Works

The monotonous light flowing from the ball is the dream of a person with clear conscience.
The soft, deep glow is the dream of a child. The nervous, quivering, cold light is the dream of a criminal. The bright yellow light is the dream of the president; the greenish – that of a housewife. The ball is reposing on a pillow; it’s asleep.

Petr Belyi

Pause
2011, Installation.
Steel, paint; sizes vary.

The fountains of blood that were almost uninterrupt edly gushing in Russia throughout the ХХ century turned it into a machine of destruction, a zone of special danger. Circular saw blades held by thin steel cables froze. The balanc e of precariously swaying saws, quivering from any touch, dried black blotches on the walls, dripping a la Jackson Pollock – everything testifies to an unstable balance. The screech of the gaining-momentum saw is just around the corner. The spectator experiences a muted horror, as if being inside of a mechanism that paused for a short while, and tries to move with extreme caution and not to brush against anything.

With Dream and Ball, Petr Belyi literalizes the idea of a space for dreams by placing large luminescent balls made of opaque glass upon stacks of pillows. A room filled with spheres exuding soft light refracted by the inviting surfaces of the textiles moves the viewer into a surreal both evocative and illusory. Taking the idealized beauty of the dream state and turning it on its head to explore the possibilities of the waking nightmare, Belyi’s Pause inspires a distinct unease, a queasy, disturbed concern that deepens as the hanging circular saw blades swing precariously within a blood-spattered nightmare scenario, a devastating symbol of the psychic wounds inflicted by Russia’s brutal past.

Weather Forecast (exhibited together with the installation Anxiety)
The webcast from the Estonian Coast of the Baltic Sea, audio of the installation Anxiety in real time, parabolic speakers of directional sound. An artificially created audio sequence of the kinetic installation Anxiety, readable in real time, evokes an uneasy feeling and demands an alternative ― the eternal grandeur of sea, forest and its inhabitants.

Anna Frants

Anxiety
2014, Media Lab CYLAND.
Fabric, ventilators, computer programming.

An allegory of anxious states – there is no love, no compassion – just anxiety.
The project represents a carefully produced stage drama whose cast of characters is a casually thrown draping. Its “choreography” is achieved by work of the ventilators of various power levels and the theater lighting. The presented show is meant to evoke an uneasy feeling.

Anna Frants’ Anxiety conjures up a landscape of fear and desperation that open doors to the darker recesses of the mind, drawing the viewer to the brink of panic while rigidly reinforcing its own status as art. Within the space of Anxiety, the viewer can explore the full force and effect of emotional despair, without descending into the chaos and panic of a more ordinary experience of despair. Alongside Anxiety, Frants will exhibit Weather Forecast, a live webcast from the Estonian coast of the Baltic sea that presents the viewer with an alternative landscape of dark, rich forests, and the mysterious grandeur of the sea. As the live feed imposes itself upon the space of the installation, the viewer is made to eavesdrop upon the vacant solitude of the foreign space, subtly reinforcing the omnipotence of the gaze and implicating the viewer in the act of surveillance.

One eye was boarded up with plywood.

Two flat plywood young ladies sit in front of each other on kitchen stools. Their heads are presented as video images in the monitors placed on the spots that are supposed to be occupied by their plywood heads. The heads are taped on video, and they act as characters in a computer simulation game. The space of this video is made of a real city with real inhabitants and a real landscape devoid of living people.
The installation explores the borderline state: I am here and I am there; I am static and I am dynamic at the same time.
The video contains the documentation of the experience of an artist who implants his hero into an environment of real inhabitants and faces the notion “one of us-stranger”, and the opposing experience of filming his heroes amid wilderness.

Alexander Shishkin-Khokusai

Eco Reduction
2015, installation.

Let there be no grownups,
Just children, small and rowdy!
‘Cause all these towering beings
Make this world way too crowded.

O. Grigoriev. Let There Be

The project’s idea came to me from a deep pondering of Oleg Grigoriev’s poem.
Let’s imagine that, for a few days, city inhabitants get reduced to the size of street animals – then we could probably feel how colossal and cruel this world of ours is on a scale of the real nature.
The installation looks like an illustration of this idea: hundreds of small plywood figures are placed on different spots of the area at the ground level, arranged into various scenes of everyday activities.

Drawing on his early career as a stage designer, Alexander Shishkin-Khokusai’s Let It Be, presents roughly hewn miniatures installed in situ within the gallery space, miniature representations of situations that appear utterly mundane and only reveal their patent absurdity upon closer inspection. For Star Landing, Shishkin-Khokusai places these figures on stools and crowns them with video monitors, their heads, meanwhile, appear on these screens as recordings. Shishkin-Khokusai’s desperate mockery of his fellow human beings has a touch of tenderness to it—his cardboard figures may be ridiculous and pitiful, but they are also vulnerable and earnest, which may redeem their silliness to some extent.

