Time Capsule. Artistic report on catastrophes and utopia #2014
Exhibition at Seccesion – November 2013 – January 2014
here you can see a photo documentation of the show
Introduction to the show
This exhibition directly reflects the present situation at a moment of growing danger, and it corresponds to the main installation, “A Resurrected Soldier”, and a new video installation, “The Excluded”.
It reflects what art could be at a moment when familiar politics and everyday life start falling apart. The events of recent months have thrown Russian artists and creative workers into a completely new reality: a new Cold War atmosphere, an escalating search for enemies, ever-tighter repression of all dissent, and an open military confrontation with Ukraine leaving thousands of dead on both sides.
What seemed the stuff of nightmares yesterday is becoming reality today, and artists who want to address present conditions have wound up in a very complicated position. How can we carry on creating, speaking and living when we are all frozen at our computer screens in hopeless anxiety, trying to make sense of the bloody mixture of contradictory and manipulated information, seething hatreds, madness and desperation while the chance to be heard is ever more limited? Most things we liked to speculate about – relations between art and politics, activism and participation – simply stop functioning. Worse, they become irrelevant in a suffocating climate of nationalistic paranoia. And we face this desperate situation while audiences vanish, activist groups implode and actually getting anything done becomes impossible. And so on.
