PREVIEW: Boris Nikitin-The Last Reality Show
For over thirteen years, Boris Nikitin’s productions, texts and happenings have been dealing with the representation and production of identity and reality. They are border crossings between illusion theatre and performance, between documentary and propaganda. Nikitin’s works, many of which tour internationally, are raw, frontal, yet always precisely composed and always searching for the boundaries and breaking points of the aesthetic.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum Tinguely Archive
Boris Nikitin presents “The Last Reality Show”, a replica of the «house» featured in the first German series of the reality television show Big Brother in 2000. Measuring 10 by 10 metres, it was originally part of the set for his production “Erste Staffel. 20 Jahre Grosser Bruder” at Staatstheater Niirnberg. For the exhibition Nikitin and his team have reworked the object, transforming it into an unusual installation, it offers a many-facetted reflection of developments in global society over the past 23 years and links them with the moment when ordinary people first volunteered to be observed round the clock for a TV show. “Big Brother” was the first reality show to be aired simultaneously on television and on the internet, marking a paradigm shift and ushering in the age of digital visibility. The fourth wall between private and public spheres was abolished, the word ‘Fremdscham’ (cringe factor) entered the German language, and everyday life became a matter of performance and thus also a matter of politics. The show’s secret star, from the outset, was the Big Brother house. It was a democratic utopia, dystopia and work of popular Conceptual Art rolled into one: an auto-surveillance system, a permanently auto-updating readymade, a paradoxical authenticity machine, and the socio-architectural prototype for the twenty-first century. In Nikitin’s 10 x 10-metre replica, the dimensions are slightly altered, one room is missing, and it is made not out of real metal but white-painted wood. It is an imitation of a building that was itself already a simulacrum. The ‘house’ is empty, its inhabitants having long since left. As a historical artefact, it stands in the space like a solitary relic; it has become a time capsule linking the year 2000 with the present day. In the intervening decades, the world has been reshaped, the Big Brother house has become a museum exhibit, the surveillance cameras are old, the furniture out of style, the questions about the nature of reality omnipresent. The installation by artist and theatre director Boris Nikitin is a quintessence of his work to date, dealing for over fifteen years with reality and its falsification, with documents and propaganda. The Last Reality Show develops these themes further and makes new connections, linking the question of creating illusions with another issue he has focussed in recent work: the vulnerability that arises when people expose themselves. Nikitin is considered as an important voices in contemporary theatre. He directs and writes, designs sets and makes video works, as well as curating festivals, symposia and happenings. The question of the manipulability of claims to truth is a thread running through all of his works. Long before fake news became a troubling buzzword, he was already inquiring into the nature of the real.
Photo: Boris Nikitin, Erste Staffel. 20 Jahre Grosser Bruder, exterior view of the container, Stage design: David Hohmann, Staatstheater Nurnberg, 2020, © photo: Boris Nikitin
Info: Concept: Boris Nikitin, Exhibition managment, conceptual collaboration: Johannes Maas, Light, engineering, conceptual collaboration: Kerim El-Mokdad, Programmation: Nicolas Welti, Set design original: David Hohmann, Production management: Annett Hardege, Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 1, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 6/12/2023-21/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-ed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.tinguely.ch/