In Mirror’s Memory, the reflection of a person who took stand in front of the thick screen is surrounded by people who are sometimes are total strangers to him. People step out of the darkness of the screen, which pretends to be a mirror, who had taken stand in front of it before. A stranger emerges and joins the lonely spectator who looks around nervously. Realizing in his mind that no ghosts appear near him, even a mentally healthy spectator experiences a superstitious horror – mirrors enjoy a dubious reputation as it is, and here we have figures that come into view from god knows where. Alexandra Dementieva does not try to program actions of the public, she respects freedom of other people, and she is unable to predict the consequences of her own experiments. The artist only provokes the viewer who decides for himself whether or not to get involved into the process and whether or not to accept the proffered circumstances.

Alexandra Dementieva’s work explores the link between representation and memory as mediated by new technology. Dementieva’s Mirror’s Memory invites the viewer to stand in front of a blank screen in a darkened room onto which an image of the viewer is projected. As a visual representation of the self, the screen presents itself to the viewer as a mirror of sorts, yet the relationship between the viewer and the mirror self is forever mediated by the computer that stands between the individual and her image. As the viewer steps toward the screen, her own image may be replaced a residual recording of a past viewer or viewers, as the computer randomly projects mirror selves on the wall. As the projected image disappears and reappears at the will of the machine, the distance between the self and the image is reinforced and reexamined through the power of the gaze.

By peering into a peephole and listening to distant sounds, we inadvertently recreate the reality in our memory, balancing on the verge of presence and absence, visible and invisible. The image is here and, at the same time, it greets us from some distance – as the sound of ocean contained in a seashell.
The opacity of a visual picture – here a black-and-white photograph, altered by the optics of the peephole and as if “enlivened” – and the vagueness of sounds presume that the spectator would involve his own archives and drag up his own feelings and associations from nooks crannies of his memory. And the less real and “anecdotal” the story about the reality is, the more plausible it sounds.

In Belova’s Archive, the memory of the body is evoked through sound. Here, the artist invites each visitor to peer through peepholes in uniform wooden boxes and discover found photographs of entry halls leading into old St. Petersburg buildings. Each box is equipped with a set of headphones, connecting the viewer with the sounds of life in each of the represented buildings—the casual hum of music, the quick fall of steps, fragments of conversations, the slow drip of water through aging pipes. The physical infrastructure of the box creates an infinite distance between the viewer and the viewed—audio-technology becomes the main tool that bridging this gap, connecting the vision to the body and creating a nostalgic reminder of a particular time and place.

Bugs-or-spiders in an erotic act; cats torturing mice; bloodied bulls and slaughtered bucks. Subjects of Marina Koldobskaya are simple, not to say trite. In her monumental mural paintings, the artist deliberately steps over the bounds of professional art etiquette. Exposing and simplifying painting techniques, she reduces the palette to three colors – black, white, red. And the drawing – maybe to the scribble of a child or maybe to sacral murals the Paleolithic Age. At the same time, Koldobskaya’s works could not very well be called primitivist – in this calibrated simplicity, one could discern the rigidity of a designer’s logo, austerity of graphic formulas of Russian Avant-garde, aggression of a totalitarian poster and magic rhythm of tribal ornaments. Rapidly creating yet another gigantic drawing before the eyes of the public, the artist performs a shamanic action by conjuring the emotions that are known to everyone – those of lust, fury, thirst and fear.

Marina Koldobskaya’s taut, tempting work draws its unique power from its simplicity—Koldobskaya paints elemental things – flowers, animals, fruits, faces, employing a deceptively simple technique and basic palette to harness the raw power of the thing itself. In her performances, Koldobskaya creates murals revealing the very nature of their creation, subtly offering the viewer both formal iconography and the tools to understand how the image came to be. Working in a forceful style linking hand and eye, Koldobskaya’s murals recall the evocative visual narrative of the cave painting more than the refined composition of the traditional canvas, injecting the visual object with uncommon energy.

