The first Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art will close with a site-specific performance by the Nizhny Novgorod-based group Provmyza (Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov).
Like their earlier projects, such as Impossible Objects (2013), which was shown at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Provmyza’s experimental performance at Garage is a complex synthesis of different genres and forms of theater.
Memento Mori Tomb explores the effects of extreme aural, visual, or emotional experiences on human perception. In the first part of the performance, the audience witnesses the death of an old man in a Victorian setting. As the man, surrounded by his family, screams his last, his voice tunes our ears to a new kind of absolute silence. In the second part of the performance, the viewer’s hearing becomes acute enough to register those faintest of noises that point to the gradual disintegration of the space: the peeling and falling away of pieces of the ceiling and elements of the interior. The third and final part of the performance is a scene of disappearance: the space is literally squeezed with a huge vice and, as the artists put it, “shapelessness becomes the spectacle.” The order of life and death is destroyed and melted into a single mass, screeching and cracking like the last echo of the material world.