December 11 saw the opening of a new exhibition at the Museum of Cultural Heritage, the In Jest project by curator Natalia Filonenko. It continues a series of events taking place in the museum since the fall, which where evidence of a long awaited and so far unique to Kyiv interaction between contemporary art and the traditional museum policy.
In the epoch of a global information market the presentation of contemporary art demands new technologies. The museum display becomes a consulting center, offering new opportunities for spectator’s direct access to new artifacts. Thus we imperceptibly find ourselves on the way to the intercultural information society of the near future.
The In Jest joint exhibition of the Institution of Unstable Thoughts and the Museum of Cultural Heritage is a symbiosis of separate cultural traditions and a quest for their proper correlation with the technologies’ cultural potential. Technical resources as such were granted by the Philips Company.
The curator, being a guide to the modern arts, arouses a certain problem or outlines some idea that must be expressed clearly and persuasively. This is not the first time when curator Natalia Filonenko creates international projects with the participation of Ukrainian, Russian, and diaspora artists. Laying the foundation for her project’s logical idea, she resorts to a demiurge trick that is supposed to overcome the inevitable perishable nature of the substance, since the paradox that there is nothing more material than thought takes a new meaning in the information reality. This trick appears out of three elements: the human soul’s universal traits (the good, the bad, and the ugly, the funny in this case), ability to enjoy, and passion inherent in the human soul. The curator has an unpredictable view on the aforementioned, and probably this is the reason why her approach is so energetic. A dynamic exposition is characteristic of all Filonenko’s projects. This is a professional author’s work on regulating mechanisms and objects in an association with pleasure and passion. It is easy and flattering for the spectator to join the game in accordance with the artist’s conception and natural properties of the material.
Out of the five video projects represented at the exhibitions, which vary in terms of style and quality but are equally witty, Arkady Nasonov’s (Amsterdam) project, Modesty of Great Significance, stands out by its elegance. Nasonov is one of over one hundred commissars of the Cloud Commission international group working throughout Europe. Nasonov’s video is hand-made: the artist is scratching the nape of two car rags with Kennedy brothers’ portraits on them in all directions. The camera registers the result of this hand-to-hand arousal: unusual mimics, ticklish winking, and childish prattle of the brand-name politicians. The mood music performed in the fashionable easy listening style by Art-DJ Fish (Dmytro Biloyartsev) tops off the mood.
The Artist to a Hostage project by Ihor Husev (Odesa) blasts the standards of any exposition, as if the routine of museum life was violated by an attack, a robbery, and taking hostages. In one of the halls all the pictures are taken away from the walls and stand on the floor. The idea is that the victims, lying on the floor as it usually happens to the hostages according in films, have a chance to entertain themselves by viewing the works of arts. The artists’ care about the hostages, though ironic, is evidence of his compassion.
Another participant of the exhibition, Sergei Anufriyev (Moscow), is simply a classic of the post-Soviet conceptualist art. He is a member of the Moscow-based Medical Hermeneutic Inspection. The medical hermeneutists’ creative work is scienticistic. They work in the sphere of synthesis of fine arts, philosophy, and literature using a discursive method, i.e., logical conclusions. In spite of the broad use of the term, conceptual art, in the modern art criticism, it should not be confused with video art, minimal art, performance, and other directions in contemporary art. Conceptual art plays with the sense of global order, its past, present, and future, which has far from exhausted its potential. It appeals to ideas, the ideas of connections, and synapses between ideas, forming an unreal world. With respect to this world we, spectators from the mundane physical world, are just a fortuity.
Sergei Anufriyev displays in the showcases the Magical Objects series: a wand, Koshchei the Immortal’s egg, and the Cap of Invisibility. Playing by the rules of the ironic Moscow conceptualist school, this set of objects can be called a paramen. According to Anufriyev’s Supplementary Dictionary, a paramen means a mnemonic bouquet, a bundle of reminiscences preserved in one’s memory, in this case with almost genetic memory. Anufriyev’s fairytale paramens became the property of the Kyiv public, which has obviously dreamt of them since childhood. However, a visual version of such a powerful paramen threatens to distract the audience from any activity, and thus the threat of any wild idea to rob the museum significantly increases. The exhibition’s curator Natalia Filonenko provided for this as well.