The performance by Ivan Govorkov and Daniil Frants is first of all a dialog between art generations. Ivan Govorkov is a professor, a professional with academic education and a drawing virtuoso whose mastery of the material is effortless and unbound. The 16-year-old Daniil Frants is a computer programmer and a specialist in the creative use of new technologies. The question that the artists raise in this work is quite pressing for current art practices: To what extent is it possible to integrate technologies into the traditional art?
Ivan Govorkov starts his drawing without any preliminary conception, practically with his eyes closed. What we have before us is not a sketch or a painted canvas. These are graphic improvisations. For an artist with academic schooling, they are a natural form of life. The automatic writing of Surrealists, le geste gratuit of Dadaists and spontaneous art techniques invented under their influence are but construction kits today. It turns out that by getting freed from under control and drawing a line blindly, without any preliminary plan whatsoever, an artist does not reach freedom, but rather sees its fictitiousness. This pleasure and this freedom contain a dose of habit, skill and predictability. This is precisely what Daniil Frants uses. With the help of the computer program that he created, computer modeling, modern scanner and a 3D printer, he transforms a spontaneous two-dimensio
There is nothing in this sculpture by now that would remind us of the initial drawing, with a possible exception of the expression. And, ultimately, each participant of this dialog still stays on his territory.

Working with the young and talented Daniil Frants, Ivan Govorkov has devised a site-specific performative installation that weaves together line, shape, composition and construction through a process based investigation of mark-making. As Govorkov draws directly on the wall, rapidly covering its expanse with the curvature of arching lines and a network of complex structures, Frants works at a computer, converting Govorkov’s two-dimensional drawing into three-dimensional digital imagery through the use of a program of his own design. A sensor in Govorkov’s hand signals the computer to mimic the mark-making of the artist, constructing basic shapes which are then printed in three dimensions and displayed alongside the drawing. Moving rapidly from the two-dimensional space of the wall to the virtual space of the computer and back to the three dimensional space of the sculptural field, Govorkov and Frants play with the very meaning of visual form itself, allowing the object to morph and change before the viewer’s very eyes, an evocative homage to abstract expressionism, to post-modern performance and to the limitless potential of the visual.

“Light exerts physical pressure on objects in its path, a phenomenon which can be deduced by Maxwell’s equations, but can be more easily explained by the particle nature of light: photons strike and transfer their momentum.
At larger scales, light pressure can cause asteroids to spin faster, acting on their irregular shapes as on the vanes of a windmill…” (Wikipedia)

The artists approach the myth of the daughter of Acrisius and god Zeus as a most beautiful illustration of the life-giving force of “immaterial” in art. Danae is a multimedia object-sculpture made of “live” round mirrors that quiver from the touch of a ray of light on their surface. The sculpture’s general outline can be correlated with the figure of Diana in Rembrandt’s paining in the Hermitage. In the installation, the artists connected the algorithm of movement of light with the algorithm of movement of a viewer’s eye over the Rembrandt’s painting. The mirror’s quivering and the trembling reflection of light from its surface create a sensual, erotic context of the object’s perception. In all ages, scientists and artists strived to represent mundane as mysterious, and mysterious – visible. It is no accident that one of the asteroids that rush about the Universe in search of living light was called Danae.

Scholars and artists have always aspired to present the mundane as mysterious and make manifest the — it is no coincidence that an asteroid rushing around the Universe in search of the live light was called Danae. Working together with Ivan Gorkov, Elena Gubanova explores the myth of Acrisius as a perfect illustration of the lifegiving power of the immaterial in art through a sculptural installation titled “Danae”. Danae is a multimedia sculpture made of round “live” mirrors that tremble at touch of rays of light to their surface. The sculpture resembles Rembrandt’s Danae exhibited at the Hermitage, and the artists modeled the light movement algorithm within the installation upon the motion of a viewer’s gaze while considering the Rembrandt painting. The mirrors’ trembling reflection create a sensual, erotic context for the perception of the object.

This ironic video novella is about a young lady in the bathroom of a communal apartment in St. Petersburg. We cannot separate her dreams and memories from the reality.
The work is made in a creative tandem with Maya Popova who plays the lead role and performs the acrobatic solo in the bathroom. The male roles are improvised by students of the German Film Academy. The artist was interested in a performing component of the project and its transformation through editing.

Victoria Ilyushkina’s wickedly absurdist video work takes on the space of the bathtub as a metaphor for the symbolic connections we make, miss and struggle through. In each episode, the actors peopling Ilyushkina’s cool, well-dressed world repeat their steps mechanically: the woman sits on the edge of the bathtub, slides off the edge into the basin and a new male visitor joins her in the tub, slipping from view with only a glance and disappearing into the sudsy void—the heroine of the video is left nameless, literally undone by boredom and the superfluous superficiality of her relationships.

