🗓️August 24 – September 7, 2014
MANEGE CENTRAL EXHIBITION HALL
📍1 St Isaac’s Sq, St Petersburg 190000 Russia
St. Petersburg annually hosts a vast number of international exhibitions and contemporary art festivals. Almost all of them aim to foster intercultural communication and draw public attention to the social and political issues of today’s world. Although St. Petersburg has a reputation for conservative traditions, young artists continue to demonstrate remarkable creative energy and inventiveness. A vivid example of this is the art project Manifesto “Pulse 1”, which brought together young artists from St. Petersburg, Belarus, and Norway.
The exhibition includes objects, video art, dynamic light painting, sound and non-sound installations, photographic abstraction, and street painting. Each artist’s project is unique, yet all share a common goal: to model their own life-social code and build a personal system of artistic coordinates in an effort to explore the image of the contemporary world.
The Helix group (Vlad Tsimbalov and Ilya Dvornikov), for example, focuses on issues of intergender communication. Their video installation explores alternatives to entrenched patriarchal traditions and mass culture, proposing the development of a new system of gender relationships and behavioral connections.
Natalya Demyanenko and Irina Schastlivtseva are drawn to philosophical reflection. In their installation Grow, women’s dresses placed one inside another and immersed in dye-filled containers become sources of a new form of matter, which—through the viewer’s act of visual immersion—can be transformed into a flow of emotional energy.
Sofya Voronina also traces the movements of this energy. She constructs a mirror path installation that reflects the lives of people once captured through a photographer’s lens.
Pavel Ivanov’s instrumental explorations begin with algorithmic code. The activity, length, and amplitude of electric waves on a dark screen generate dynamic light paintings filled with energy and artistic meaning.
Alexey Grachev, too, searches for such meanings. In his sound art installation Groove of Real Time, he attempts to materialize the sound streams of life and find a sensory form for the events of Time.
Artists from Norway, Dmitry Lurie and Beate Petersen, present a multimedia video installation titled Conversions, which creates a unique five-part choir using the voice of a single singer. The work invites viewers to contemplate the human body as a transcendent medium—a divine, non-mechanical instrument. The piece features a performance by renowned Russian tenor Mikhail Serishev of the psalm The Embrace of the Father, originally composed in the 14th century at the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. In the Orthodox tradition, this troparion is still sung during the sacred ritual of monastic tonsure.
Anastasia Markelova investigates the issue of chromatic world order (The Depth of Stillness, photo-painting), while Ekaterina Chaban uses painterly improvisations to reflect on contemporary youth street culture and the possibility of redirecting aggressive energy into creative expression.
Project Participants:
Russia: Pavel Ivanov – Dynamic painting (moving images); Anastasia Markelova – The Depth of Stillness, photo painting; Sofya Voronina – Everything That Happened Will Remain With Us, installation; Natalya Demyanenko & Irina Schastlivtseva – Grow, installation; Alexey Grachev – Groove of Real Time, sound installation; Helix group (Vlad Tsimbalov & Ilya Dvornikov) – Patriarchal Model. Version 1.0., video art.
Belarus: Ekaterina Chaban – painting
Norway: Dmitry Lurie & Beate Petersen – multimedia video installation Conversions