Kod epohi (Zeitgeist)
14-24 March, 2013
Contemporary art, music, dance in the world of ideas and objects
Curators
Organizer
International Culture Project
«Art-Residence»
The All-Russian Museum of Applied and Folk Art
The art project brings together leading artists, composers, choreographers, and scholars of our time within a shared space — an exhibition of contemporary art, a series of concerts, performances, interviews, and thematic scholarly articles, forming an artistic and scientific discussion around the key codes and themes of our era.
Structure
Concept
The art project presents the diversity of contemporary art languages.
Program of the project is comprised of several directions:
• Museum collection
• Visual arts
• Music
• Dance
• Analytical platform – scientific discussion in the framework of the festival
The goal of the participants of the project is to determine the main characteristics of time, its features and tendencies. The contemporary art exhibition, music and dance performances, as well as round tables with scientists will mark the parallels between art and science, and formulate the psychological landscape of the epoch.
The phenomena of interaction of the present with elements of past times, presented in the exposition, will create an original timeless environment. This environment will combine in natural way the most recent works of contemporary authors with amazing objects from the Museum storage.
The leading Russian scientists – philosophers, historians, sociologists and culturologists – will help to understand the complex interaction of times, as well as formulate a viewpoint on the notion of Zeitgeist. In the format of short precise interviews and a series of thematic articles they will formulate the analytical framework of the topic.
The exhibition tried to reveal the ideas laid in the objects of Museum exposition, out of time and space context, as well as develop the mechanisms of creation of the new environment by connection of principles of contemporary and traditional art.
Konstantin Grouss, curator of the exhibition
"It is strange that when speaking about spirit of time, we usually imagine very material objects or everyday things. These are kind of tracks left in space by time. By these andmarks we can determine our coordinates in history. Each object goes through evolution from idea to absolute pragmatism and further, through unification to merging with natural environment. The environment gives birth to new ideas and the cycle repeats itself, bringing the spiral to a new helix. We may divide this spring of time into epochs, observing the differences, trying to capture what is standing behind all the infinite transformation. We follow these tracks, analysing the objects, details of dismantled epoch, assembling it again into whole. And the aim of all this is understanding where, in what point we find ourselves now. How can we formulate the main feature of our time and guess the future? How can we derive a universal code which forms the mood and ideas? Because the today ideas will turn yesterday into things and environment. And the speed of our perception, our attitude to ourselves, method of information analysis will give title and characteristic to every new turn of time. And its Spirit that makes us move in one direction and leave new tracks – will still stay incomprehensible.
The “Kod epohi / Zeitgeist” art project is an experiment in which contemporary artists, musicians, choreographers and intellectuals generate new ideas. It is an intrusion into material world of amazing things, in which the brightest ideas of former epochs are imprinted. The very notion of epoch is questioned, when the development of ideas is considered as infinity, where the most important is the pulse marking the points – Now – Now – Now. Is it possible to understand in this rhythm, what the contemporaneity is. Objects from the collection of the Museum of Applied and Folk Art coexist here with objects of contemporary art. This neighbourhood challenges the established notions of clear borders of historical epochs, doubts the evidence of the very idea of epoch, and puts a question: who, with what aim and with which consequences is marking the borders of contemporaneity, mapping the time."
Visual art program
Alexander Ponomarev / Mike Hentz, Berlin / Paolo Bottarelli, Berlin / Riccardo Murelli, Rome / Nina Vitanova-Wlakhova, Berlin / Eve Bailey, New York / Mayuko Ogava, Tokyo / Alena Ivanova-Johanson / Vladimir Nasedkin / Tatiana Badanina / Dmitry Alexeev – Alexey Ivanov / Alexander Lysov / Dima Hunzelweg/ Recycle group / Roman Mokrov / Olga Zovskaya / Protey Temen / Alina Glazoun / Katya Reisher / Kristine Alksne, Berlin / Masha Obukhova / Taus Makhacheva / Egor Kraft / Dima Filippov / Alexey Buldakov / Dmitry Morozov, ::vtol:: project / Arseniy Zhilyaev /
Art institutes:
Institute of contemporary art (ICA, Moscow), program curator – Nadezhda Busheneva, artist
Participants: Natalia Zintsova, Nadezhda Busheneva, Alexander Povzner
Rodchenko multimedia art school, program curator – Kirill Preobrazhensky, artist
Participants: Ira Tsykhanskaya, Nik Degtyarev, Viktoria Marchenkova, Anna Pokarzhevskaya, Andrey Golovin, Ilya Korobkov, Alina Kleytman.
