ART CITIES:Venice-Man as Bird, Images of Journeys-Part II

“Man as Bird. Images of Journeys” explores the interaction between discoveries in optics and art, fields that are intrinsically connected with an ambition to understand the world and to determine man’s place in it. Throughout history, people have tried to push the limits of the visible and find new angles of view by carrying out expeditions to distant places or improving the very means of seeing ?(Part I, Part III)

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Archive

The group exhibition “Man as Bird. Images of Journeys” presents 14 Russian and foreign artists working with different media: sound and light installations, video, photography, and art objects pushing the boundaries of artistic expression and perception with the use of advanced technologies and traditional media. The exhibition invites the viewer to travel across multiple dimensions, space, time and individual experience, which may alter perception of the world and of the self. The initial morphology and structure of the images transforms along the journey due to different viewpoints incorporated in the project. Along the journey, the angle of vision expands from the familiar 120 degrees of the human vision to 360 degrees of the bird’s eye. The space built in accordance with the laws of linear perspective, seems right only at the first glance. The viewer placed in the center of a panorama often loses his ability to see details. They merge within an overall undifferentiated flow. “Private Moon” (2003-17) by Leonid Tishkov, is a visual poem telling the story of a man who once met the Moon and stayed with her for the rest of his life, traveling with it all around the world. Located in unusual ways, the traveling moon offers viewers and random passers-by to experience the sensation of fabulousness of existence. Hence, a viewer finds himself inside the installation, becoming a character and partaker of events, experiences poetic state in our prosaic postindustrial time. The site-specific video installation “Ghost ship” (2017) by Tanya Akhmetgalieva works with the memory of the place: for many centuries, ships moored to Venice’s piers. Tanya Akhmetgalieva reflects upon personal life odyssey of each of us and creates a story about how we always dream to be somewhere else except where we are now. Our beacons beautifully glow somewhere far at the horizon, and we eternally drift from one dream to another, failing to live here and now. Provmyza’ art group presents the video Installation “Eternity” (2011), the work creates a sense of anxiety by immersing the viewer into a multilayered space, where surrounding reality is dissolving, and so is human sight. The metaphor of the eternity is a little girl, who opposes the destructive force and constantly defeats it. In this version of the installation produced specially for the exhibition, the viewer is forced to move along the image and is unable to capture the entire picture at once. The girl’s cry becomes acousmatic, since its visual source is outside the field of view. The image unfolds before the viewer detail after detail, since he is forced to watch only from a close distance. Thus, the viewer experiences the Lilliputian perception, while the little Eternity girl appears as a giant incomprehensible to his view. Masaki Fujihata in “Private room / TV” (2009-10) recalls the golden age of television, when it had set up an invisible network of viewers. This medium introduced the ability to share an experience with friends or relatives, classmates who are supposedly watching from some other place, or even unknown people yet further away, while sitting in a well-lit room at home. Today the viewers can again feel the community of a global home – the world of virtual networks. However this space turns out to be fragmented, split into icons, and its elements form a kind of a global database. Fabrizio Plessi in “Ca’ d’Oro” (2009) uses the boat as a symbol and a metaphor of the idea of a journey into the creative unknown. It represents the essential element in finding the right direction for the sailor in the artistic storm. The virtual water that digitally streams within the interior of the boat is the flowing of time, an energetic movement of the mind. Participating Artists: Semyon Alexandrovsky, Tanya Akhmetgalieva, Dmitry Bulnygin, Sofia Gavrilova, Marnix de Nijs, Irina Zatulovskaja, Yurii Kalendarev, David Claerbout, Martin Honert, Fabrizio Plessi, Provmyza’ art group (Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov), Mariano Sardón, Leonid Tishkov andMasaki Fujihata.

Info: Curators: Marina Loshak and Olga Shishko, Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, Cannaregio 607, Venice, Duration: 13/5-5/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, http://venice.arts-museum.ru