The hydraulics principle in psychoanalysis refers to the libido theory, and in this context Freud uses terminology strongly tied to liquids: efflux, discharge, repository, channeling etc. As the narrating voice, in a didactic tone, speaks about what is occurring at a psychic level, images taken in physics and chemistry laboratories run showing scientific experiments relating to liquids. Schematic graphics, images of test tubes, water pistons, valves and connecting vessels seek to paradoxically illustrate what is occurring in the psychic apparatus, that is, what by its very nature cannot be represented. What interests me is the human tendency to comprehend phenomena, even the most complex, via schematic representation, via a generalization that leads to the identification of organizing principles. I quote Oliver Sacks who, as a child, was dazzled by Mendeleev’s Table: “The periodic table was incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could never analyze adequately what I meant, in this context, by beautiful: simplicity? coherency? rhythm? inevitability?”

Mariateresa Sartori’s stark, philosophically rich video work presents the intricacies of the human libido as a popular chemistry lesson. Drawing upon Freudian symbology through a sensuous depiction of liquids and flows, Sartori explores the “hydraulics principle” from all angles. Reframing the question of human sexuality in the language of psychoanalysis and the space of the classroom, Sartori reorders the nature of human experience, drawing the viewer from the realm of the experiential to the realm of the experimental, magnifying the gap that separates lived human experience from the theories and practices we construct to explain ourselves.

Traces on White
2015, 80 photographs, carousel slide projector

With support of Media Lab CYLAND

A man is walking from point A to point B, but he is arriving anywhere. At the heart of the photography projects of Alexander Terebenin Gallery and Traces on White, there is a movement along the trajectory determined in advance. A path that is straight or winding, with distinct rhythmic repetitions in the space of a gallery or with the improvisation of a chaotic, almost primeval structure, in a snow-bound corridor. Running in place, cyclicity. A road that leads nowhere.

The photographic prints that make up the Gallery series depict perspectival stretches of the dilapidated 18th century colonnades lining Nikolsky Market in St. Petersburg, while Traces on White reveals empty paths throughout countryside’s equally neglected natural environment, replete rickety fences and desolate, snowy fields. Throughout both series, Terebenin carefully constructs a journey into nowhere, delicately conjuring an atmosphere of desperation despite the light of the sun and the vast open expanses. Those abandoned places reeking of discontent and the abuse of neglect call immediately to mind the glories of Russia’s imperial past and a nostalgia inseparable from the rust and concrete structures within which those halcyon days once so fully expressed themselves.

Alexander Arefiev (August 3, 1931 – May 5, 1978)

Alexander Arefiev was born in Leningrad, USSR. He learned to draw at the Zhdanov Palace of Young Pioneers. In 1944, he was enrolled to the Secondary Art School at the Academy of Arts where he studied with Alexander Traugot, Ilya Glazunov, Sholom Shvarz, Vladimir Shagin, Rodion Gudzenko. In 1949, he was expelled from the school together with A. Traugot and M. Voytsekhovsky. In 1951, Arefiev’s friends Vladimir Shagin and Valentin Gromov were expelled from the institution as well. In the late 1940s, Arefiev and the other expelled artists united into a group and started holding small apartment exhibitions of their works. Arefiev’s works from the 1940s consist of cityscapes (Vasilyevsky Island, Kolomna) and genre scenes. In 1948, he met poet Roald Mandelstam who later on, in the 1950s, became the center of a group of artists that, in addition to Arefiev and Traugot, included Rikhard Vasmi, Sholom Shvarz, Rodion Gudzenko, Valentin Gromov and Vladimir Shagin. In the mid-fifties, Arefiev created hundreds of drawings on the subjects of the Leningrad daily life. In the late sixties, A.D. Arefiev became the leader of a small group of artists that was later on dubbed the Arefiev Circle whose other members were V. Shagin, R. Vasmi and Sh. Shvarz.
The artist tried his hand in book illustrations and had two solo exhibitions in the apartments of his friends, artists Vakhtang Kekelidze and Kyrill Lilbok (in 1958). In 1974-1975, Arefiev participated in organization of exhibitions of nonconformist artists at the Gaza Palace of Culture and Nevsky Palace of Culture, and he himself was a participant of the first of them. In 1975, he became a member of the Partnership of Experimental Exhibitions. From that time on, he participated in several apartment exhibitions in Leningrad and in Moscow. Being a non-Jew, he also participated in exhibitions of the Jewish group Aleph. A.D. Arefiev died in Paris on May 19, 1978.
The artist’s works are in the collections of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Museum of Nonconformist Art(St. Petersburg, Russia) Zimmerly Art Museum (New Brunswick, USA), State Museum of History of St. Petersburg, State museum Tsarskoye Selo Collection, and in private collections of St. Petersburg, France, New York.