MARCH architecture school, program curator – Evgeniy Asse, architect
Participants: Julia Andreichenko, Julia Arnautova, Natalia Bakaeva, Evgenia Bakeeva, Daniel Barenboym, Veronika Barinova-Malaya, Anastasia Weinberg, Ivan Grekov, Daria Grudinkina, Maxim Zuev, Maria Kartseva, Alexandra Kovaleva, Anna Kozlova, Alla Komarova, Snezhana Kopeikina, Egor Korolev, Anastasia Kotenko, Anton Kravchenko, Tatiana Levchenko, Anastasia Levschanova, Denis Makarenko, Daniil Makarov, Alina Morozova, Anna Mosenkova, Innokentiy Padalko, Valeria Samovich, Daria Sannikova, Andrey Sviridov, Mikhail Sergeyev, Alexey Sirotkin, Artem Slizunov, Alisa Starobina, Dmitry Stolbovoy, Maria Tyulkanova, Antonina Khlyzova, Anna Schevchenko, Alexandra Eminova
Dance program
Working with human body as the main artistic medium, the medium capable of transferring the meaning and information through energy, through flow of images which have precise dimensions not only in space, but also in time. Space of representation is organised as a direct dialogue between choreographer - artist, and a person from audience, which is watching from the sidelines.
Andrey Andriyanov / Valentin Tszin / Konstantin Grouss (ZERO Dance Gallery) / Boroditsky Dennis Dance Company BDDC / Yuko Kaseki, Berlin
Music program
Vladimir Ivanov,
Pianist, graduate of Moscow conservatory, program consultant.
«We invent, play, find and establish, we speak. We encode the languages, set the fonts, simplify and complicate. We are the epoch here and now, all together and each of us separately. In us there is code for the epoch. Listen to us!
Composing a program of music part of the art project, I feel myself a part of a great experiment. An experiment where experienced hackers – artists, dancers and intellectuals - are searching for the new code for the limits of self-identification. In such state, when a shadow is more important than an object, and a portrait is being made looking at the person's track, I consider it's especially important to remember the categories, without which art ceases to exist. These categories, in fact, are properties of beauty - Symmetry, Ethics, Infinity. Having put the vocal quartet (4) in the first concert, strings quartet in the second, and linear octet (8) by Steve Reich in the third one, we managed to come to symmetry.
We discuss moral and ethics in «Passion» by Lang. In the first concert. We speak the languages of Russian music. In the second concert. Only movement. Pulse. We play infinity. All together and each of us separately. We simplify time. We encode «now». No emotions, literary or religious ideas. Only movement. To one side, leaving behind new and new tracks. We speak the language of minimalism. In the third concert.
The goal is reached. Now, listen to us!..»
Soloists of Studio for New Music (SNM) /
Valentin Azarenkov, clarinet /
Marina Volkova, flute /
Vladimir Ivanov, piano /
Anna Kondrashina, flute /
Elizaveta Miller, piano /
Mark Pekarsky percussion ensemble /
«INTRADA» vocal ensemble
Scientific program
Arseny Khitrov, Ph.D., associate professor of the cultural sciences of Higher School of Economics, program consultant.
At first glance, it seems obvious that historical time is divided into ages, eras, periods and generations. The categories which designate them, such as «antiquity» and «middle ages», «feudalism» and «capitalism», «classicism» and «romanticism», «60s» and «70s», «ottepel'» and «perestroika» often do not require explanation. Learned back at school, they seem self-evident. It is doubtless that every period has its clear time limits, as well as a set of specific characteristics, through which we can identify it and distinguish from any other. Looking at a thoughtful gargoyle, we understand that it would be a fragment of a Gothic cathedral. Seeing on the wall a portrait of Hemingway in a sweater, we understand that we are in a Soviet apartment from 60's. Certain things are easy to form into a gestalt, and in the mind there appears a guess that some time our age will also get its nickname, and will be immediately answering to it. Guess is replaced by eager curiosity, the curiosity being replaced by desire to collect by ourselves all the keys to the present on one ring, to become Columbuses of our own epoch.
But are there gestalts of eras in reality, or are they merely a result of simplifying revision of the past? Aren't they created by the optics
of our historical, retrospective vision that doesn't tolerate homogeneity and continuity? Finally, aren't they arbitrary constructs, created by historians, intellectuals, status groups or educational systems, power relations and division of labor? Is it correct to speak about «code of the epoch»? Or is the very concept of «code», despite its neutrality and technicality, loaded with ideologies?
