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Spring of Dream or Nightmare. Catalog
Mary Anaskina, Natasha Angashanova, Vadim Mel
Plastic, found objects, photo printing, particle board, ceramics, wool, slime, acrylic, kinetic sand
2020
Performance at the opening February 1: “Cool story, Sis”
by Mary Anaskina (14 sec) - watch the video
Mary Anaskina, Natasha Angashanova
I told them to write a joke in the box and they put a mirror in it
Cardboard, paper, polyurethane foam, acrylic, photo printing, plastic
2020
I had a dream that I had nothing
Paper, gouache, acrylic, charcoal, gel pen, spray paint, table - the work of the artist Valentina Novikova, a chair made by Vadim Mel, hoodies, jeans, sneakers, 3D-mask of Alexander Pushkin, Caligo Memnon paper butterfly, photo printing, found objects, drawing under the stairs
2020
Performance at the opening February 1: "Like a ghost"
by Natasha Angashanova (5 min) - watch the video
Candle,don't cry
Wood, textile, foam rubber, sequins
2020
svecha ne plach (candle – don’t cry)
Drawn on a specular sequinned canvas this image can be adjusted every time it is exhibited to mirror its exhibition environment. The fictional premise of the drawing and the accompanying melancholic song see the invisible protagonist lament her former lover in the dead of the starry night, which is reflected on the canvas along with the physical attributes of the space. By entering into a playful dialogue with the exhibition space, this work aspires to establish connection between the artist’s dreamworld and the space it temporarily inhabits together with a cohort of other artworks in a group show.
A portrait of the one that got away
Drawn by the wind in moonlight’s bliss
A day that never came
Flew by the window and made me reminisce
ooh-ooh-ooh
Candle don’t you cry
Your tears of wax won’t melt these frozen hearts
Night don’t fail me now
And cradle me in the embrace of thousand stars
A final bow on autumn’s stage
A silhouette of dreams that we then had
And i tear out this farewell page
Burned down the words that we once said
ooh-ooh-ooh
Candle don’t you cry
Your tears of wax won’t tie this undone bow
Night don’t fail me now
And of the shadow i let go
[Saxophone solo]
Words 1
Ceramics
2020
Slova (words) is a series of round clay pieces. Their ornament mimics a widespread decorative approach to contemporary interior and industrial design where a variety of blank surfaces, from coffee cups and throw pillows to hotel rooms and airport lounges, are embellished with patterns made up of non sequiturs and uplifting words. Designed to replenish space with meaning and orient the subject towards experiential perception of space, these patterns amount to absurd gibberish when read together and produce little sense. By transporting these embellishments onto art objects and then placing them in an exhibition space the artist is attempting to evaluate the similar intent of art to create experience and meaning.
Azil (Liza Chukhlantseva)
Raptor Spiro, 2020
Ceramics, photo print on paper, linen, book, video on smartphone
The world I once knew burns out before my eyes.
Lighters in the sky melt the iris.
A sad hit becomes an ear-worm swirling eternity backwards.
A multiplied pattern on a wallpaper repeats but I can’t come back home.
Where does this curve go? What is in the center of my Universe?
A black hole is a trauma that determines the destiny.
My instinct is to live as a counterweight to the wrecking force of gravity.
Dum spiro, spero – my last religion and hope.
A giddy fall in a dream ends by a doomed mosquito’s squeak.
His time is running out, Raptor is smoking in the closed room.
It poisons the air and fades away turning itself into the dust.
The spirit of an extinct predator took revenge in this fictional story about fight and disappearance.
Play space
Video, 1'58" - watch the video
2020
Have you ever walked into an invisible barrier in a game? Virtual space has an implicit logic to it, meticulously designed routes with breadcrumb trails of pavlovian rewards. I have a particular memory of playing a game called Bugdom on my parent’s iMac G3.
I somehow guided the blue pill bug through the sheets of grass that lined the arena like a 2 dimensional set for an old movie. On the other side there remained a wafer of virtual dirt, ending abruptly before an indeterminately large space filled with light and a suggestion of sky. I almost thought that the designers had intentionally hemmed me off from an infinite play space. As long as
I follow the dirt tiles I could explore what lay behind the level.
I followed it as long as it took for it to become apparent that there was no way back into the level from this side of the grass-wall,
so I made my character jump into the void.
I guess the sky is a wall in this sense. A virtual barrier between me, and the rest of existence. Which is to say, a visual reinforcement
of the breadcrumb trail I’m heading down at any given moment.
You don't notice it right away, but every now and again I look up
at the sky and feel like the world is ending. A cartoonishly sickly mauve hanging over the dead golden lights of the city. I wonder how far you have to drive before it goes navy. A good 2 hours, I suppose.
I’m terrified by the purple-grey light, but this terror is not the horror movie-type fear of the unknown. Darker skies are electric with endless depth. But this one is a dead shroud, a refusal.
The dead orange streets illuminate an ailing sky. A detergent purple. Maybe people 30 years from now will grow used to this light.
Bestiary 5+ — public with children's work:
Adam, 9 years old, Transformer. Ceramics, glaze, engobe, 2017.
Adam, 9 years old, Transformer. Ceramics, glaze, engobe, 2017.
Maryana, 6 years old, Worker and collective farmer. Ceramics, glaze, engobe, 2018.
Nastya, 6 years old, Worker and collective farmer. Ceramics, glaze, engobe, 2018.
