The "Great expectations" program. Special screening

June 25, 2015
Summer movie theater MUZEON, Krymsky val, building 2

Curators: Olga Shishko (Russia), Elena Rumyantseva (Russia)
Participants of the Great Expectations Project: Antonina Baever, Evgeny Granilschikov, Elena Koptyaeva, Roman Mokrov, Sasha Pirogova,Tatiana Akhmetgalieva and Albert Soldatov (all — Russia).

The «Great Expectations» program is a project created by three institutions — MEA “Manege”, «MediaArtLab» Center for Art and Culture and «Triumph" Gallery. For two years solo exhibitions by young video artists took place at one of Moscow’s major art venues, ending in a large scale group show.

The new generation of artists has found itself in a very complicated historical context, when changes around them make them turn again and again to the search of identity and try to define their own place in the new frame of references.

But it would be a mistake to lock oneself within the boundaries of the geographical discourse – these feelings of being lost, watching the meaning slowly degrading, being disoriented – are a specific sign of this generation. The young always feel everything keenly – this is an inherent condition for youth – inner conflicts, a search for identity, a desire to change the surrounding reality radically. But the characters in these works don’t leave their attempts to transcend boundaries, even if by crossing the heady current on a mere air matrass or sewing up the black holes with simple thread.

The Great Expectations programme doesn’t aim to define the future – each artist has his own aspirations, fears and a way to fathom the world. The dreams of a future, an eclectic mix of fantasy and reality are just an attempt to expand the borders of the familiar world of the visual art that obeys the common rules. It is hard to guess what awaits us further on, but it is those, who now just start to construct their reality through art have a power to influence the potential world order, and we have great expectations of them.

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Antonina Baever
Socialism in a Dream

2014
3'00''

This film takes the form of a monologue delivered by the heroine on her personal experience, which constantly sees her confronting condemnation of the past socialist era and musing on the socialism that is yet to come. Thanks to the techniques of surrealism, the minimalist interior of the photographic laboratory and the abrupt montage, the viewer sees everything as though through the heroine’s dream. A clearly structured narrative fails to hold its own against the positive pressure of the social utopia and crumbles into petty domestic anecdotes, deepening the general unease at the current state of affairs, as wishful thinking gives birth to that which never was. (Vera Trakhtenberg, Andrey Parshikov)

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Eugeny Granilshchikov
Courbet's Funeral

2014
11'33''

“Courbet's Funeral” is a film-collage, where video-poetry, documentary and fiction are absorbed and mixed together, creating multilayer associations connected with personal and national history. Everyday life and politics are in the center of attention. Snapshots give place to acting and performance, so viewer can hardly distinguish one from another. Characters present their monologues where the main point becomes more and more blurring. “Courbet's Funeral” is a video-diary pretending to be a document, a conversation about the present in present time.

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Elena Koptyaeva
Replacement

2015
20'00''

This film is about a broken form of communication, about the transmission of a collective message, which bears something besides its own content. 

The work describes the appearance of new types of connections between people, objects, events and signals which we observe in an imagined media field. An event may never happen in reality, but it will remain in the mind of a contemporary man as something serious, which has changed his perception. The information field offers us new scenarios to form the nearest future. A new zone of conflict appears in the consciousness of man, as we can define what goes on in reality on the level of events, but not what happens in total. We cannot imagine a full picture, because our experience is formed in a state of a gap between the events in the media, an imagined field and our everyday experience of individual perceprion of reality.

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Roman Mokrov
Paradise
To Set Off
Homewards 

2014 / 2013 / 2013
2'00'' / 3'00'' / 4'00''

Roman Mokrov in his video works explores the mythology of the post Soviet space where the imaginative and the desired conflicts with a disappointing literalism of reality. His multimedia pastorales always look as if found round the corner — in everyday landscapes, that are looked at with a tired eye and perceived as banality or underdeveloped public spaces, abandoned recreational zones or monuments of the glorious past, stuck in an uncertain present.

Overgrown ponds, concrete fences, sandy beaches and slimy swamps in Moscow suburbs are not only the natural environment where the artist grew up and has lived his whole life, but it is also a metaphor for a wild reserve of contemporary Russia, whose inhabitants lost faith in the miraculous long ago. Roman Mokrov, on the contrary, creates fantastic worlds on the basis of everyday imagery at the intersection of the collective unconscious, folk domestic culture, national habits and media images. In the works that are united in the Pastorale series the artist uses industrial cinematic special effects or invites characters to complete silent natural landscapes and animate empty spaces where a viewer’s eye usually doesn't find anything special. 

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Sasha Pirogova
Queue

2014
9'21''

Plastic video based on Vladimir Sorokin’s novel “Queue”, in which the author is doing a painstaking job playing with text, trying to create a situation where the boundaries of time are fluid and vague and main themes are impermeability, hysterics, dependence and clanship.

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Tatiana Akmetgalieva
Trauma

Sound: Evgeniya Yemets
2013
3'00''

A blow, a feeling of pain, exposed nerves, fear, seething and straining inside. Unlimited anxiety is stored up and in time it will burst out, crashing everything in its way. You lose your footing. The traumatic experience stays forever in your memory. Raw scars remain upon the cloth of your life.

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Albert Soldatov
Balthus

2014
13'00''

Albert Soldatov's video features ten scenes, each formally representing characters from the Polish-French artist Balthus' paintings. Each of the characters, frozen in idleness and appearing as though in a trance, is a comment on the meaningless dimension of the internet age.

In this instance, “Balthus” is a term describing the suspension of consciousness of the contemporary human being, the situation of inactivity and absence of ideas that characterizes the contemporary era. The space of the Internet acts here as a field for contentless unstructured information, as a kind of viscous medium, disturbed by waves of expectation, confusing any event that falls into its field with its sticky layers of commentary. The attention of the viewers is switched back and forth numerous times, due to the aimless sliding around over the media-surface from one event to another, as they receive flows of fragmentary messages in the form of briefly expressed value judgments, emotions, superficial notices, jokes or ‘likes.’

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Venue

Summer movie theater MUZEON
Krymsky val, building 2
muzeon.ru

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Contacts

Julia Grachikova
+ 7 (905) 719-66-85
ididshe@gmail.com