MOSCOW.- Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition One Within the Other. Art of New and Old Media in the Age of High-speed Internet. Halls of the third floor of the MMOMA venue at Petrovka street contain eight art projects, produced with different materials and media, from painting to electronic means of communication, in the period of 2012-2015. As part of the long-term strategy of extending the museum’s holdings, the works selected or created especially for the exhibition will be recommended for acquisition into the MMOMA collection.
Authors of the works are Maria Agureeva, Kirill Garshin, Evgeny Granilshchikov, Evgenia Machneva, Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::), Dmitry Okruzhnov and Maria Sharova, Rostan Tavasiev, Yan Tamkovich. They all belong to the young generation in the Russian contemporary art – however, being born in the USSR, they remember the world without cell phones, Wikipedia and social networks. In the mid-2000s, they witnessed widespread dissemination of digital technologies and, first of all, of high-speed internet, the main hybrid communication tool of the present epoch, which significantly changed the traditional forms of behavior and socialization, attitudes to knowledge and attention, perception of space and time.
Perhaps, this unique experience largely determined the exhibition protagonists’ interest in genealogy, mixing and interpenetration of different media, which distinctively colors their individual poetics. Such recursive attitude to materials and technologies is reminiscent of the celebrated quote from Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) – “the content of any medium is always another medium”. This aphorism became the starting point for the exhibition in MMOMA.
All presented artworks, in their own way, demonstrate the nesting of visual technologies, when one medium can be noticed within the other, the old one within the new one and vice versa, like endless reflections in the opposite mirrors. Family photos or digital pictures borrowed from the internet are reproduced on canvases. Art objects create accounts and communicate on Facebook. Machine parts become patterns on hand-woven tapestries. Interfaces of various electronic devices flicker in a cell phone video. The project by one artist becomes the material for another artist’s installation. An ancient sacred sculpture shows through in the form of a robot, while the textures of living flesh may be guessed in the polished colored plastic.
Each art project is being displayed in the environment of the artists’ “laboratory” – with different documents and artifacts, which shed light on the process of its creation, its exhibition history or, on the contrary, are devoted to the subsequent reflection on the project by its author. Notably, many of these laboratory exhibits are being shown for the first time. They will help viewers immerse themselves in the mental creative space of the exhibition participants, as it were providing clues to their conceits, and will focus attention on the phenomenon of intermediality, i.e. migration of ideas and images, human anxieties and dreams, from one material carrier to the other.
In a certain sense, One Within the Other continues the discussion initiated by the 200 Keystrokes per Minute exhibition, which is being devoted to the role of the typewriter in Russian culture of the past century and opened simultaneously on the second floor of the museum venue at Petrovka street. Transferring the conversation to the plane of artistic and theoretical considerations on technology in art, the exhibition on the third floor will take the viewer into the modern context of the domination of digital media.