Maxim, 8 years old, Zabivaka, ceramics, 2018.
Emilia, 9 years old, Gal pal. Ceramics, glaze, engobe, 2019
Metallic panel by Vadim Mel. Steel 5mm, 2011.
Enemy Of The Stars – watch the video
Video with 3D animation + object moving element of a table lamp
2020
In the video, four robotic arms, like those used in the automotive industry as part of an automated manufacturing process, assemble a composition of geometric shapes. This composition is one of the “Prounes” by the constructivist artist El Lissitzky. The “conveyor platform” is also located on the red matrix, also inside Lissitzky’s other geometric composition - Proun 99.
In front of the screen where the looped video is broadcasted, an object is located - a metal red "hand". This is a moving element of a balanced-arm lamp.
Enemy Of The Stars is the title of two works of the English vorticist artist Wyndham Lewis - a theatrical play and a drawing
of a mechanistic leg.
Vitamin Wig C
Sewer Fx
Sound, 33:47
2017
The peculiar interdependence of fungi and witch hunters*
Eco-solvent color printing on PVC film, materials found: galvanized steel mesh, various types of plastic
2020
The installation consists of fused into a single layer photographs of “natural” landscapes and plastics found at the shooting sites.
The work is an experiment in constructing connections between phenomenological layers, which in the current historical context feel like heterogeneous - between virtual images, the physical support of these images and the environment of support of images. The basis of the experiment is an attempt to think of the “natural” environment in such a way when none of its parts is thought of as “extraneous”, separate from it. Take, for example, the classic "outsider" - plastic waste. These clumps of matter, synthesized from the very depths of the biosphere and restructured at the molecular level, seemed to exfoliate from their bosom, becoming something else. Following this, in many ways narrow, purely speculative logic, one can trace how plastics, even in their current “unnatural” form, have already come back. They returned to the biosphere as part of rock, locked in arctic ice, dissolved in sea water and sand grains of beach sand. So, along with aluminum, concrete particles, the level of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, as well as bones of domestic chickens, plastic has become one of the possible markers of the new geological era.
This conceivable environment consists not only of something physically located. Through mutual deep connections, it also includes thoughts about it, images of these thoughts and their virtual incarnations, for example, endless digital streams of photographs of objects of “natural”, “natural”, secret paths to which are lined with plastic, like the roads of medieval witch hunters dotted with winter erysipelas affected by ergot.
*This work is the first of a series of experiments on the construction of author's symbiotic constructs for distinguishing between natural and artificial.
Ignat Olenev
Exhibmusikk february
Sound, 37:08
2020
Buyer Walker Rover (Yiwu) Aka. There then
Video, 15’18”
2019
In her artistic practice Amalia Ulman is always blurring the lines between fiction and fact. In the past, she has made online durational performances which extended into mainstream media, video essays and lectures that mingle scientific jargon with unreal data. Challenging the authority embedded in traditional narrative forms and media, her work constructs new forms of storytelling closer to how we experience information in our everyday life.
Experimenting with the various shapes that fiction can take, Amalia Ulman’s video “Then, There” subverts the nature of two different medias: First, how the privacy of a phone conversation between two girlfriends becomes a tell-all voiceover; secondly how the seemingly public selfie-stick vlogger style of filming, always confessional, becomes voyeuristic.
The video by Amalia Ulman with its multiple subtitles in various languages (in Spanish, English, German, French, Thai, Russian, Igbo, Polish, Greek, Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Chinese) and Russian dubbing is a reflection of the city of Yiwu itself. The film portrays a place, where a cacophony of foreigners communicate
to one another through translation apps, flirt with buying agents, complain about the food or how painful the massages are, ultimately dreading or loving China.
Through selfieapp-filtered videos and confessions, made using readily available domestic technologies, we learn about the protagonist Ana, who is a tankie nerdish fan of the Heavy Metal band Extremoduro. She is a Spaniard with an English philology degree who worked as a cashier in the local supermarket after finishing college. She married young and left for Guatemala, where her husband owns a few businesses, one of them a $1 store.
Every few months, Ana is sent to the Chinese City Yiwu to replenish the shelfs of one of the stores with stationary, plastic trinkets and toys. During one of these trips, she finds herself – disillusioned
of life – in a dead-end, starting to fantasize about staying in China, becoming an English teacher, and never looking back. In phone conversations with her high-school friend, in Spanish (her native tongue), and an American colleague in English (an imposed second language), she talks about studying Chinese. For her, studying and adopting other languages is almost a given, and always connected with a new future, which she worries “is always somewhere else”.
Copyright 2019 Amalia Ulman All Rights Reserved.
Courtesy Amalia Ulman and Wuzhen International Contemporary Art Exhibition.
Felt Cute Might Delete Later X
Performance, 40 minutes – watch the video
Performance artifacts: pantyhose, gel-like soap, silicone, gel bases, synthetic hair
2020
Performance Felt Cute Might Delete Later X explores the boundaries of perception of the self image of your own body that
is stuck between real and virtual worlds. Sometimes our image gets out of control and starts to dictate its own rules. This process creates the illusion of the necessity of projecting the most enlightened features into dimension of virtual approval.
Felt Cute Might Delete Later X is the quintessence of forms
of experiencing contact with the divine in the post-Internet era.
What innovations does the substance of the human soul begin
to possess, being connected to the World Wide Web?