Rodion Gudzenko (1931, Poltava – 1999, St. Petersburg)

From 1944 to 1947, Gudzenko studied at the Secondary Art School at the Academy of Arts together with A. Arefiev and Sh. Shvarz, and he was expelled. In 1953, he was admitted to the correspondence section of Moscow Institute of Printing and Publishing, Department of Art Design of Printed Materials. The artist was arrested in 1956 and convicted under the article 58, § 10 “for anti-Soviet subversive activities and propaganda” and he was released from prison in 1961.

Reclining Nude
35Х41 см
Hardboard, tempera
2004

Valentin Gromov (1930, Leningrad)

Gromov learned to draw at the A. A. Zhdanov Palace of Young Pioneers.
In 1946, he was enrolled to the Secondary Art School at the Academy of Arts where he studied with Alexander Arefiev, Alexander Traugot, Ilya Glazunov, Sholom Shvarz, Vladimir Shagin, Rodion Gudzenko. In 1948, he met poet Roald Mandelstam who was of a great influence for him. In 1951, he was expelled from the school together with Vladimir Shagin; his friends A. Arefiev, A. Traugot and M. Voytsekhovsky were expelled from the institution a year earlier. In the late 1940s, the expelled artists, including Gromov, united together with A. Arefiev into a group and started holding small apartment exhibitions of their works.
After the Secondary Art School, Gromov was admitted to a night school, which he successfully completed. He worked as a stage designer. In 1953, he was admitted to the correspondence section of Moscow Institute of Printing and Publishing, Department of Art Design of Printed Materials, from which he graduated. In 1956, after the exposition of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism had been opened at the Hermitage, he experienced a strong impact of French painting on his art, and French artists Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir were of influence on his development as an artist.
Subjects of Gromov’s works are theater, scenes in the parks and on the beach, views of Leningrad suburbs. His early paintings (1950s) show a strong influence of Arefiev, but subsequently the artist generated his own manner that combined the contrasts of bright splashes of pure color and the fragmentariness of composition, characteristic of the Arefiev Circle, with the drawing imbued with a fine lyric inflexion.
From 1959 to 1998, Gromov worked at the printing plant as a proof-reader for print. In the early 2000s, he began to work a great deal with painting.

Rikhard Vasmi (1929, Leningrad – 1998, St. Petersburg)

Rikhard was born in 1929 году in Leningrad in the family of an architect. In 1948-50, he studied at the Leningrad Architectural Training College. In 1951, he joined the group of nonconformist artists. In 1948, sculptor Mikhail Voytsekhovsky (born in 1931), who studied at the Secondary Art School at the Academy of Arts together with A. Arefiev and A. Traugot, wittedly called the circle of his artist friends the Order of Mendicant Painters, similarly to the Order of Mendicant Knights, founded in 1118 in Jerusalem, that is better known as the Order of Templars or Knights of the Temple. 20 years later, this name was caught up by artist Alexander Arefiev who relegated it to himself and his friends. The circle members were A. Arefiev, V. Shagin, Sh. Shvarz, V. Perlovsky as well as poet Roald Mandelstam.
Since 1965, the artist participated in the apartment exhibitions. In 1965-67, he lived in the city of Narva. In 1978, he participated in an exhibition at the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Yerevan. In 1991, Vasmi became a member of the Creative Union of Artists (IFA).
Vasmi’s creative manner is characterized by the simplified treatment of forms accentuated by the harsh linear drawing and decorative color. He worked in the genres of landscape, portrait, still life, and he created historical compositions. His development as an artist was influenced by the Leningrad artists Nikolai Lapshin and Alexander Vedernikov. The themes of the artist’s works range from scenes of everyday life to biblical subjects, with cityscapes being the prevalent one.
Vasmi died in St. Petersburg in 1998. He is buried in St. Petersburg in the same grave with poet R. Mandelstam (died in 1961) and A. Arefiev (died in 1978). In May of 2012, a monument to three of them was placed on their grave.

Sholom Shvarz (1929, Leningrad – 1995, St. Petersburg)

Shvarz was born in 1929 in Leningrad. He graduated from the Secondary Art School at the Academy of Arts, but he was not admitted to the Academy. He completed two years at the correspondence section of Moscow Institute of Printing and Publishing (1953–1954). He worked as proofreader at a printing plant, roofer, radio assembler, shipping agent, house painter and others.
The artist’s paintings are characterized by an expressive manner, and his graphic works reveal an interest to the study of form.He died in St. Petersburg in 1995.