Photo by Vladimir Peysikov
Imagine you’re dreaming, and in your dream you pick a flower in heaven, and then you wake up with the flower in your hand. Ah, what then? (Max Richter. From Natalie Johns’ Max Richter’s Sleep, 2019)
Where do we go every night when we close our eyes and drift to sleep? To the realm of misty dreams? Walk the winding roads of our unconscious? Do we see the future or the past? Or the present existing in parallel to here and now? What if dreams are a different reality that coexists with the one we know? And how can a third part of life, although passive, be deemed insignificant?
Sleeping is as important part of life as wakefulness. It affects our perception of reality and the phantom line between objective truth and the surreal world of visions and fantasies. Dreams and their nature still raise numerous questions and researching them is filled with various hypotheses that are yet to be scientifically confirmed or disproved. Dreaming and its many aspects is turned into a subject of artistic reflection in the exhibition narrative.
A Wave of Dreams unites works by 32 artists. Referring to the ancient tradition of dream interpretation, some participants find in them warnings and prophecies. Others explore the borderline state between dream and reality as a paranoid feeling of losing touch with reality. In some cases, the memories of the past switch places with dreams, as if emerging from each other; in others the visions of the future bleed through like recurring stress dreams. Sometimes metaphysical images come up like accidental visions. The artists turn to memory archives, feelings of déjà vu and dream journals. Through the works we invite the viewers to enter an extraordinary world of fantastical images, nightmares and drifting dreams. A Wave of Dreams will become the border zone between wakefulness and dreaming in which objective reality is no longer dominant, giving way to illusion.
Polina Mogilina
Lao rosewood, billiard ball, carving. 2020
At the Fringes is an exhibition organized by the Department of Research Arts, a center for artistic research projects focused on the Russian territory. This new project shows the life at the fringes and in the border territories of Russia, where fringes are not exclusively state borders but also natural boundaries, land areas, divides and limits of space.
Areas that have been historically considered “remote”, “disconnected,” “isolated,” become especially interesting in today’s society as the means of communication have been organically integrated into the human ecosystem and transformed our perception of space. The fringes are closer than ever now but still remain somewhat distant. These can be spaces well within the country’s landmass as well as border territories.
Cohesiveness of space, in Russia and globally, is not uniform which produces modern forms of geographic inequality. The non-uniformity can be observed as some parts of the country are better known while others remain “uncharted territories”; the project takes this disparity as its starting point.
The exhibition opens with documentary projects where each presents an interpretation of archival or documentary records (photographs, official documents, sketches, field notes, video) covering a fringe region.
A stand-alone part of the project is its “permanent exposition.” It comprises painting and photography that recreate the image of a fringe with varying degrees of visual approximation. Complementing it, there is a library section that offers insights into the history of the Russian space and its landmark social, philosophical and artistic concepts.
In the third part of the exposition, the acoustic experience is just as important as the visual. The audience is immersed into the fringe space through installations and objects.
The project is supported by the Presidential Grants Foundation.
Artists
Evgeniya Buravleva
Sofya Gavrilova
Alexander Gronsky
Maria Gruzdeva
Olga Davydova
ZAPOVEDNIK research group
Elizaveta Konovalova
Taisia Korotkova
Alexey Korsi
Maxim Ksuta
Anton Kuznetsov
Alexander Morozov
Ivan Napreenko
Valeri Nistratov
Sergey Novikov
Nikolay Onischenko
Pavel Otdelnov
Alexander Povzner
Egor Plotnikov
Sergei Prokofiev
Igor Samolet
Maria Safronova
Maxim Sher
Natasha Timofeeeva
The project is about communication and relationships.
“With the world on a string”
Dear friends, I ask you to send me the segment of the thread of any length and color.
Thank you.
Location – in a personal message.
120×100 cm, stainless steel
Special projects of Fifth Moscow Biennale Contemporary Art
The initiator of the project – MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE
Project managers – Zelydkovskaya Anna (Anya Zholud) and Olga Pautova.
The curator of the exhibition – Tanya Scheben
The project participants:
Tatiana Antoshina, Marina Belova and Alexei Politov Peter Belyi, Sergei Vorontsov, Natasha Zintsova, Daria Krotov, Maxim Ksuta, Group Pprofessors (Andrew Lyublinskiy, Maria Zaborovskaya), Alexander Povzner, Nicholas Polissky, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Andrew Rudiev, Roman Sakin, Haim Sokol, Rostan Tavasiev, Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev, Dmitry Tsvetkov, Peter Shvetsov.
All photos … … … …