During her artist talk, the St. Petersburg based artist Lera Lerner will present her projects dealing with the conversion of various forms of deviant public activities into a museum context. The artist will explain how the relocation of non-institutional knowledge into the field of contemporary art may alter society’s attitude to natural thinkers, or, simply put, how to launch a walking corn inside oneself.
The artist talk is based on Lerner’s story about her artistic investigation of dislocated knowledge, whose protagonists are city dwellers endowed with paradoxical worldviews and unconsciously involved into creative practices. Monuments to themselves, noticeable urban characters, these people are often labeled marginal, dropped out of conventional frameworks in terms of appearance, behavior, and speech. By making art, however, such people feed life into the city. Abiding in the center of human flows—there are excluded from communication, being always visible—they remain unnoticed by the majority. Communication with them opens up the space of a spontaneous gesture, fundamentally incomprehensible and inexplicable from the common logic perspective.
During the talk, the artist will discuss how to incorporate deviation into contemporary art. What types of mediums and representational languages are able to articulate this unique experience without losses. How to build some three-dozen dog houses each night. How to cure oneself with light. How to earn using free sheets. Is there a definite article in Russian? What does define the man of the future? And what does pereplyas (a Russian folk dance) look like?