non-objective bright abstraction of Maxim Smirennomrensky. New poor art was proposed by artists of a new generation. Arseny Zhilyaev mounted a version of communal suprematism from low-tech furniture on the wall, and under it Ksenia Sorokina laid out a crisp parquet floor made of crumbling waffles. It turned out very intricately, in the good tradition of theatrical trompe l'oeil.
Overall, everything was a success. And the fact that there are too many punctuation marks in the title is both an advance for the future and a gesture of trust in the creative complicity of the audience, who are free to insert their own formulations into the wandering ellipses.