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Special projects
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Witnesses to the impossible
event
site and dates
Art of Emergent Russian Artists
curator
project description
An artistic utterance that aims to analyze the phenomena of contemporary reality inevitably runs up against the problem of choosing a language of description. Besides geopolitical, social, and public crises, there is also a crisis of forms and notions that can be applied to the problems of contemporary life.
The “normative” and rational rhetoric of the establishment that claims to be objective is incapable of adequately reflecting many present-day conflicts. The striving to look true in a world of surrogates and imitations, in which the “reality effect” replaces reality itself, is a reactionary one.
Resisting the logic of imitating appearances, art looks for other forms of testimony about reality – forms that would be proper only to it. It finds them in the domain of imagination and fiction and expresses them in the images of the non-existent and the impossible. Artists apply a special kind of self-censorship: they speak about reality using lies and teach viewers to detect truth in them. Like psychoanalysis, art approaches reality as something that is excluded from our symbolic system on account of its traumatic nature. For reality to exist, it must be perceived as a phantom, i.e., a fiction or an impossibility that we can accept and then make out what is true and real in it.
The impossible is not simply a category of fiction. The impossible is closely interwoven with the fabric of our symbolic world and thus is able to change and transform the existing order of meaning and ultimately reality itself.
The impossible effaces the boundaries of time. It uncovers the concealed aspects of the past from which we derive the ideas, knowledge, and forms of action that are essential for us today. The impossible is a way of overcoming our ideas on the eternal laws of present-day society that lies in the grasp of “objective relations”. It also points to possible models of the future that can be made out in the fragile utopian artistic projects of today, giving substance to our premonitions.
artists
- Ivan Brazhkin
- Ilya Budraitskis
- Aleksei Buldakov
- Alexandra Galkina
- Dmitry Gutov
- Zhanna Kadyrova
- Aleksei Kallima
- Irina Korina
- Where The Dogs Run Group
- Alexandra Lerman
- Vladimir Logutov
- Diana Machulina
- Vikenty Nilin
- Nikolai Oleinikov
- David Ter-Oganyan
- Yevgeniy Fiks
- Valery Chtak
- Ñ.A.T.Group.
organizer
 A full-length article about the project will be in the catalogue of the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art which is
coming out on the 1st March.
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