Even if the idea of epochs is just a construct, and the «code of epoch» is an ideologeme, it still remains undeniable that artists, philosophers and scientists passionately desire to think in terms of these notions, as well as to understand what is the time in which we live. So what does this preoccupation with present suggest? It is symptom and sign of what? Who, for what reason, under which circumstances, on the basis of which criteria, with which tools and with which consequences is attempting to draw borders of contemporaneity? We suggest to answer these questions in the course of the Round Table «Zeitgeist. Is the decoding possible?» in the framework of international multi-genre creative project in the field of contemporary art, music and dance – «Zeitgeist».
Oleg Aronson / Arseniy Khitrov / Ilya Afanasiev / Ivan Boldyrev / Viktor Wachstein / Andrey Velikanov / Irina Gluschenko / Gasan Guseinov / Ilya Inishev / Boris Kagarlitsky / Kirill Martynov / Ilya Matveev / Mikhail Mayatsky / Alla Mitrophanova / Georgy Nikich / Elena Petrovskaya / Valery Podoroga / Kety Chukhrov / Elena Shklyarik / Viktor Misiano
Program of video interviews
In this part of the scientific program, the scientists were asked to answer three questions:
1. Who, why and with what consequences draws borders of epochs / generations / present / past?
2. Do we want to be modern? Yes / no - why?
3. What is your view on properties of contemporaneity, its features? Where are the limits of contemporaneity? Are we now in the beginning / middle / end of the age?
Their reflections on these questions were provided by:
Elena Petrovskaya, PhD, chief editor of "Blue Sofa" magazine
Viktor Misiano, contemporary art curator and critic, the editor of "Moscow Art Magazine"
Georgy Nikich, curator
Ilya Inishev, PhD, assosiate professor of the cultural sciences of Higher School of Economics
Oleg Aronson, Ph.D., senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences, winner of the Andrei Belyi prize for the book "The communicative image"
Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSM)
Kirill Martynov, philosopher, teacher at the Higher School of Economics
Victor Wachstein, PhD in Sociology, Chair of theoretical sociology and epistemology in the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation, a specialist in the sociology of everyday life and social theory
The second part of the scientific program of the festival is presented by a series of articles on “Kod epohi "Zeitgeist":
"The epoch of codes". Ilya Inishev, PhD, associate professor of the cultural sciences at the Higher School of Economics
"Signs and ghosts of time" (Contemporary art and abstract capitalism). Oleg Aronson, Ph.D., senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences, winner of the Andrei Belyi prize for the book "The communicative image"
«Permanent present, or The end of the world as the only possible project of the future». Ilya Afanasiev, historian, postgraduate of the Oxford university.
"Code of timelessness". Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSM).
«OLVIDO». Irina Glushchenko, philologist, historian of culture, associate professor at Higher School of Economics.
"Touching and quote". Ivan Boldyrev, philosopher.
"A person who has had too much contemporaneity". Kirill Martynov, philosopher, teacher at Higher School of Economics.
"Decoding the age". Andrey Velikanov, artist, philosopher, teacher of the course "Philosophy of Art", Associate Professor at Department of Cultural Studies of Philosophy Department at Higher School of Economics.
«Zeitgeist». Ilya Matveev, a graduate student of Philosophy Department at Moscow State University, activist of the Russian socialist movement, participant of "Collective of researchers of politicization", member of the organizing committee of the Free Union of university teachers "University solidarity".
"Code of the epoch: from phenomena to models, and from models to a symptom". Alla Mitrofanova, cultural studies, independent researcher, curator of Philosophy Cafe (St. Petersburg).
"End of epoch". Mikhail Mayatsky, Professor of Cultural Studies Faculty of Philosophy at Higher School of Economics, Ph.D., author of the books: "Secondly" (Moscow: Pragmatics of Culture, 2002), "Resort Europe" (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2009), "Debate about Plato "(Moscow: printing house of HSE, 2012).
"Code of the epoch: Disappearance" (anthropological aspects). Valery Podoroga, Ph.D., professor, one of the leading scientists of the Institute of Philosophy, of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The third part of the scientific discussion is the Round Table on the topic "Code of the epoch. Is a transcript possible?" that will be held on March 16 at 15.00.
Moderator of the round table - Gasan Guseynov, philologist
Invited to participate:
Valerian Anashvili,
Valery Podoroga
Kirill Martynov
Alla Mitrofanova
Elena Petrovskaya
Kety Chukhrov
About the organizer
International Culture Project «Art-Residence» is a space, uniting several directions of art:
• Visual art
• Music
• Dance
In the framework of the International Culture Project «Art-Residence», artists, choreographs, musicians of various disciplines from Russia and other countries can meet, share their experiences, work together and present collaborative ideas that lie at the intersection of different art forms.
Our aim is to bring together the concepts of artists working within both the same artistic field and different genres, and to identify the connections that unite them.
