Private Moon installations from 2003 until now

Rene Magritte, 16th September 1956, oil on canvas

Moon installation in the open air Art Klyazma festival 2003
Apokryfos at NCCA Moscow 2003

Private Moon at Bargehouse London 2005

Private Moon at Nanto Japan 2006

Private Moon and Solveig installations at Latvian National Museum of Art 2008

Exhibition «A(rt)R(ussia)T(oday) - index»
With support from the Latvian Ministry of Culture, as part of Russian Culture Days in Latvia, the Russian State Contemporary Art Centre and the Latvian National Museum of Art’s exhibition centre «Arsen?ls» have organized a large-scale and heretofore-unseen-in-Latvia project - «A(rt)R(ussia)T(oday) - index».

25 artistic projects are on display whose creators hail from various regional cities – Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizniy Novgorod, Kaliningrad, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk. Riga has not seen such a major Russian art exhibit in the past 20 years.
»ART - index», taking into account the amount of knowledge Western art fans and professionals have, offers a solid overview of current art trends, styles and innovations in Russia and the key artists behind them. Such names like Oleg Kulik, Vadim Zaharov, Leonid Tishkov, Sergei Shutov, the group «Blue Noses» and «Провмыза» are among those featured.
The show is made up of major projects and installations, displayed in clever point-counterpoint, i.e. the works of young artists are shown in contrast to the works of established artists. The essence of this exhibit is the stance taken by its curators – to reflect Russian art trends as complex and contradictory.

http://www.vmm.lv/en/

Private Moon in Singapore on Biennale WONDER 2008

Private Moon, 2003. Installation by Leonid Tishkov

Singapore poet Leong Liew Geok inspired the Private Moon installation

Moon at window sill,
Smiling crescent parked outside,
Unwilling to budge

On flat roof with me
Silent witness of lit rooms:
Unknown company

Bent over with you
Piggyback-rider,
to gauge—Water below bridge!

My yoke of white jade,
Sole passenger to ferry
Wherever I row

Your Brightness on sled
I lug across waves of snow.
Why can’t You float home?

At this opening
You’ll wait, light at tunnel’s end,
Anticipating

I’ll come to take you
Home to your usual table ….
Here—eat these apples!

Stuck on snowy roof
You’re prostrate, an empty stage
I’ll shovel upright

You’re there, attic moon,
Before I end an antique
Trip to count cobwebs

Side by side we lie—
Keep your whole self covered, else
I won’t get to sleep!

Leong Liew Geok 3 October 2008

Dr Leong Liew Geok, an English professor, sent me these seven haikus based on an installation at City Hall. She’s written two volumes of poetry so far: “Love is Not Enough” and “Women without Men”. A third one, “Passions”, is on the way.
http://www.singaporebiennale.org/index.html

"Private Moon" by Leonid Tishkov

PRIVATE MOON

Writer Chesterton once said that there couldn’t be a personal faith
as there couldn’t be a personal sun or a personal moon. In Russia
everything is the other way round: we are faced with life one to
one, and we are completely lonely in the face of the problem of
time, that is, the problem of life and death, the problem of losses
and gains, the moon, the sun, and everything in this life. We could,
conceivably, turn to someone for support. But we are still lonely…
However, that shouldn’t make us grieve or suffer. Loneliness of
this sort means that we exist, we are here, we are at the center of
the universe and we are comparable to the Moon, to the other
celestial bodies.
“Private Moon” is a visual poem telling the story of a man
who met the Moon and stayed with her for the rest of his life. In
the upper world, in fact in the attic of his own house, he saw the
Moon falling off from the sky. Once she was hiding from the Sun
in a dark and damp tunnel. But the passing trains frightened her.
Now she came to this man’s house. Having wrapped the Moon
with warm blankets he treated her with autumn apples, gave her
a cup of tea, and when she got well he took her in his boat across
the dark river to the high bank overgrown with moon pine-trees.
He descended into the lower world dressed in the clothes of his
deceased father and then returned from there lighting up his path
with his personal Moon. Crossing the borderline between the two
worlds across a narrow bridge, immersed in a dream and taking
care of this heavenly creature, the man became a mythological
being living in a real world as in a fairytale.
Each photograph is a poetic tale, a little poem in its own right.
Therefore each picture is accompanied by my own verse, which I
wrote when I drew my sketches for the photographs. So it turns
out that the Moon overcomes our loneliness in the universe
uniting many of us around it.

Leonid Tishkov

Photographs by Leonid Tishkov & Boris Bendikov, 2002-2005

1.
Like Magritte’s
Day and Night
The moon was stuck in a pine tree’s crown
a needle adhered to its radient sleeve

2.
The sky is near.
Open the attic and you’ll see
there next to the wasp nest
rings the blinding light
of the lost moon

3.
Open the closet
there among the old coats, the moon
hides from people

4.
Autumn is so chilly
even the moon has caught a cold

5.
I cross the dark river
to the high bank
where the lunar evergreens grow

6.
I grope about in the dark
carrying the heavenly light on my back
in a swarm of sparkling bees

7.
The Moscow Moon
in a starless sky
has sat down on the edge of a roof

8.
I invite the moon to tea
like a lump of sugar
the damp night dissolves the moon in
an apple tree

9.
After everyone has gone to bed
go to the window and there
the crescent moon has appeared to you

10.
A bundle of light is the moon
on a sleigh. The sky
worries, when will he return?
Where have they taken him?

11.
Like a lunar unicorn
Under the covers she
shines even brighter

12.
The funeral of the moon-every morning
Come nightfall you discover the body of the newborn moon
and help return it to the sky
leaving a mere trace in the snow
a thawing light impression

Leonid Tishkov 2003

Private Moon at Bass museum 2009

Russian art "Russian Dreams" take place at Bass Museum in Miami 2008

Bittersweet modern Russian art By Jackie Wullschlager

"Beauty, though, will save the world," wrote Dostoyevsky in The Idiot. Generations of artists and writers played out that uniquely Russian glittering idealism: first building revolutionary utopias - Malevich's and Kandinsky's abstraction, supposed to herald a new spiritual reality - then turning to "underground" art as an inner emigration, a morally authentic opposition to communist oppression. Seventeen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is anything left of that ecstatic seriousness in Russian art today?

The poster image for Russian Dreams is a slice of a phosphorescent green moon pulled down to perch on a roof terrace giving on to a vast twinkling city. It comes from Leonid Tishkov's ravishing photographic series "Private Moon", shown in Paris earlier this year - a work of formal beauty choreographed with photographer Boris Bendikov to cast Tishkov as lost hero of a modern fairy tale, journeying through different worlds and into dreams to protect his imagination. The big fake fluorescent moon set variously within a diamond blue stage set, zooming in at an open window, hanging low over a shadowy figure in a water garden, bringing flickering romance to a giant Moscow apartment block, reminded me all at once of the moonlit views of the Dnieper by 19th-century landscapist Arkhip Kuindzhi (the revelation at the National Gallery's 2004 Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy show), Gogol's urban fairy tales such as the proto-surreal "The Overcoat", and the revolutionary opera Victory over the Sun, designed by Malevich, where the sun is captured and brought down to earth, plunging the world into darkness to prepare for a new cosmic order. Tishkov similarly pulls the moon out of the sky to recast everyday life, but with the 21st-century ambivalence towards lost utopias, melancholy and sense of disconnection that characterise all the works in Miami.

Russian Dreams', Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, to February 8.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

http://www.bassmuseum.org/

http://www.russiandreams.info/en/photographer/tishkov