Lecture cycle Contemporary Art: Current Approaches

Building upon the topics raised in the essay “Fire {ALV / 5G}”, Maxim Spivakov turns to the analysis of modern forms of suspicion in relation to technical objects and the open fight against them. In the perspective of such conspiracy anxiety, it will be possible to redefine the very concept of technicality and outline various strategies for coexistence with technical objects.

In the hybrid by their nature conspiracy theories, the new European rational “techniques of suspicion” are tied with suspicion toward technics and the “re-enchanting” of the world of technical objects. For example, via a series of arson attacks on a network of 5G cell towers, fire—the mythical source of the emergence of technics—reclaims the melted away results of its evolution.

At the same time, an alarming distrust of technics can be the basis not only for its destruction but also for the formation of collective solidarity in a common environment saturated with elements of technicality and humanity of varying degrees. The appeal to the analysis of environments and relationships, blurring the boundaries between the technical and the natural, allows us to correlate the technophobia of the fear of the loss of “natural existence” and the techno enthusiasm of projects of complete autonomy of technics.

About the lecturer

Maxim Spivakov (b. 1984, Moscow) is an artist. He graduated in Graphic Arts from Moscow State University of Printing Arts in 2008. In 2018, the Vadim Sidur Museum showed his solo exhibition 1/2. Group exhibitions include: The Way of Enthusiasts, Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice (2012); the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2012); the 1st Bergen Assembly (Norway, 2013); Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks, Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow (2014); Detective, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2014); Portal, Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow (2018); and The Sky Is Always Clear, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2019). He lives and works in Moscow.

The environmental agenda has been getting louder and closer in recent decades. The climate crisis threatens to affect all aspects of our lives, from minor everyday routines to global solutions at the international level. Launching a conversation about nature and its rights in the territory of art, practitioners often go beyond the role of an activist or scientific promoter, completely revising their creative approaches and career strategies. Art projects dedicated to ecology are far from being only landscape photographs or spectacular installations revealing the effects of global warming. They also encompass research and joint experiments with scientists, attempts to reconstruct endangered ecosystems, workshops on DIY practices, and work with migrants.

Olga Deryugina will examine examples of artworks about the climate crisis and environmental protection implemented over the past twenty years and will try to highlight the main tactics of approaching these subjects artistically.

About the lecturer

Olga Deryugina (b. 1991, Saratov) is an artist, curator, and journalist. Her interests include digital media research, interdisciplinary practices, and environmental issues. Member of Margaritki (Daisies) art group. Former co-curator of the Start platform for young art at Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2018–2019). Author of the Anthropocene Digest Telegram channel. She lives and works in Moscow.

Art historian and psychoanalyst Gleb Napreenko will outline various approaches to the unconscious proposed by Jacques Lacan, including the unconscious of the Oedipus complex and the castration complex, the unconscious as a discourse and social connection, the unconscious as rooted in pleasure beyond meaning. Depending on how differently one can think of the unconscious, one can also think differently about politics. In this sense, Lacan's reading of the unconscious as the reverse side of psychoanalysis opens up various perspectives of the political, including those relevant to what is happening today, be it a trend toward a right turn or a crisis of trust in elites.

About the lecturer 

Gleb Napreenko (b. 1989, Moscow) is an art historian and theorist, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, who continues his training at the World Association of Psychoanalysis schools. Former editor-in-chief of Raznoglasiya magazine (2017), co-author (together with Alexandra Novozhenova) of the book Episodes of Modernism (2018). Author of articles for Khudozhestvenny Zhurnal (Moscow Art Magazine), International Psychoanalytic Journal, Artchronika, Dialogue of Arts, Iskusstvo (Art), as well as for the “Art” and “Society” sections of the online resources Openspace.ru, Colta.ru, e-flux, and other publications. He taught at Baza Institute, Rodchenko Art School, lectured at the HSE School of Art and Design, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions. He lives and works in Moscow.

