Sergei Kishchenko

b. 1975, Stavropol. Lives and works in Moscow

Temple of Venus, 2019
Installation, video,  4’ 32’’
Courtesy of the artist

This new, site-specific work by Sergei Kishchenko is driven largely by his long-term research into the history of fertility cults and partly by the architecture of the exhibition, which resembles a space station from a Tarkovsky movie. It is made up of various different elements that come together to form a temple or ritualized space, more specifically a temple of Venus embodied in the ancient forms of Mother Earth located at the center. On one side of the capsule, a group of highly magnified black-and-white photographs of seeds allude to women’s historic role in the development of agriculture. A series of new works references the papyri found carbonized in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, which had to await the arrival of new technology enabling us to read these documents from the oldest surviving library on the planet and unravel the knowledge we lost to Mother Earth.

In Kishchenko’s scenario, a room like this could exist on a space station or a space ship departing our destroyed planet.  The key to understanding Temple of Venus is Giulio Camillo’s Theater of Memory, an epic idea for a universal archive which the Renaissance Italian philosopher worked on but never realized. Contained in a single room and resembling an amphitheater, it was designed to facilitate the retrieval of any micro or macro connection that passed through the universe and our memory.