Translated material
Borders beyond borders
The II Moscow International Biennale of Young Art opens
The debut exhibition of young art that took place two years ago, although it was called a biennale, was still perceived as only a good entry into this venerable genre. The second show in terms of the number of participants and exhibitions is quite comparable to the adult biennale. Throughout July, Muscovites and guests have the chance in their free time to parade from gallery to gallery, from museum to museum, and look for the best of the works of 600 artists and art groups stationed in sixty exhibitions at forty venues in the capital. Curators Daria Pyrkina and Daria Kamyshnikova reviewed more than two and a half thousand applications received from Russia and seventy countries around the world. As a result, masters from fifty-three countries (including Russia) participate. As the curators emphasize, the presence of projects from Russian regions, neighboring countries and the CIS is especially important.The theme of the youth show is paradoxical and relevant at the same time - “Borders”. Paradoxical because today, with the latest opportunities and technologies of communication, the topic of borders seems to be becoming an anachronism. This is interestingly confirmed by the fact of sponsorship of the festival by the largest cellular operator in Russia, MTS, and the successful young airline S7 airlines. And the main partner of the biennale, the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation, considers communication and dialogue, the integration of the culture of Russian regions into the global space, to be one of the main strategies.
Nevertheless, the topic of borders is more significant today than ever. Partly due to the dizzying success of the said erasure of the border genre as such. Not only globalization and cultural unification are sad, but also the crisis of the individual’s cognition, up to the collapse of ideas about what is good and what is bad. After all, dispersion and dispersion across different cultures neutralizes the semantic core of each and discredits its value (full) content. And in general, this is a vector of movement towards all-justifying irresponsibility. How can one not recall the great statement about the boundaries of Gogol’s Nozdryov! Wanting to amaze Chichikov with the size of his possessions, he said the imperishable: “Here is the border!... everything you see on this side is all mine, and even on the other side, all this forest that turns blue over there, and everything that is beyond forest, it’s all mine.”
Is there a danger of catching the Nozdrevschina virus at the festival? Absolutely yes. If this happens (and almost all the main openings of the Biennale are ahead), then the show can be likened to a voyage hastily concocted by post-Soviet tour operators (who doesn’t remember them?): when there is a lot, it’s colorful, colorful and noisy, but the differences suddenly turn into indifference, and thousands all cases of life answers are replaced by circular irresponsibility.
The first exhibition of the biennale, which opened yesterday, was prepared by a team of four curators: three Frenchmen (Yves Robbert, Isabelle Bertolotti, Thierry Raspail) and Daria Pyrkina. The exhibition is dedicated to the Year of France in Russia and is called “Vis-a-Vis”. Takes place in the main premises of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) on Zoologicheskaya Street (13, building 2). Its idea is a meeting at a distance between countries, Russia and France, those two who have something to say to each other. Creatively, of course. The selection of participants who made up the pairs was a very intricate, three-stage process. At first, Pyrkina studied Lyon artists (Lyon is a partner in the project), and three Lyon curators studied Russians. As a result, about twenty “artists” were selected through joint efforts. Then they began to look for opportunities for their creative dialogue, combining language and ideas. As a result, the circle shrank to seven participants on each side. Next, these seven selected couples were introduced to each other via the Internet and asked to independently discuss and select works for the exhibition. This established triple cordon actually helped to get some very good work. However, the curators added a bit of Nozdrevism to the very principle of exhibition.
The first impression of what I saw: the success of the great Moscow Biennale with the main curatorial project of Jean-Hubert Martin inspired the young people too. I remember the main exhibition of the Biennale the year before last, made by Pyrkina. There, as is customary in the abstruse, political and social art forums of Europe, all sorts of graphs, reports, documents, diagrams and theses hung. Some kind of office. It's hard to look at it as art. Now, right on the heels of Martin's exhibition, the Garage is creating a visual splendor. And miniature palaces, and abstract sculptures in the halls, and a fragile life-size human figure intricately woven into the musical staff, and a car hidden in something like a chest of drawers, and huge paintings and photographic polyptychs covering the entire wall. And the space breathes, and nothing crowds each other. And there are fourteen works in total for the huge hall. A step towards an event in the territory of art itself has certainly been made.
