Solveig. Landscape of My Memory.

Solveig. Landscape of My Memory, video installation at Nina Lumer Gallery, Milan, until 31 January

Sk(y)ier

Sk(y)ier, video, 1999
at Nina Lumer Gallery, Milan, until 31 January 2011

The Wish Machine

 

Wish Machine, cinetic installation, 2010
on The Little Prince in Moscow show
at PL Gallery, M.Dmitrovka, 29
23 December - 1 March 2011

Multimedia Art Museum Moscow opening

Sk(y)ier, installation: video, steel, acrilic glass, electric lamps, 1999-2008, collection of MMAM

I AM STILL ALIVE

I AM STILL ALIVE, photo and video projection on a glaicer, Spitsbergen, 2010

First South-Russian Biennale_Rostov_2010

Solveig: The Landscape of My Memory
Installation, 2004: salt, glass, video, sound, 230 x 200 cm

Memory is a desert which we populate with the imaginary
In the landscape of my memory, one can see snow-covered fields and mountains, a small figure of a boy skiing along the shore of a frozen lake, and the traces of his skis in the snow. Following those traces, I travel into the past, restoring my ideal universe in which childhood is a time of spiritual depth and endless dazzling white snow. The vast sky above is like a window into childhood on which frosty patterns live, the northern lights glow, and huge stars fall. Snow is the time, the white imaginary landscape in which I settle my personal memories. It is there, at that hardly visible line of the snowy horizon, that the earthly and the transcendent spheres meet.

My Mother's Dress / Dematerialization
of Memory
10 photographs, 60 x 85 cm
Video, 3'
2006

After my mother's death I was left with her clothes: dresses,

scarves, blouses, underwear. The lonely dresses hung in the

wardrobe, silent on their wooden hangers. One of them
was the conservative black woollen dress of a primary-school

teacher. A colorful one of crepe de Chine was what she wore

on holidays. What was I to do with all that had been left after

her passing? Recalling how my mother had shredded old

clothes into strips to make carpets, I cut her dresses to ribbons,

to one endless ribbon, and spooled it into a ball. I cut

everything into "fringes," as my mother used to say.

Thus the clothes were dematerialized, converted into balls,

like atoms wound from electrons that hold
the nucleus of matter inside. "What beautiful material —

I shall make myselfa dress out of," my mother would say.

In the title of my work, "dematerialization" plays

on the similarity of the Latin roots for "matter" and "mother."

When I was done all that remained were the shadows

of dresses on the closet walls, bare hangers on nails, heartache

and a velvety photo album. And many colourful atoms

thatnow make up my reality, a peaceful

home fortified by love and memory.

Opening 21th May in Rostov Museum of Art

http://biennaler.ru/

THE INNER URAL

In the frames of the 3rd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Arts M'ARS Centre for Contemporary Arts presents - THE INNER URALS, a project by the Yekaterinburg Branch of the NCCA

"THE INNER URALS"Curators: Alisa Prudnikova, Vladimir Seleznev, Svetlana Usoltseva

"The Inner Urals" is not a plagiarism of Pelevin, not even an homage to Boyce; rather, it is the very alchemy which emerges at the geographically enticing frontier between Europe and Asia. A deceiving metaphor for a region exceedingly rich in existential background.The Urals is either inside, or merely aside. Any attempt at metaphorical comprehension makes one cast aside all that is modern and related to frontiers and instead embrace images of inner experiences. But to what extent is that typical of the Urals? The Urals is a severely dissected space bound together by the almost souvenir stories – all those "from the Urals" and "we were born at the Urals". Those who live at the Urals not only form an eternal bond with those mountains, those forests, and those fields beneath the never-ending snow, they also carry the Great Ural Mythology gene. This mythology is like a fathomless quarry, a black hole that sucks in anyone who approaches it: the Demidovs, the Russian tycoons of yore, whose fake gold coins still excite the imagination of local treasure hunters; the numerous Ural craftsmen, from the fairytale Danila to the Cherepanovs; the Red Army divisional commander Chapaev, who had sunk into the River Ural as if into the mythical Lethe; the infernal pioneer Pavlik Morozov.And right in the middle of this pantheon is the custodian of cedar wisdom, the surrealist of mines and metallurgical plants – Bazhov, narrator of folk tales.Ekaterinburg is a very sensitive city, often overreacting, constantly amassing the functions of the center of the Urals. One has to firmly believe in one's center, which is located exactly where you live; and to do that one sometimes requires a certain initial shove or impulse. For the Ural artists, the fundamental principle has always been this: "Real art always comes from within", using the words of the artist Leonid Tishkov. Objective circumstances are not enough to explain the local cultural explosion; rather, there are some mutagenic agents at play here, creating this reality of the surreal space with an elusive identity.

Alisa Prudnikova, Vladimir Seleznev

Participants:

Leonid Tishkov

Kuda begut sobak

iZer Gut

Victor Davydov

Den Marino

Oleg Lystsov

Vladimir Seleznev

Alexander Shaburov

Elena Klimova

Alexander Belov

Alexander Solnechnyi

Fedor Telkov

Soup Studio

Julia Bezshtanko

Katya Poedynschikova

Video work "Farewell to the Christmas Tree" at CU Art Museum, Colorado

“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

Nikodim in Napoli EM Arts and in Seattle

Nikodim on Northwest Film Forum Seattle in November 6, 2008

Stars of Russian Video Art

1. PROVMYZA (Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia)“Wet chicken” (3min 40sec)“Fugue” (19min 10sec)“Slippery mountain” (6min 25sec)These artists work in various spheres of contemporary art employing a wide range of multi-media means.
2. Victor Alimpiev (Moscow, Russia)“Sweet nightingale” (6min 50sec)Victor Alimpiev assumes the isolated viewpoint of an observer in order to capture both spontaneous and controlled nuances of human expression and behavior.
3. Lyudmila Gorlova (Moscow, Russia)“Happy end” (6min 30 sec)Lyudmila Gorlova films wedding parties on Vorobiovy Mountain, which is where the newly wed of Moscow traditionally visit. 4. Olga Chernyshova (Moscow, Russia)“The train” (7min 15sec)Chernysheva’s best know work The Train (2003) is a remarkable video journey through the carriages of a Russian intercity train that recalls the Constructivist cinema of Dziga Vertov.
5. The Blue Soup Group (Moscow, Russia)“Panorama”, “Vestibule”, “Gas” (4min 20sec) The piece references the early days of cinema when dioramas and panoramas were in common use. The camera’s 360 panning shot can be read as a metaphor of man’s life, seen as a whole.
6. The Blue Noses (Moscow-Novosibirsk, Russia)“Sex-art” (3min 10sec)“If I were Harry Potter” (4min)The term “Nailed-up Video” was coined by Viacheslav Mizin and Alexandr Shaburov in 2003. The works they produce are formally inventive yet extremely cynical in terms of content.
7. Leonid Tishkov (Moscow, Russia)“Nikodim” The story of a man’s journey (6min)Tishkov’s continually evolving narrative and space is mapped in drawings, photogrphs,prints, illustrated books, paintings, sculptures, plays and video installations. Today his work is widely shown throughout Europe and the United States, as well as in Russia. The film offers a figure of a man, an artist himself.

http://nwfilmforum.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/stars-of-russian-video-art/

http://www.em-arts.org/independent/films/nikodim