The border between the notions of “modern” and “contemporary” is drawn not just chronologically but chronopolitically. This means that we move on from the idea of ​​a new European unified time to the production of and co-presence in multiple temporalities, multiple times, which is integral for the concept of “con-temporaneity.” This production of temporalities allows the suggestion that contemporary art and science fiction can be explored as different facets of a common transdisciplinary field. We have been captivated for a long time by the division of knowledge, meaning that science fiction belongs entirely to the study of literature and contemporary art is part of art history. Bringing together contemporary art theory and the theory of science fiction, curator and theorist Boris Klyushnikov analyzes an important segment of the cultural practices of recent times, defined by the term “counter-futurisms” by philosopher Jussi Parikka. Along with films, music, and poetry, counter-futurisms also include a specific approach to artistic production, an approach to understanding the infrastructure of art. Video essayism has gained momentum as one of the most important mediums of counter-futurism. In the films and installations of Larissa Sansour, Sophia Al-Maria, Lawrence Lek, John Akomfrah, and the Otolith Group, the moving image, the technological basis of visuality, and poetic writing create alternative imaginary narratives that split the totalitarian unification of modern-day digital capitalism, which, using Michael Hardt’s words, becomes similar to the Empire in the literal sense of the word (for him the analogy was the Roman Empire). Montage, the disjunctive combination of magic and technology for the sake of liberating an alternative image of the future, makes counter-futurisms not just a “genre” among other genres and trends but a subversive cultural practice allowing both the concepts of science fiction and the world of contemporary art to be redescribed.

About the lecturer 

Boris Klyushnikov is a curator and theorist of contemporary art and a teacher at Rodchenko Art School and BAZA Institute of contemporary art (both Moscow). He has worked at the National Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow) and taught at the Department of Cinema and Contemporary Art of the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow). He was the organizer of a laboratory of art criticism at Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow).

Landscape as a genre of fine arts may, at first glance, seem to be an absolute relic of the past, but it often becomes the most suitable form for reflecting the pressing problems of our time, whether it be increasing urbanization, desertification, the decline of biodiversity, and other manifestations of the ongoing climate catastrophe. Contemporary artistic practices offer new ways of both interaction with the natural landscape and a detached look at it; help to see military objects inaccessible to the human eye or deep-sea landscapes cut through by technological infrastructures; develop new optics and ways of looking at the role of humans in the landscape and nature endowed with contemporary philosophy and political agency. In his book Landscape and Memory (1995), art historian and professor at Columbia University Simon Schama wrote that landscape is a “text on which generations write their recurring obsessions.” Following Bruno Latour, who coined the term “new climate regime” in his book Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, artists and researchers of the new climate regime continue to intensively write and rewrite this text today, bringing in the logic of redefining the anthropocentric position in relation to the landscape, countryside, environment, other living species, nature and the place of humanity in it.

About the lecturer 

Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator of contemporary art shows and educational projects, who teaches at Sreda Obucheniya School, Moscow School of Contemporary Art, and RMA Business School. Recipient of Innovation Contemporary Art Prize (Curator of the Year, 2017). As a curator, Burenkov has worked at V-A-C Foundation for the Development of Contemporary Culture (2014–2016), ISSMAG Gallery (2016–2017), Khodynka Gallery (2019), and the nonprofit Cosmoscow Foundation for Contemporary Art (2019–2020), and as head expert in regional development at ROSIZO and National Centre for Contemporary Art (2017–2018). His writings have been published in Artforum, The Calvert Journal, East East, Kommersant-Art, Spectate, Aroundart, Colta, Khudozhestvenny Zhurnal (Moscow Art Magazine), Dialogue of Arts, Afisha, Strelka Mag, and other publications.

In the (post)COVID world, the notion of “caring” is used as a universal virtue. A critical reflection of this term can reveal both emancipatory potential and various forms of oppression and control in it. Feminist artistic and theoretical interpretations of caring and reproductive labor make it possible to pay attention, on the one hand, to the productive refusal to perform acts of social reproduction, and on the other, to the work of creating
alternative worlds.

The first part of the lecture will focus on the forms of productive refusal. It will be considered alongside the theories of opacity, allowing questioning of the requirement of absolute permeability. In this context, productive refusal will be understood as a form of survival and (re)production of protest.

The consequence of refusal becomes the redirection of attention from the event of oppression to its structures. Attention to the material structures of oppression is the entry point for critical research on infrastructures. Several art projects drawing attention to the support and “distributed reproduction” practices that ensure the successful functioning of social systems will be considered.

Finally, attention to nurturing and supportive practices allows us to think differently about time and the future. The final part of the lecture will analyze ways to create emancipatory futures in the present through rethinking social relations.

