Ministry of Culture, Russian Federation
National Center for Contemporary Arts, Ekaterinburg branch in collaboration with International Fine Arts Consortium and Perpetual Art Machine (PAM)

Presents

Walking a Fine Line
Parables of the Sublime and the Subversive in Russian Video Art.

Curated by: Ksenia Fedorova and Alisa Prudnikova

January 9 (Friday), 7:30pm

Monkey Town:
58 N 3rd St. (btw. Kent & Wythe), Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211

The program showcases the recent Russian video art works that reflect complex and controversial attitude towards the phenomenon of the sublime in Russian culture and mentality. Artists confront mystification and sacralization, engagement and spiritual detachment with strategies ranging from epatage to derision, eccentricity, and radical activism. Whom to blame? What to do? The viewer is invited to ponder upon these and other perennial “Russian” questions and find his/her own “fine line” of authentic response.

Research on characteristics of national and local identity is one of the main foci of the Ekaterinburg NCCA. The search for identity in post-Soviet Russian society and the development of a new value system have been raised in interdisciplinary projects like “Novorusskoe (The Nouveau Russian)” (2005), “In Transition Russia 2008”, videoprogram “Dreams in the Epicenter” (2007), and others.

The penchant to extremes, paradoxicality, and irrationalism have become stereotypical characteristics of "Russianness". In such a way, contemplative submersion sometimes rather easily turns into subversion, a response of blunt satire or heavy-handed irony. The fact of contemporary reality is that the radical “other” is embedded into the surface of what is already here, which is none other than the everyday, the event of life itself. Shifting perspectives, whether as a radical gesture, or just slightly, we are all groping to find that most authentic fine line that connects the limit and its beyond, the spiritual self and the social other. Russian contemporary artists demonstrate how a national feature speaks the common (universal) truth.

Artists: Leonid Tishkov, Blue Soup Group, Vladlena Gromova, Vladimir Logutov, Bombily Group, Alexey Buldakov, Yury Vasiliev, Victor Davydov, Victor Alimpiev, Veronika Rudyeva-Ryazantseva, Provmyza, Blue Noses Group.

Contact:
www.uralncca.ru , ksenfedorova@gmail.ru
monkeytownhq.com , 718.384.1369, monkeytownhq@gmail.com

Admission: $5, $10 minimum, reservations are recommended