Exhibition of artist Alexander Priymachenko Safe House

December 6, 2016 at the WINZAVOD Center for Contemporary Art at the START site, an exhibition of the artist Alexander Priymachenko Safe House opens. As conceived by the author, the exposition is an experimental laboratory with experiments on moving in time and space. The exhibition features a photo collage, videos, objects made of wax.

According to scientific forecasts, in the near future, humanity will be in a situation where the pace of scientific progress will become so fast that it will be impossible to comprehend them. We are experiencing echoes of this future today. Reality turns into a set of disparate designs that give each person a picture of the world. This disunity leads to a state of total uncertainty. In the project of Alexander Primaychenko, video, photo collages and objects made of wax form an alternative space, conceived as a place of possible communication - present, past and future.

In the center of the exhibition is a video Ðreamscape: interpretation of the runway photo-novel, filmed in the early 60s by one of the main documentaries of the 20th century, French director Chris Marker. This is the history of the world after World War III. People forced to live in a dungeon create a device that can move them into the past. The protagonist is an experimental subject who is testing a new technology. With the help of the device, he plunges into memories, trying to collect the image of the past from the fragments of memory. Its purpose is to restore the connection between fragmentary fragments of consciousness and to outline the path for humanity that has been captured by a catastrophic present. The same device, the helmet of virtual reality, is recreated in his video by Alexander Priymachenko. His hero plunges into the ruined 3D gaming world over and over again. The journey is accompanied by insets of childhood memories. The hero hardly combines layers of fragmented experience, his personality is on the verge of dissolution. The paths to a clear understanding of reality are blurred as much as possible.

It is no coincidence that Alexander Priymachenko takes a video game as the basis of a short film. Disunity is one of the conditions of virtual reality. Games are created as a set of levels that are built in a certain way. “It seems to you that you understand everything, and then you fall through the wall, and everything fell apart,” the artist explains. At the same time, games are an element of reality, a tool that allows you to remotely observe situations, create new ones and immerse other people in them.

Ðreamscape world crosses the boundaries of virtual reality and finds material embodiment in the space of the exhibition. Its fragments are captured in a series of acrylic-printed photo collages and wax objects. Collages are based on documentary photographs taken in one of the sleeping areas of Moscow. The pictures show artifacts of the environment that attracted the attention of the artist. In the process of processing, silhouettes from games were added to them: the outlines of the houses, scattered lines, characters frozen in unnatural poses. In collages, the domestic environment merges with imaginary images, forming a single whole.

In addition to landscapes from the digital world, game objects currently penetrate: a bottle of Health pills and containers with cartridges. Transformation of sterile 3D objects into real ones is accompanied by deformation. The wax chosen as the material helps to recreate the process of transition from one dimension to another.

“Wax seems to me to be very physical material, tangible, closest to the flesh. He looks like a body. This is something closer to us than metal or plastic, something more tangible. It was interesting to choose the wax for the conversation about the intersection of different layers of reality and to embody the nonexistent in such extremely physical, organic material, ”says Alexander Priymachenko.

Safe House is a place where digital worlds find their material embodiment.

Dates: December 6 - January 8
Opening hours: Tue-Sun 12: 00-20: 00
Free admission