🗓️December 22-26, 2015
🎟 Free Admission
BOREY ART CENTER
📍58 Liteyni Ave, St. Petersburg 191104 Russia
◆Anna Frants’ Visionary Dreams #3268-72◆
Cyland MediaArtLab presents a new project by media artists Evgeny Chertoplyasov and Sergey Kostyrko—an interactive audiovisual holographic installation at the intersection of several areas of digital art.
The project aims to expand the expressive possibilities of poetry through algorithmic art and to create a situation where a closed system is brought to life by the presence of an external observer.
The work revolves around the idea of an eternal striving for balance—and the impossibility of ever fully achieving it. As in other works by artist Evgeny Chertoplyasov, it is built around a found object—here, a phrase describing a toy known as the “Anapov bird.”
Evgeny Chertoplyasov is an artist working in photography, video, and sound art. In 2011, his project Pharmaconcert was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize. He has participated in the international video art festival Now & After (MMOMA, Moscow) and in exhibitions such as History of Russian Video Art (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy) and Return of the Ghosts (Hong Gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan).
Sergey Kostyrko is a media artist and musician, a member of groups like Benzolnye Mertvetsy, Glina, Mars-96, and Coaxil. He is also one of the organizers of FulldozerFest and the Spina!Party concert series, as well as co-founder of the cassette label Spina!rec.
Anna Frants, as in previous years, presents video and audio installations. Her works become part fantasy, part instinctive immersion—interwoven with programming and robotics. This year’s exhibition continues the Personal Space series, started in 2015, which is dedicated to the phenomenon of attachment or affection for the inanimate. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov referred to this as an “individual mystery”:
“With an inexplicable thrill, I gazed through the glass at a handful of distant diamond lights that shimmered in the dark velvet of far-off hills, and then seemed to slip into a velvet pocket. Later I gave such treasures to the heroes of my books—to rid myself of this wealth somehow.”
The exhibition at Borey Gallery will feature four new installations: Personal Space No. 2, The Road, The Nuisance, and New Year Project.
Anna Frants is a multimedia artist based in New York. She was born in St. Petersburg and graduated in 1989 from the Stieglitz Academy of Art and Design with a classical training in monumental painting. She later expanded her interests into new fields such as computer graphics and animation.
Her achievements reflect a wide range of artistic interests. Anna has received several awards for best 3D animation at prestigious computer graphics competitions (e.g., AutoDesk Planet Studio Award). She curates and participates in exhibitions in the U.S. and Russia, teaches media and animation, and publishes art criticism. Her works are in the collection of the Museum of Art and Design in New York and in private collections.
Art Center BOREY, founded in 1991, is a unique cultural institution born from a grassroots civic initiative. It was created by a group of like-minded individuals with the goal of establishing a cultural house open to artistic initiatives. Its mission is to present a wide spectrum of artistic and intellectual life in order to shape criteria for evaluating contemporary art.
The Road
CYLAND Media Lab
Old suitcases, audio
The past is remembered in fragments, especially when you’re not the one moving. I absolutely love traveling—especially by train—because you’re lying down! You can’t do anything about it, but you’re still rushing forward! Toward your destination.
Maybe there’s no real need to go there, but circumstances are such that you end up lying there thinking about life anyway. And then you remember childhood, and the feeling of sun-warmed moss when you lie on it cheek-first—it’s a little rough, but kind, because it’s warm and smells like the sea, though the sea is 50 kilometers away.
There’s also the smell of a hot coin that bounced off the rail after we put it there. And the suitcase that smells mysteriously “experienced.”
My mother once told me a story: during the siege, a bomb fragment pierced our wardrobe and left a hole. Fast forward 25 years, and I, three years old, am standing in front of that wardrobe. A black, TERRIFYING HOLE horrifies me.
“Mama, are there really only things inside?”
I don’t remember what she answered, but I’m so glad that the THINGS stayed with me!
From the Personal Space series
Space No. 2
CYLAND Media Lab
Video programming, audio, cotton, household items
Do you “own” the shadow that tree branches cast on a park bench if you sit there every day? The paradox is that it feels like yours—you get used to it, bond with it, even love it. You become the source of light that creates it. Unlike the emotionally indifferent “cold” sun, the person who loves the shadow radiates warmth—not rational, not practical, and not subject to precise analysis.
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov called this an “individual mystery”:
“With an inexplicable thrill, I gazed through the glass at a handful of distant diamond lights that shimmered in the dark velvet of far-off hills, and then seemed to slip into a velvet pocket. Later I gave such treasures to the heroes of my books—to rid myself of this wealth somehow.”
Personal Space is a series of exhibitions devoted to this phenomenon of attachment or love toward the inanimate—from a purely subjective perspective.
From the Personal Space series
The Nuisance
Projector, video camera, Roomba robot, programming, video
Anna Frants, CYLAND Media Lab
Programming by Alexey Grachev
From the Ozhegov Dictionary:
NUISANCE (надоеда) — A person who constantly pesters or clings to someone.