“Farewell to the Christmas Tree” in Brooklyn

'Farewell to the Christmas Tree' by Leonid Tishkov in collaborated with Sergey Tishkov,2001, 15 min., music: Membranoids, Sergey Starostin.

A video and photographs showing portraits of abandoned dead pine trees lying in dustbins after the feasts. The video shows the burying of a pine tree in Tsaritsino cemetery, Moscow.

Walking a Fine Line:Parables of the Sublime and the Subversive in Russian Video Art
January,9

Artists confront mystification and sacralization, engagement and spiritual detachment with strategies ranging from epatage to derision, eccentricity, and radical activism. Whom to blame? What to do? The viewer is invited to ponder upon these and other perennial "Russian" questions and find his/her own "fine line" of authentic response. Research on characteristics of national and local identity is one of the main foci of the Ekaterinburg NCCA. The search for identity in post-Soviet Russian society and the development of a new value system have been raised in interdisciplinary projects like "Novorusskoe (The NouveauRussian)" (2005), "In Transition Russia 2008", videoprogram "Dreams in the Epicenter" (2007), and others. The penchant to extremes, paradoxicality, and irrationalism have become stereotypical characteristics of "Russianness". In such a way, contemplative submersion sometimes rather easily turns into subversion, an arrant hooliganism. The fact of contemporary reality is that the radical other is embedded into the surface of what is already here, which is none other than the everyday, the event of life itself. Shifting perspectives, whether as a radical gesture, or just slightly, we are all groping to find that most authentic fine line that connects the limit and its beyond, the spiritual self and the social other. Russian artists demonstrate how a national feature speaks the common or universal truth.

Artists include: Leonid Tishkov, Provmyza, Victor Alimpiev, Blue Soup, Victoria Ilyushkina, Yury Vasiliev, Victor Davydov, Alexey Buldakov, Olga Chernysheva, Blue Noses, PG, Bombily group, Dmitry Bulnygin, Veronika Rudyeva-Ryazantseva, and others.

Curated by: Ksenia Fedorova (ksenfedorova@gmail.com)
Alisa Prudnikova (alisa@uralncca.ru)

http://www.monkeytownhq.com/1_9_09.html