About the lecturer 

Sasha Shestakova (b. 1993, Moscow) is a researcher and art critic. Her scope of ​​interests includes material and infrastructural aspects of the production of the future, as well as the decolonial analysis of art in the so-called post-Soviet space. She is a regular contributor to the online resource Aroundart.org and has published writings in KhZh, Kommersant, Colta.ru, and other publications. She lives and works in Moscow.

In a three-dimensional cardboard decoration, imitating virtual communication via Zoom, the characters of the video open portals/gaps from one space to another. The six protagonists act simultaneously as scientists and test subjects, experimenting on themselves aiming to develop new reflexes for survival in a rapidly changing world.
In the exhibition space, the virtual backgrounds featured in the film turn out to be retractable curtains-draperies, behind which there is a window into the surrounding reality.

At the beginning of 2021, in a stressful epidemiological and socio-political situation, Chto Delat collective filmed the video Six Kinetic Melodies for a Required Future at Lenfilm Studios, which was on view at the show Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (March 26–August 1, 2021).

New Holland’s Open Lecture Hall will run the St. Petersburg premiere of the film followed by a discussion featuring the team of authors, including Dmitry Vilensky, Nina Gasteva, Olga Egorova (Tsaplya), and Nikolay Oleinikov, as well as participants and co-authors of the film Nastya Denisova, Katya Ivanova, Elina Lebedze, Alexey Sergienko, Sergey Finogin, and Grusha Tsiolkovskogo. The speakers also include philosophers and Chto Delat
participants Oksana Timofeeva and Artemy Magun, curator of the Science and Art Museum at the Pavlov Institute of Physiology in Koltushi Irina Aktuganova, and independent art critic, philosopher Alla Mitrofanova.

Chto Delat’s new video tells of a utopian laboratory where the main protagonists and at the same time co-authors of the film act as scientists and experimental subjects, performing experiments designed to develop new forms of social behavior for survival in a rapidly changing world. The action is set inside a three-dimensional decoration made of cardboard, which simulates virtual communication via Zoom in the real space of the shooting pavilion. Reflexes, the basic form of activity of the nervous system that bring us closer to the entire organic world and are responsible for the “automatic” part of human life, operate as a lever of the imagination of the new future. Conditioned reflexes that arise, on the one hand, as a reaction of adaptation to changing conditions, and on the other, as an anticipation of the future needs of the body, anticipation of what will be required in a second, hour or a year, an embodiment of how our brain constructs, “a required future” (using the words of psychophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein), are being discussed in the context of the criticism of reflexes and the post-Pavlov’s speculative science of nature.

The outcomes of the work of the Laboratory of Stop, the Laboratory of Risk and Idleness, the Laboratory of Anti-Helplessness, the Trip-laboratory of Surplus Enthusiasm, the Laboratory of the Wandering Body, and the Laboratory of Applied Nausea should help humanity in the near future.

About the lecturer 

Chto Delat was founded in 2003 in St. Petersburg and currently includes Dmitry Vilensky, Nina Gasteva, Olga Egorova (Tsaplya), Artemy Magun, Nikolay Oleinikov, Alexey Penzin, Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (Gluklya), Alexander Skidan, and Oksana Timofeeva. The collective’s activities embrace art projects, social and political campaigns, seminars, and the publication of an eponymous newspaper. In 2013, the collective launched the School of Engaged Art and, in 2015, Rosa’s House of Culture (St. Petersburg). Select solo exhibitions: The Urgent Need to Struggle (ICA, London, 2010), Perestroika: Twenty Years After, 2011–1991 (Kunstverein, Cologne, 2011), Chto Delat? in Baden-Baden (Kunsthalle, Baden- Baden, 2011–2012), Time Capsule. Artistic Report on Catastrophes and Utopia (Secession, Vienna; KOW, Berlin, 2014-2015), When we Thought we Had all the Answers, Life Changed the Questions (Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art, Seville; University Museum of Contemporary Art MUAC, Mexico City, 2017 ), When the roots start to move and get lost (State of Concept Exhibition Center, Athens, 2020), Times, Lines, 1989s (Khoj International Art Association, New Delhi, 2020). Select group exhibitions: the 11th Istanbul Biennale (2009), the 17th Sydney Biennale (2010), the 1st Gwangju Biennale (Republic of Korea, 2012), the 31st San Paulo Biennale (2014), the 12th Shanghai Biennale (2018), etc. Chto Delat participants live and work in St. Petersburg.

