The lecture by Zhon-Zhon Sandyr that opens the two-day program A Journey to Inner Udmurtia will look at the history of the local underground art scene from the perspective of a viewer, participant, and collector of this history.
In the 2000s, when he became interested in DJing and electronic music, Zhon-Zhon Sandyr met and soon began to collaborate with the Izhevsk art group Archaeopteryx, the pioneers of video art and performance art in Udmurtia. Through this collaboration he began to collect—at first, spontaneously—a film and video archive which later became known as The Tropics of Izhevsk and to digitize the collected materials.
In 2010, he co-founded the creative group Emnoyumno (Divine Elixir) together with Kuchyran Yuri, and in addition to work in sound, film, performance, and happenings, they began organizing ethnofuturist symposia and shooting ethno video art (while taking part in international and interregional festivals and exhibition projects).
Zhon-Zhon Sandyr’s work-in-progress archive covers almost four decades of Udmurtia’s art, from the first avant-garde exhibitions of the 1980s to the visual experiments of the 1990s and 2000s and the ethnofuturist and symposium movements of the first decades of the 21st century.
Zhon-Zhon Sandyr’s archive and lecture are centered on four self-organized art phenomena in Udmurtia: the art group Lodka (the oldest of the four), the group Archaeopteryx (now Tvorcheskaya Dacha, still active today), the ethnofuturist movement, and the electronic music scene of Izhevsk in the 1990s. His talk will also touch on the artist Aleksandr Germesov (b. 1970), whose individual practice stands apart from any groups or associations.