Russian Performance : A Cartography of its History
▻http://garagemca.org/en/event/russian-performance-a-cartography-of-its-history
C’est juste un reminder d’une exposition du musée Garage à Moscou qui a eu lieu en 2014
Russian Performance: A Cartography of its History is the first exhibition to explore a century of the medium’s history and unique traditions in Russia. Spanning the early experiments of the Futurists to the radical actions of today, the project also emphasizes the significance of Russian performance in an international context.
Based on four years of intensive research, the exhibition takes a chronological structure, with the peculiarities of each decade or epoch reflected in the architectural design of the corresponding section of the show. Cutting-edge multimedia technologies will enable viewers to participate in a performance that is shaped by their own choices, navigating a number of alternative scenarios that are available alongside the main route. Specific #tags linking each work to one of the project’s key themes (such as Statement, Costume, Landscape, Interactive Object) will assist visitors in traversing the exhibition according to their individual routes, which can be mapped with a specially designed free app.
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« Russian Performance : A Cartography of its History » : Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. - Free Online Library
▻http://www.thefreelibrary.com/%22Russian+Performance%3A+A+Cartography+of+its+History%22%3A+Garage+
“Russian Performance: A Cartography of its History”
GARAGE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Based on years of archival research, “Russian Performance: A Cartography of its History” provided a comprehensive overview of the subject over the last hundred years, from the artistic experiments of the early Russian avant-garde through the Moscow Conceptualism of the 1970s to the political post-perestroika work of the “New Wave” and Moscow Actionism groups, the apolitical collective performances of the early 2000s, and the renewed interest in activism and politics in performance in the 2010s. An enlarged photograph of the anti-Putin protest group Pussy Riot (by prominent Moscow photographer Igor Mukhin) was the not-so-subtle exit point of the exhibition.
Rather than articulating performance as a genre, through which questions are produced only by the medium itself, the exhibition embedded the medium in very a specific sociopolitical and cultural context, with its own questions, issues, and anxieties. This raises the question of how performance has been defined through art history: more often than not with a strong, if not exclusive, focus on a Euro-American context, associated with the transgressive, bodily, or identity politics of those artistic practices that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. An exhibition of this kind can revise that history even as it is being written. Performance is a medium that escapes a stable definition, mainly because its manifestations are as varied as the artists practicing it. This wide range was reflected in the exhibition, and its organizers (Garage curator Yulia Aksenova and its head archivist, Sasha Obukhova) actively destabilized the definition of performance. The show’s first room featured some obvious examples, such as the 1913 Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. But then the focus shifted to the theatrical experiments of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein—traditionally shown as part of theater history, yet now framed as Russian performance in a broader sense—as well as filmed and photographic documentation of mass revolutionary demonstrations and parades that took place in Russia in the 1910s and ’20s. Performance beyond any artistic intention, without any institutional framework, and solely designed for ideological purposes? The proposition may seem exaggerated, but it is certainly thought-provoking. And one only need recall the often extreme interventions of the Moscow Actionists to realize the fine line between artistic intention and public domain—most notably Alexander Brener spray-painting a green dollar sign on one of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1997, as documented in a previous exhibition at Garage.
#art #cartographie #russie #moscou #garage #soviétisme