The high complexity and large scale characteristics of the critical problems of our time, such as the environmental crisis, provoke the creation of flexible and transformable research tools that make one think not so much about inter- or trans-, as of postdisciplinarity. In other words, the point is not in the permeability/transformability of the boundaries of specific disciplines, practices, or theoretical positions, but in the “homelessness” and fluidity of objects that are born in the course of postdisciplinary hybridization. Emerging as a result of the interaction of many positions and viewpoints, hybrid objects do not lend themselves to strict categorization. This also means that they require special conditions for existence since they cannot survive within the university academy framework. In this model of postdisciplinarity, art—in a sense more reminiscent of the ars of an early medieval university—is an environment most suitable for hybrid objects. What role does philosophy play in the hybridization process, and does this process have a limit? We will address these issues during the lecture.

About the lecturer 

Nikita Sazonov (b. 1997, Moscow) is a philosopher, curator of the Posthuman Studies Lab. He works in the register of speculative philosophy, posthuman politics and also explores hybrid methodologies and modes of thought. He lives and works in Moscow.

The sublime is one of the key aesthetic categories of modern history, developed by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Unlike the beautiful, which represents the harmony of the world to the gaze of a passive viewer, the sublime asserts the subject in their ability to imagine the unimaginable, surpassing the scale of human feelings. However, whereas for Kant, the notion of the sublime connected aesthetics with morality, creating an imaginary
foundation for intelligent life in a distorted and wrong world, for Burke, on the contrary, it revealed the powerlessness of reason in the face of the unknowable forces of nature. Today, the sublime has become an integral part of popular culture, focused so much on disaster and violence, and shapes modern-day mass consciousness in many ways. Having become “imaginable,” the sublime turned into the primary means of producing dystopias—the continuing life after the end of the world. In his lecture, Ilya Budraitskis reconstructs various conceptions of the sublime and focuses on its connection both with the possibility of utopia (a different, unimaginable society) and a radical rejection of the utopian.

About the lecturer 

Ilya Budraitskis (b. 1981, Moscow) is a political theorist, lecturer at Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka) and Joseph Backstein’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Member of the editorial board of the Khudohestvenny Zhurnal (Moscow Art Magazine). His book Dissidents Among Dissidents was awarded the Andrey Beliy Prize (2017). He lives and works in Moscow.

Traditionally, science was interested in a fundamental and multi-perspective study of reality and philosophy in understanding the world as a whole, while art invented big form (such as the classical novel). In the second half of the twentieth century—after the defeat of fascism and the general disillusionment regarding the Soviet project, the idea of the “end of grand narratives” became popular. Science split into separate disciplines, philosophy dissolved into theories and studies, and art fell apart into separate heterogeneous individual practices that seemed impossible to summarise. At the same time, we witnessed a counter-trend—interdisciplinary syntheses, the search for universals, systemic descriptions, and all-encompassing narratives. In the 1960s, contemporary art produced the new meta genre of installation, followed by the super-art form of megalomaniac curatorial projects.

Today, it seems that grand narratives in art might be making a return with meta reflexive practices that tend to produce narratives on behalf of other phenomena and persons—imitating the speech of art historians, taking on the curating function, devising philosophical systems, and working with the quasi-scientific discourse. Artists write personal mythologies, fictitious histories, and quasi-museological studies.

Andrey Shental will share his observations on the return of grand narratives to art, offer his explanation of their spread and a critique of relating practices, drawing on several works by Russian artists. 

Biological life, including human life, is increasingly viewed today as an object of universal protection and care, involving more and more participants. In this regard, critical discussions about biopolitics as the dominant way of exercising power and managing the population have become particularly acute. Can we say that the biologization of life has supplanted its existential meaning, or, contrarily, it has rather discovered it on new grounds? What is meant by life and death in contemporary biopolitical culture? Can life be viewed differently from what is governed and regulated, and how does it become a political matter? The lecture proposes to answer these questions by appealing to “life-creation” and “life-construction”—two different trajectories of understanding the politics of life that arose in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, respectively.

About the lecturer 

Marina Simakova (b. 1985, Moscow) is a researcher of social and political thought. She lives and works in St. Petersburg.

