Exhibition of contemporary art "Wasteland and wasteland"

On October 26, the famous curator Andrei Erofeev opened a large exhibition project “Wasteland and Heath” in Vladivostok, combining the key names of Russian contemporary art. The exposition will last at the Zarya Center for Contemporary Art until January 15, 2017. Free admission.

The thematic exhibition of contemporary art is devoted to key elements of the Russian natural and urban landscape. These are two features of the state of the territory by which all our compatriots will immediately recognize their native land.

A wasteland is an abandoned urban area, let go of its own accord, dropped out of cultural and administrative control. And the wasteland is a similar phenomenon in the wild. A dead place where the forest used to grow, and now thickets grow in the burned out or wetlands. The chaos of these places is close to totality. In them there is an almost complete absence of a familiar order of things. There are no solid valuable objects here, the visitor’s gaze wanders into the void of the formlessly disintegrated space.

Wastes and wastelands exist in all the so-called "civilized countries." But there is “wasteland” and “wasteland” - a short-term state of a place, a pause between past content that has disappeared and future content that is about to arise in this place. They are rare. These are piecewise flaws in space for centuries of manicured territory.

Russia belongs to such countries where islands of improvement flicker pointwise in the vast world of chaos. Here wastelands and wastelands are constant and even tend to expand. De facto they are the basic characteristic of the Russian territory. Nevertheless, most of our compatriots are not inclined to endow wastelands and wastelands with a spiritual, cultural and civilizational meaning and recognize their rights to legal status as significant elements of the urban and natural environment.

For one part of our society, wasteland and wasteland there are phenomena, although inevitable, but low-lying and even shameful, like “latrine places” that are indecent to consider and discuss. Another part of society, on the contrary, has a crazy interest in apocalyptic pictures of total devastation, embarking on virtual (in computer games) or real extreme tourism through the depths of the casting world. But they also do not perceive the wasteland in the context of their existence. On the contrary, Voyeurism in the exotic looking glass serves diggers, stalkers, ubrexes and their many fans on the Internet as a means of mental distance from the surrounding outback.

Meanwhile, in the Russian fine arts, for the third century in a row, the tradition of perceiving wastelands and wastelands as an identification (or identification) allegorical landscape of the “Russian world” is ripening and forming. She was born the program of the national landscape of Romanticism, the search for the visual equivalent of the "genius of the place" in which the natural, social, spiritual factors, as well as the features of the everyday life of the people interbreed. Together, they model a specific standard of context, which, as a trace or imprint, is invariably reproduced by a given nation, no matter in which geographical region it settles.

The Russian identification wasteland landscape originates from the famous gloomy "Thaw" by Fedor Vasilyev. This type of landscape was continued in the lyrical "bridges" of Polenov and Korovin, and in Soviet times it formed the basis of landscape painting by non-conformist artists, creating a natural alternative to paradise visions of communism.

The wastelands and wastelands were depicted by the largest underground masters - Eric Bulatov, Oleg Vasiliev, Mikhail Roginsky, Dmitry Plavinsky, Semen Feibisovich, as well as the conceptualists Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, Alexander Brodsky.

To emphasize the continuity of the topic, this exhibition opens with the work of some of these older masters. But the main place in the exposition is given to those who represent the post-Soviet period of Russian art. These are mainly Moscow and St. Petersburg artists, to which was added the talented tandem of the Latvian avant-garde artists Katrina Neuburg and Andris Eglitis, who created a huge installation on the theme of “garage life” for the Venice Biennale 2015.

Vladivostok at the exhibition is represented by the works of the famous musician and mystification artist Pavel Shugurov, whose work will be exhibited in metal garages - the main attribute of local wastelands.

In the works of all these artists, wastelands and wastelands retain the original meaning of the allegory of Russian life. But their landscapes are no longer looped on the symbolism of social and existential ill-being, alienation, abandonment, stagnation and powerlessness. In them wastelands and wastelands are presented rather in an attractive light - as an original subject-spatial environment saturated with bizarre fragments of “self-building” and historical ruins inhabited by rogue animals, parasitic plants and unusual residents from among the lumpen and marginals. This reckless people here not only indulge in bliss and carnal pleasures, but are engaged in productive activities. An unrecognized world gives its inhabitants a free, unauthorized, uncontrolled life. These places exhibit a special aesthetic based on such forms and textures that in the zones of order and discipline have a negative connotation - on dust, dirty snow mixed with clay, on a mash of viscous, fluid-like plastic, in which chaotically mixed and ground fragments of old life drown.

Wastelands and wastelands are windows open both to history, whose material evidence elsewhere has been sanitized by the authorities, and to the future, to the ghostly utopias with which the elites regularly seduce the population. Artists not only explore the morphology of wasteland and wasteland, but also present the viewer with the features of the inverted optics of the “Russian look” with which the inhabitant of such places perceives the outside world.

Composition of artists:

Kirill Ass, Oleg Vasiliev, Sofya Gavrilova, Blue Soup group, Ilya Dolgov, Anya Acorn, Alexey Kallima, Vitaliy Komar and Alex Melamid, Elizaveta Konovalova, Elena Koptyaeva, Valery Koshlyakov, Ivan Lungin, Roman Mokrov, Vladimir Molochkov, Katrina Neuburg and Andris Eglitis, Vincent Nilin, Nikola Ovchinnikov, Anton Olshvang, Pavel Pepperstein, Dmitry Plavinsky, Anastasia Potemkina, Mikhail Roginsky, Vitas Stasyunas, Ilya Trushevsky, Semen Faybisovich, Pavel Shugurov.