Alexei Shulgin 10 Years in Art

On April 9, 1992, already an acclaimed artist and creator of the well-known series Other People’s Photos, as well as the founder of the group Immediate Photography, Alexei Shulgin looked back at his first decade in art in the exhibition 10 Years in Art, at the gallery in Tryokhprudny Lane.

There, he presented the path he had traveled as an invisible process with an unpredictable outcome. As his final work of the period, he showed the installation Spinning Mirror 1.

In the exhibition text, Shulgin claimed that the only way to attract the interest of the contemporary viewer, tired of visual flows, is by showing them their own reflection. To further complicate his collaboration with the public, each viewer was invited to reassemble their own image from pieces in the elusive space. Shulgin managed to engage the audience and turn the artist into a process manager by creating a well-developed structure, a reliable engine and a slider-crank mechanism of his own creation.

In the decades that followed, Alexei Shulgin worked in a broad range of roles, from photographer and web developer to musician, teacher, and curator, and today his first «progress report» looks prophetic. With this work, he confidently declared that movement is more attractive than stasis, and that the artist is free to radically change both their strategy and tactics. Vibrating within what seems at first sight to be a mechanical installation are not only images but also a syncretism of contemporary visual art and the relationships between the part and the whole, the artist and the viewer.