La Biennale di Venezia 57: Part II Russian Pavillion

La Biennale di Venezia 57. Three Pavilions from the Giardini: Post-War to Post-digital”

Now through November 26th, 2017

Highlights from the 57th Venice Biennale : Part II

“God is in the details” said Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. Get into the details at the Russian Pavilion’s

“THEATRUM ORBIS" Curated by Semyon Mikhailovsky

On the ground floor, Grisha Bruskin’s installation “Scene Change,” is a mesmerizing promenade between Antiquity and Modernity, whereby the eras confront each other in a series of gorgeously mysterious works in accordance with ancient rules of the “art of memory”. The abundance of figures in the installation represents, according to the press release, “the contradictory nature of power, incarnated by a mechanized hybrid: the two-headed bird. Dolls, dummies, hybrids and androids give shape to the threat of international terrorism, while soldiers with binoculars, drones and archaic idols equipped with antennae and radars pursue the idea of a “transparent” world where they can monitor and spy on the human masses.” A projection traverses the space as if leading the viewer through the installation, stumbling along the way. Bruskin ignites mythologies with contemporary versions of the potential melt down of our world at large.

Artist duo Recycle Group (formed by Andrey Blokhin (1987) & Georgy Kuznetsov (1985)) inaugurated their “Blocked Content” project in the pavilion and in various sites around the Arsenal and Giardini areas. One was able to find various forms in virtual space, through the Recycle Group application, that appear on the screen of a smart phone or tablet. When flashed along the patterned lines adjacent to the embedded bodies in the walls or just over the grande canal for example, the bodies are revealed and “freed” from their material prison or strange geometries could be observed hovering in the space above the landscapes. The immaterial emerges out of digitally engineered form. The Matrix comes is now a reality.

Sasha Pirogova, a flamboyant video artist, concentrates his attention on movement and an indicative intertwining of theatre, ritual, performance and dance to alter rational movements into metaphorical ones. “Garden” is a video that tells the story of eternal life, death and immortality expressed through darkness, and light. He reveals that through darkness, not experienced as terrorising, but seen as it having the potential for enlightenment, human being is a resource of light.