(with Ekaterina Kovalenko )
Study subject: transforming a Journey into an Artwork.
First place in the third annual competition “Vzlet”, nomination “Photography”, curator Igor Mukhin
VDNKh, Kosmos pavilion, Moscow, Russia, 2018
Text by curator Igor Mukhin:
The academic journey in the distant past ended with a report at a round table with a view of the expedition’s trophies and was meant for academic students. The artistic prose of Stendhal, Hugo, Jack London and many other writers captured the minds of failed travelers all over the world. After photographic groups were introduced into expeditions of the 19th century, mass-circulation academic albums – reports with views of exotic places and countries – became available to curious readers of libraries around the world.
More recently, journeys beyond the Iron Curtain have involved an endless journey through cramped Soviet kitchens, telling stories and displaying captured artifacts.
In the present, we put up with the publication of unobtrusive recreation that penetrates us from various social networks, the settings of which allow us to block those who produce endless content on-the-beach. An invitation to visit, which includes viewing photos from a recent exotic vacation of the hosts, leads to the deletion of a long-standing contact from the address book.
Today, Google Street View cars allow you to safely travel the world without leaving your home, “plunging” into a computer monitor, but the craving for travel cannot be stopped. No photo or video conveys the personal impressions of a ray of sunshine in the Roman Pantheon, the greedy eyes of visitors to the Louvre, the relaxed passengers of the Berlin underground.
In assessing a budget trip, personal, Soviet experience is also important: spending nightly leisure time on chairs of different heights of the local Collective Farmer’s House, stacked in a single row with a noisy company of musicians “Sounds of Mu” in the Baltic capital, hard seats of the recreation hall on the second floor of the Vilnius railway station, a dead-end railway station in Tallinn, closed from passengers at night, the pleasure of hitchhiking, not subject to the laws of exact arrival at the final destination, where a possible check-in is to be.
With the exhibition “Young, but unbroken” in “Cosmos” I am interested in fixing the results of a low-budget European tour of young Moscow artists.
Research topic: the transformation of a Journey into a Work.
