On 1 March the first spring event, an exhibition with an ambiguous name ‘Pol’ (eng. ‘Floor’, also ‘Gender' or 'Sex') was organized at the ‘4 rooms’ free space. For us, the people who organized the event, it was not so much a matter of our ambitions as supervisors (even though for both Evgeniya Nikitina and your humble narrator it was the first experience in this sphere) as it was trying out a new format, new for both Cultural Transit Fund and Yekaterinburg in general. It was a one night exhibition aiming mostly at bringing the artist and the audience closer together and giving a boost to their interaction opportunities.
Wandering through the exposition, visitors did not come across long boring explications (explanation what the artist wanted to say with his work). At first sight it was probably taken as ‘Real art doesn’t need explaining and guides, everything must be understood without them. Don’t you understand the language of art?!’ But the next minute a visitor would meet the artist himself, ask a few questions about his work and probably say something himself. As it usually happens at such events, having indulged in the latest trends of modern art, public begins to peek at chairs, fire cabinets and other furniture asking themselves if they were actual furniture or works of art. That played into the hand of Sergey Lukashin, a luminary of Ural art, whose pictures and installations built into the space were displayed at the event. With his characteristic humor, Sergey created three installations, ideas for which he received upon his first visit to ‘4 rooms’. The name ‘Pol’ was understood in different ways by different artists, we will speak more about this wonderful word that is quite tricky to translate into other languages later. Having heard name of the project Sergey understood ‘pol’ as floor coating, a walking surface, and played with these meanings in his works. The visitors had to literally mind their steps not to step on ‘Carrion’ by the bar counter (bent aluminum forks which everybody tried to push away just as the artist had planned, showing that any fallen object often becomes useless junk that you want to stay away from, saying ‘it’s not mine…’). Two other Sergey’s installations also had word-plays in their names. ‘Hidden Pol’ was a square meter of floor coating covered with plastic wrap, untouched in the beginning and torn and trampled by the end of the exhibition. A metaphor meaning to tell us that however well we hide and protect something, in the end it will be discovered like the floor under the visitors’ feet. ‘Innocence Turned into a ‘Pol’ Entity’ uses the gender represented by the white airy fabric stretched under the ceiling that has a 1-shaped hole in it. The 1-shaped piece of fabric has fallen to the floor and therefore became a ‘pol’ one. (Translator’s note: Here the word-play is in the fact that the same phrase ‘polovaya edinitsa’ in Russian can be understood either as one sexually active or aware of his gender or one somehow belonging to the floor, for example used to wash it or living on it)
Visitors had a chance to interact with the name of the exhibition starting from the first seconds of their visit to ‘4 rooms’ as they actually took part in creation of one of the works. Street artist Slava PTRK offered everyone to leave a ‘trace in art’. Later a portrait of a hobo, ‘trampled’ by the visitors was displayed in one of the halls. Across from it we could see a work of Slava’s ‘brother in arms’ in PTRK, Ilyukha Mozgi, - image of Paul McCartney carved on a piece of old linoleum.
Coming back to rendering the name. From the draft name ‘Between masculine and feminine’ (determined by the time of the project – between the men’s and the women’s national holidays), that trapped the artists in the sphere of self-identification, relationships and gender stereotypes, the name has been changed to ‘Pol’, thus granting the artists more freedom in self-expression. We combined ‘gender’, ‘floor’ and ‘half’ (‘pol’ also being short for ‘polovina’, a half). As for the first one, we have received refusals to cooperate from artists that were not happy with the ‘provocative nature of the name’. Another provocative thing at the exhibition was a project of two women photographers Dasha Gofman and Luba Kabalinova ‘Coming out’. The project tells 6 stories and shows 6 black and white pictures (with the family, with the significant other, one on one with the camera) of people who have come out. The project had an obvious social orientation and for its 6 participants who have come to the exhibition the artist-character-visitor communication was probably more important than to anyone else at the event. At the moment ‘Coming out’ has been continued and will soon be displayed as a bonus to a big and serious exhibition. One of the characters, Evgeniya Stanina has submitted her own series of photographs.
Gender self-identification was the topic of the work of Vladimir Seleznev, an artist and curator of Federal Modern Art Centre. A meditation video ‘Portrait. Man and Woman’, framed in a golden fillet. As a work of art in the middle of a busy street a girl that used to be a man is looking at us, we are looking at her and from the headphones we hear a song that played in the ‘Man and Woman’ movie: ‘So much joy, enough drama – and a long story, a man and a woman are created by the game of luck’.
