It is not always easy to decide to conduct an experiment, the results of which will inevitably be made public. However, the collaborative experiment-project “1PLACE2” has already entered the final straight, and shows the audience its artistic results.
The project was launched a week ago, when the exhibition of three artists from Berlin – Sven Stuckenschmidt, Andreas Marker and Max Sudhues was opened within the frames of the vernisage week of the 2nd Ural Industrial Biennale in the Local History Museum. Yekaterinburg remembers Sudhues’ last year master class for young artists, which was ended with an exhibition of light installations for the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin flight. This time the artist came from Berlin not alone, he came with his colleagues Sven Stuckenschmidt and Andreas Marker, his fellow students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munster. It was the first experience of joint exhibition for the authors with a great career history of solo and group projects; the artists are involved in different art themes, it’s impossible to make their approaches and techniques equal.
The Ural artists were offered the collaboration, within frames of which they worked with the finished exhibition, inserting their artistic expressions in the context, offering development of the themes, which have been already declared by German artists, and may be the most difficult was discussing with them the legitimacy, appropriateness and the extent of interference. It was an invitation to a dialogue between artists, hardly capable of having unconfined verbal communication. Therefore, it would be artificial to try to limit the whole exhibition with a thematic framework; the parallels were based on the principles of the different order: conceptual rejection of the general narrative in favor of many private motives and intonations, which were growing to various flower heads, getting inspiration from already existed works; based on the principles of sensible correlation of art forms: and, emphasized on the principles of spot research (from fragmentary impressions of the city to the great attention to the secific character of the four halls of the Local History Museum).
Artists didn’t have to work with soulless empty rooms. Both German authors and their Ural in-a-week-associates, two waves came into the room, with the history of which it was needed not only to negotiate, but also to counteract, to make critical notes from the viewpoint of modern art. As each of the halls pretentiously declares itself - whether it is a pink room with magnificent curtains or a pass-through hallway of metal walls, a red hall with disassembled stands or a furniture exhibition, which seems to be installed forever in the embedded showcase opposite the entrance. These and other obvious layers of many working years of the museum, which is impossible to ignore, became the conditions / obstacles / materials for the artists’ works.
One room was expected to be strongly reincarnated: for quite a long period of time the walls were covered with cloth which was removed by the artists who cleaned the room from the decorations. Museum walls appear to be vulnerable without cloth however the artists managed to choose the solution to deal with the issue; there is no an attempt to disagree but to cooperate, offering alternatives even through the negation. In the hall the light installations from Berlin were placed: a reddish tint of the Black Hole Sunset (2011) - the work which was painted by Sven Stuckenschmidt is represented here; opposite it there is another work The Shadows of the Future (2012) by Max Sudhues, the work in which the parts of a non- assembled digital projector are reflected on the wall, thus we have an impression that it modifies even if not in the separate universe but in the museum representation: ordered and scarcely pierced by the light of an old equipment.
Artworks undergo various interpretations. Anyhow it is really interesting to watch the natural theme vs. artificial, organized, organic, animal and human one here, in this exhibition. In the pink the so called "home hall", the image of predator in the work of Andreas Maerker Tiger (2010) is dispersed in gentle colors of the walls and no one can feel the animal power. Further to, it seats behind an insignificant plastic fence, made of soft metal - the minimalistic sculpture created by Sven Stuckenschmidt (Fence, 2011). In defiance to Stuckenschmidt's metal bands, Svetlana Spirina showed the natural lines of the trees branches. She managed to poetically veil the geometry of a fence with the white squares of fallen leaves (without name, 1). In the work Soft Parade Natalya Hohonova made a step from the tiger’s skin coloring to the tiger canvas with the painted eyes of a woman. This step can be determined as a step from the animal world to the feministic human world. The specific video of Max Sudhues where fish swim between the real communication pipes became the reference point to the work of Kirill Borodin (Flying by), where the birds, unexpectedly, break through the facing wall and vanish. Probably, in the context of industrial biannual exhibition, one could release fish "inside the factory wall" but their rhythmical motion could be faded against the background of the much the same animals and unconscious element of the working " mountain". In the quiet museum walls fish as well as birds which try to tear the pattern of well-decorated and hidden interior, are in the right place.
Such revolutions, micro and macro ones happen every time when the new generation comes. Attentive and new look gives the opportunity not to hide but discern oneself.
Agata Iordan (Art historian, Postgraduate student of the Culturology & Arts, Ural State University)