Each work in itself is interesting and subtly staged and executed. However, we were promised pairs. And this is where the problem arises. At first, it is not possible to understand who found each other with whom, who went to whom for so long to perform a duet. To the question, where is the counterpart to the chest of drawers with the car (by Ivan Plyushch and Irina Drozd), Pyrkina answered: go behind the wall, there you will see a picturesque polyptych with telephone booths in luxurious interiors (work by Laurent Proulx), here’s a pair for you. And so it is with almost all couples: their common territory, literally according to Nozdryov, is beyond the boundaries of visibility. And within the boundaries, you can guess about what other vis-à-vis might turn out. After all, right next to the chest of drawers with the car, there is a surreal photograph with chairs on the lawn at night from Delphine Balle. Why not a union? (Her genuine counterpart is the photo polyptych of Vladimir Logutov.)
The combination of two strategies, involving strict selection boundaries and disappearing boundaries in the direction of the exhibition, has its effect. Still, a bit of Nozdrevism (but only a bit!) irritates at first, and then forces you to independently analyze all the exhibits, delve into the essence and choose in the labyrinth of plots, of course, heroes who have found each other. Having gone through the trials of separation, the unions only became stronger.
Two pairs are in the lead for me. The first one can be called “House - Anti-House”, artists Vincent Oline and Ilya Trushevsky. Oline created an amazingly beautiful palace from wood with inlays, with colonnades, halls, luxurious chandeliers, loggias, and terraces. The palace would become a masterpiece of the Rococo style. Yes, the fact is that its dimensions are comparable to the scale of the auditorium of the famous Lilikan theater. And in terms of configuration, the palace is nothing more than an ancient secretary. A parody of the thinning beauty of absolutism is wittily titled "The Fall of an Empire." Trushevsky hung a battery painted black, wrapped it in black hoses, and tied it to a school desk with geodesic marks and a sponge on it. The black octopus seems to be watching a video of an artist extracting primary elements. Fire, soil, iron are visible. The video installation itself is associated with post-avant-garde opuses, with the alchemy of Beuys and Barney. If Vincent is about the beautiful and fragile, sometimes feigned shell of architecture, then Ilya is about the guts, about what lives inside the beautiful walls, is flesh, ribs, life-giving communication.
The second couple is Russian Stas Bags (Milk&Vodka group) and Frenchman Cedric Albi. They offer wise meditative images inspired by the practice of conceptualism. Bugs laid out five metal five-part boundaries on the platform, like a staff of music. And to each of them he hung fragments of flat multi-colored figures on a transparent wire. In perspective, the figures are combined into the image of a person who is either assembled or disembodied, unraveling into separate sticks and segments. The work is called “I looked at this border for five weeks in a row.” If we take into account the five-part structure of the entire installation, we will see a person woven into the musical staff, becoming the visible embodiment of the sounding musical phrase. Albi also talks about the vicissitudes of materials in a four-part installation with photographs and found objects. The goal is to find a human dimension to technicalism. Albie photographs powder spilled from an old light bulb in daylight. Places the discovered piece of wood - parts of some kind of tool - on a pedestal in the form of a folded book. And the old instructions, in which everything is torn off except for the title like “User’s Guide,” is placed under glass like a museum engraving. The center and periphery of things and concepts is the theme of his project (and one of the common themes of the entire young forum).
For all those interested in the biennale, MTS offered its game. All information about the events will be posted on the Red Art virtual platform (www.red.mts.ru/redart). A competition for the most innovative project has been announced separately, as well as a competition for spectators for the best photo mosaic. Those who want to get information about the fourteen major exhibitions of the Biennale on their mobile phone, go to the interactive service “Mobile Audio Guide”.
The hottest days of the Biennale are the second half of this week. Winzavod, NCCA, MMMA, even the Tsaritsyno Museum are the main venues now. We are following events.