If contemporary art follows the extensive-development logic suggested by the museum-exhibition complex and easily assimilates various layers of social reality (new media and discourses; scientific discoveries and education experiments; activism and unique experiences), for poetry, an integration into contemporary art poses the danger of an asymmetrical instrumentalization and the loss of itself as a distinct entity. Without delving deep into media archaeology, we can say that poetry and contemporary art exist in a regime of mutual attraction/repulsion, the first one balancing between the new syncretism of constantly erasing boundaries between writing and speech, reading and listening, singing and speaking voices on the one hand and its own immanent logic of the development of new languages on the other.

The lecture will look at why contemporary poetry today is in many respects closer to contemporary art than to traditional literature. We will analyze a few examples of poetry interventions and productive syntheses of poetry and art that allow poetry to exercise the material (materialization of signifiers), media (media poetry, soul poetry, visual poetry, video poetry), and performative/situationist (poetry actions and performances) aspects of language.

About the lecturer 

Roman Osminkin is an art theorist and critic, poet, performer, media artist, curator, and teacher. He studied at the Russian Institute of the History of Arts (St. Petersburg) and is a Candidate of Art History. His research interests include collective performance (community-based, participatory and performative practices in contemporary art). He is the editor of K.R.A.P.I.V.A platform on contemporary art and a member of editorial boards at Translit and Metazhurnal. He is a participant of the music project Techno Poetry and a co-organizer of the circle of precarious poets Krasnoye Znanie.

Osminkin is a lecturer at Chto Delat School of Engaged Art (St. Petersburg), Moscow School of New Literature, and Vaganova Academy (St. Petersburg). He is a member of the St. Petersburg Union of Artists. He lives and works in St. Petersburg.

What forces are shaping the landscape of contemporary art in Russia? What ideas guide its agents when making decisions? How does cultural policy and “common sense” affect resource allocation and environmental support? Daria Yuriychuk will share the results of her observations regarding the frictions of art’s multiple realities.

About the lecturer 

Daria Yuriychuk (b. 1992, Moscow) is an artist and researcher of visual culture. She graduated in Art History from the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University and from HSE University’s master’s program Visual Culture. She is the co-author of performances by the zh-v-yu art group (Landscape for a Dead Dog, The Garden),
choreographer of the feminist performance-conference Locker Room Talk, and co-author of the anti-capitalist performance-platform Caries of Capitalism at Meyerhold Center (Moscow). She has published articles on dance, body politics, and contemporary art. Co-founder of the Kafe-Morozhenoe media activist collective that studies labor problems and initiator of the Magic Institute of Feminist Research archival project. She lives and works in Moscow.

One of the central tendencies of twentieth-century art is the inclusion of various social groups as audiences and actors of art. Whereas representatives of the artistic elite were the initial promoters of this process, since the 1960s, the source of these ideas has become members of vulnerable groups of society themselves. Along with diverse ethnic groups, workers’ rights’, feminist, and queer movements, an important trend is the struggle for the rights of people with disabilities. The policy of representing the diversity of identity and experience is taking shape before our very eyes into the “new ethics” requirements. In his talk, Anton Ryanov will share observations based on his own experience and considerations about the risks associated with the dogmatic attitudes of the representatives of the new paradigm, which affects both the work of institutions and the formation of the community and artistic practices.

About the lecturer 

Anton Ryanov (b. 1986, Nizhny Novgorod) is an artist, curator of exhibitions and inclusive projects. He graduated in Philology from Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod. He is a co-founder (together with Vera Berlinova) of the Androgyne and Centaur art group, co-organizer of the educational initiative Dialogues in Space, co-curator of the 2nd Special View Forum-Festival of Social Theater. Recipient of the All-Russian Contemporary Art Prize Innovation in New Generation nomination (2019). He lives and works in Nizhny Novgorod.

Art historian Nadya Plungyan will speak about a number of recent exhibitions that she conceived herself or which she contributed to as a co-curator. These projects’ specificity concluded in the combination of scientific novelty with experimental artistic solutions. Plungyan will also share her thoughts on what exactly allows for such a synthesis of contemporary art and contemporary Russian science.

About the lecturer 

Nadya Plungyan (b. 1983, Moscow) is a historian of Soviet art and a curator. She graduated in Art History from Russian State University for the Humanities. She is a visiting lecturer at HSE University and editor of the Art section at Colta.ru. She lives and works in Moscow.

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