The dignity of all Russians is chaos. Kandinsky Prize Laureates Exhibition in Barcelona

“West is West, East is East”, says the first sentence of the catalog of the exhibition of contemporary Russian art “In complete mess” (En un absoluto desorden), which since June 15 occupies all four floors of the Santa Monica Arts Center (ArtsSantaMònica), in Barcelona. The exhibition was organized with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Catalonia and the City Hall of Barcelona.

The exhibition presents the work of Kandinsky Prize winners since its inception six years ago. Some works that managed to become notable events in the cultural life of Russia in a short time remain “far from paternalistic control of the state,” says one of the organizers of the exhibition, Shalva Breus, president of the Artchronika Foundation. The exposition, which can be seen until the end of September, will visit only two European capitals. Vincent Altaió, director of the Santa Monica Center for the Arts, emphasizes the importance and relevance of contemporary Russian art exhibitions in Europe.

“For a country that has experienced incredible turbulence for 20 years, accompanied by a surge of violence, the chances that culture will play a prominent role in people’s daily lives are very low. Art exists far from reality, and this distance is often expressed through humor. This humor is black, cynical and dry, ”says one of the exhibition’s curators, Frenchman Jean-Hubert Martin.

“Artists see the chaos and disorder of being as great opportunities, as a hotbed for creativity,” added another curator, Andrei Erofeev. It was these searches for order in disorder, in the political, social and cultural sphere, that formed the basis for the creation of the exhibition.

The exhibition is organized on four main topics: “Dmitry Prigov. The last conceptualist ”,“ Aesthetics are bad things, or the contextual art of social disorder ”,“ Tyrant and artistic activity ”,“ The collapse of the symbolic systems of the church ”.

Tables where ashtrays, paper, food waste are placed in complete disarray, a room in which all the furniture is randomly placed on the walls, and instead of the ceiling - direct access to space, clouds reflected in houses without a roof, and as if living inside these houses - All this and much more can be seen at the exhibition. Oleg Kulik presented his installation “Leo Tolstoy and Chickens” - a life-size figure of Leo Tolstoy, completely covered with chicken droppings, but continuing to write. According to the author, the layer of excreta embodies the neglect of culture and Russian history in the chaos of human existence, and human life is a process of constant humiliation. Sergey Shutov presents a picture with many priests without faces, worshiping icons on which there is no God.

And finally, a bright self-portrait of Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe in the image of Putin, against the background of a two-headed eagle. This is not the first use of the images of Russian political figures by the artist, and with his works he tries every time to express “the ugliness of the political wrong side, its perversion and ideological inconsistency”.

Anna Sidorova