Andrey Guryanov and Anton Kuryshev

Andrey Guryanov and Anton Kuryshev’s sound installation is an intervention in the Museum’s audio notification system. From time to time, a signal can be heard in the East Gallery. It’s similar to the one that precedes an audio announcement but is not followed by any announcement. Like the conspiracy theories around the twenty-fifth frame in film and television, a signal without a message seems to speculate with visitors’ attention, or even secretly affect their psyche. What is the artwork here? Is it the signal or the silence that follows it? Perhaps, with a properly tuned mindset, the visitor can perceive the pause between the two repetitive signals, in the spirit of John Cage’s famous work 4’33”.

Guryanov and Kuryshev’s previous joint sound works emphasized the site-specificity of place. Reminder (2016) at Moscow’s Stanislavsky Electrotheatre featured sounds recorded in the foyer and reproduced, like an echo, in the same space in a random order, filling the current moment with the ghosts of the past. In GOST 111-35 (2018), prepared speakers made the glazing of the ZIL Palace of Culture’s winter garden (designed by avant- garde architects the Vesnin brothers) resonate, rattle, and tinkle. Alternatively, the signal without a message transforms Garage into what contemporary anthropology defines as “nonplace” (a term coined by Marc Augé), the meaningless—other than for purely utilitarian needs—transit space of hypermodernism, like a shopping center, airport or subway. In such nonplaces, the visual and acoustic ecology is permanently disrupted by the intrusion of unnecessary messages, the number of which has increased many times over the past year due to sanitary warnings. All of this is not helpful for our mental health, but Guryanov and Kuryshev’s “alarming” sonic readymade is intended to produce a healing effect. By consciously noting our own reaction to the warning signal, we can try to overcome its automatism, realize the violence of the readiness/frustration imposed on us, and place a barrier before it within our internal audio landscape.