In the same hall visitors could meet another video art work of Pop-grafika (eng. Pop-graphics) (PG), a Moscow art group that has never been to Yekaterinburg in its 12 year career. Ilya Falkovsky, Alexey Katalkin and Boris Spiridonov, members of the group, created a ‘multimedia comic’ that combines photos, graphics, video and an audio track. In ‘Beer, Football’ artists turn into social outcasts, rampant football fans. ‘By creating a ‘bad guys’ image the artists show today’s Russia with violence, drugs and sex being its significant features’ ©. And right next to it there is a direct opposite – work of Olga Pavlova, a media artist from Saint Petersburg. Again I’d rather put a quote here, ‘‘Kittens, doggies’, we can conventionally call it macro realism, op art, and a photo collage. Animalistic portraits, willing to become group ones, falling apart into flora and fauna so cherished by Olga, and coming back into solid images, carry into fragile psychedelia, develop our imagination and eye sight. What does the artist want to say with it? Olga prefers to remain silent, letting her characters’ ‘meow’, ‘woof’ and ‘moo’ to complex authors’ concepts.’ – Anton Borisov. Visitors could enjoy video for the track written by Olga’s friend, a famous St. Petersburg musician Alexander Belkov (Unter Gluck band), and take home a small quote on a postcard with the collage print.
There were many collages: three more artists joined Olga in this category. Maria Artemyeva from Nyagan introduced a series of collages ‘Children and Birds’: androgynous children from different countries with subtly developed sexual characters, black and white, in a particular composition – illustrations of their feeling of the world, pedantic and laborious in the manner of creation, made a good contrast for glamorous pictures of Fyodor Buravlyov. According to the artist, ‘visitors’ eyes rested while watching (his) surrealistic humor of collages and caricatures’.
Sergey Rozhin, whose projects in association with Federal Modern Art Centre have brought him recognition in the city, must have been the one to receive the most excited feedback. 36 works divided into groups according to technique and themes were displayed in different halls. Collages made of black and white photos with a generous addition of bright gouache , mainly philosophical and relationships subject ( ‘Conscience’, ‘My First Time’, ‘Unwashed Socks’), same collages with addition of contraceptives (‘Insignificant Responsibility’) or boot covers (‘Deathly Battle’) seen as art objects. Visitors could also see ‘Monument To Those Who Take Me For Who I Am’ that the artist created an hour before the opening.
Any visitor could perceive himself regardless of sexual identity in an installation of Anya Sitnikova and Lena Shubentsova. Feeling like being in some sort of a cocoon, a mother’s womb, being independent is a dream of every metropolis dweller.
Independence was the subject of two video works of Tatyana Akhmetgalieva from Saint Petersburg, with whom our audience is familiar after 1st Ural Industrial Biennale of modern art. Tatyana doesn’t explain her works as a matter of principle – they are aimed at personal experiences and feelings. ‘Alchemy’, made back in 2006, is a white sheet of paper turning black. As soon as human hands touch it, the process is on. A powerful sound track and the picture sending us off to understanding that the paper is a metaphor for human body really make one wander. Sound is also important in Tatyana’s second work, ‘Wound’. Here we see characteristic for the artist materials (wool and synthetic threads). They inevitably form an association with human body: white fabric and pulse beat under it, accompanied by a sound track resembling actual heartbeat in the beginning and horrible noise closer to the middle when a stream of red threads penetrates the white fabric. What is it if not deformation of our skin? Whether it’s actual skin or something deeper that’s hidden from the human eye.
Natalya Khokhonova was definitely working with something hidden from the human eye. A very simple installation made of x-ray pictures and red threads attracted the visitors’ unconditional sympathy and understanding. Word ‘Love’ was formed by the threads and ‘Pain’ formed by different bones on the x-ray pictures reflect Nataya’s thoughts on how these two feelings are connected. If you talked to the artist during the event, you would learn that idea came to her after having read an article that said that there’s a part of brain responsible for both physical and emotional pain and how simple painkillers like Analgin can help you get rid of emotional suffering.
Works of Anatoly Vyatkin, another famous Ural artist, had more physical in them. A series of canvases resembling rock painting with the archetypical hunter and a portrait of Sasha Grey. Portrait of the famous avant-gardist both in sex and music couldn’t do without metaphors: visible phallic symbols and the author’s signature written in transparent glue raising some association, didn’t embarrass Sasha who has seen her portrait in a social network and re-posted it onto her official page in the beginning of the exhibition. Very young Maria Plaksina also experimented with different techniques. She has submitted 4 works, all very different from each other. In one of them, ‘Supremacy of Asphalt’, Maria used sunflower seeds. A black square made of the seeds, technique and characters of this work make us decipher the name and look for meaning inside it. Traditional technique of water paintings in ‘Architectural Grotesque’ by Maria Salomakhina was slightly shifted: the artist made a stamp on watercolor paper and then edited the image with colored pencils.
Photography also met some shifting. A series of works by Renata Kasimova ‘In2’ was some experiment, re-thinking and play with shadow theatre. While Renata had shadow, Sasha Saltanova, who has already had exhibitions not only in Yekaterinburg, but also in Berlin and New-York, had a lot of light. Too much light, in fact. ‘Turn Off the Light’ installation is a reproduction of ‘Last Day of Pompeii’ and a usual table lamp. Play of the name of the picture, poses people on it and position of the lamp is the secret of this work. Truly an artist is a person who notices things others don’t. In sight of the last work it’s time to finish and ‘turn off the light’ and while speaking of visible and invisible…what a pleasant almost sadistic feeling it is to watch a visitor struggling to decide if what he sees is art or not.
Not an art critic Artyom Antipin
