A terrible place

How to get rid of enemies - external and internal - tell in a gallery on a hodgepodge

What dangerous feelings are dictated by many of our actions? What like a disease suddenly instills in the surrounding reality and makes us come to the world or hide in a shadow? The answer can be found at the exhibition "Afraid", which opens up to us all the shades of the terrible: familiar and unknown.

16 artists take part in the exposition “I'm afraid”, whose works are based on their own interpretation of fear. Someone is scared by closed spaces and incomprehensible situations, someone's fears come to life in dark corners, and someone is afraid to lose their memories and express an unsightly truth, afraid to comprehend life, make a choice.

The beginning of the exhibition is the installation of Antonina Baver: black letters on a white background, illuminated by multi -colored lamps - "dedicated to all those whom I hate."

The design of the exhibition space imitates the evacuation plan (Maria Colina-Peresa): a blinking lamp, black walls, white arrows on the floor indicating the direction of movement. This place is like a metaphorical maze calling for the search for a way out - the path of salvation, liberation from fear - personal and public. The visual series is complemented by anxious music, rhythmic blows, distant screams.

A video interview with one of the curators of the exhibition of Louise Morin with the famous Oleg Kulik, a kind of answer to the early project of which (“I believe!” 2006) and this exposition is a reason to think about fear as a driving force in the life of any person. The main thing is the connection of the fear of social and the fear of personal, which in the world of contemporary art is inseparable from each other. But being released from public phobias, you focus on the inner fears, which, according to Kulik, and nourishes creative imagination.

The unification in one exhibition space of artists from different places - the Urals and Siberia, the European part of Russia, Ukraine, as well as France, Austria and the Netherlands - allows you to organize a place for fear of fear in a certain intricate laboratory, where it is interesting to study strange installations, confusing videos, frightening sounds that cause a multifaceted feeling that fills consciousness.

On the black canvas, Anna Rotaenko’s installation: under the rhythmic blows imitating the knock of the heart, you can read a story consisting of fragmentary memories of difficult childhood, pain of loss, about the black moments of life and about future desires:

“You can almost anything, in order to talk about money, illness, to argue, demand the impossible, take risks, ask uncomfortable questions. I am almost twenty -seven, I want to stand in line for donation, enjoy life, often see my mother, not talk about the war, not remember violence ... "

Each artist embodies his understanding of the word “afraid”, leading him from micro to the macro level, using the concepts of “enemy”, “control”, “self -control”, “censorship” as litmus papers, showing fear inside and around us.

Diana Machulina: “For me, the worst is the loss of memory <...>. Society is afraid of reminders that radical changes are possible, erasing the past, trying to erase its fears about the future. ”

Turning to local practices, rituals, mythology and folklore, artists do not ignore universal moods. They seem to prove the theorem from the contrary: fear can be completely different-the usual aversion to unpleasant and frightening objects (like dried dead frogs in a series of photographs of Sergei Bratkov), a response to political, social and cultural changes (in the story and photographs of Masha Sumnina) and at the same time attractive. We inevitably reach for what scares us, to what sometimes causes disgust and confuses thoughts. The gaze attracted in the series of photographs of Janina Boldireva's shades of fear - blurry fragments with a shaky reality.

The interpretation of the fear of Alexander Ozumov is a bed under the stairs. The fears of everyone often gain forms in the dark, come in dreams and become reality.

Fear can turn into a loss of memories or gaining knowledge that cannot be applied, fear not to take advantage of your rights or use it unreasonably, the desire to conceal your judgments, instead of speaking openly and honestly.

Fear more and more penetrates our social life. The poet is not accidental interest in the exhibition, where the viewer goes in the hope of formulating his fears, buried by the artistic imagination of people who have found a way to cope with their phobias. “Treatment with art”, as the term “art therapy” is translated from Latin.

The exhibition will last until December 10.

Ekaterina Semenova , for "New"