Annenkirche
November, 19–21
8b Kirochnaya st.
Tue–Sun: 10:00 – 22:00
Free admission
Artists
Victoria Vesna (USA), Ivan Govorkov (Russia), Maria Karol, Evgeniy Korelin (Russia), Damla Kilickiran (Norway), William Latham (UK), Huang Lingdong, Wu Ziwei (China), Patricia Olynyk (USА–Canada), Mariateresa Sartori (Italy), David Hochgatterer (Austria), Boris Shershenkov (Russia)
Curators
Elena Gubanova (Russia), Anna Frants (Russia-USA), Sergey Komarov (Russia), Karolin Tampere (Norway), Danielle Siembieda (USA)
David Hochgatterer (Austria), Time To X, sound installation, 2013–2014 (new version 2020) © Jim Poyner Photography
Material is the endless multitude of all objects and systems existing in the world. According to Aristotle, nothing arises from nothing, so anything that arises and changes requires a certain substrate, which loses one set of properties and acquires another as it changes. A classic example is a statue: in an artist’s hands, a lump of bronze turns into a statue, and bronze is the material cause which ceases to be a lump and acquires a new form. This substrate is what Aristotle called material.
The projects displayed at the Annenkirche are artistic presentations of different forms of material, and a new examination of materiality in the light of modern scientific knowledge. We are glad to display them in the Lutheran church of St Anne, as a way of saying that there are no contradictions in knowledge of the world in the religious, artistic and scientific sense, if this knowledge is directed towards the human being.
In everyday life, it is not often that we think about the ecology of the cosmos. Media artist Boris Shershenkov looks for traces that people have left in the ether. The project by Victoria Vesna is a message to look up into the open cosmos to find stardust which so greatly influenced life on our planet.
The imaginary geometry of the Universe is figuratively displayed through the movement of human hands in Ivan Govorkov’s video work “Trajectories”. Patricia Olynyk projects an evocative sound and visual environment in the multimedia work “Dark Skies”, which articulates the ambiguous space between the micro- and macro-environment. Damla Kilickiran’s “Psykografier” create a semiotic landscape in the process of change.
The sound installation “New Wind” by Mariateresa Sartori proposes to anthropomorphize and tame an enormous natural force: the wind, which we cannot control. This is an attempt to stop chaos, giving the human voice the phenomenon of movement. The permanent sound installation “Time to X” by David Hochgatterer turns the fourth dimension of time into a geometric space.
Several works address human perception of danger and fear as a space of chaos. William Latham’s work is a response to the COVID-19 epidemic. This video parodies and transforms into art the elaborate geometry of viruses. Chinese artists Huang Lingdong and Wu Ziwei present a landscape of the future in which technology becomes an inseparable part of the natural world, and recounts how people construct a pseudo-environment. And the students of the “School for the Young Artist” program at the PRO ARTE Maria Karol and Evgeniy Korelin invite viewers to look at their own fear in the form of candied fruit.
The raging wind and candied fruit, crystals of stardust and mutating viruses, mimicry and the music of Tchaikovsky, television airwaves with human traces and the trajectories of cosmic movement — all of these things are a small crystal of the semiotic landscape of our contemporaries in which the common geometry of time overflows.
— Elena Gubanova, festival curator
Victoria Vesna (USA)
[Alien] Star Dust
media installation, 2019 — work in progress
The project originally premiered in March 2020 at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria. The starting point is seven meteorites from the collection that crashed on all the world’s continents. We are invited to search for star dust amid the circulating natural and anthropogenic particles that we all breathe. The audience is confronted with layers of animated crashes and sounds that they can access through Augmented Reality (AR). They also have the opportunity to participate in a workshop and an online meditation that will be led remotely by the artist.
METEORITES
Tissint: Morocco, Africa
Chelyabinsk: Russia, Europe
Fukang: China, Asia
Henbury: Australia
Canyon Diablo: USA, North America
Campo del Cielo: Argentina, South America
Allan Hills A76009: Antarctica
Meteorites from NHM Wien collection
Ivan Govorkov (Russia)
Trajectories
video, 2007
filmed by Elena Gubanova
A short video about the oppositions of polar forces, and also about the inseparable connection between them. Through the movements of the left and right hand, their rotation, mock antagonism and inner tension, the artist offers his model of the Cosmos, defining it as an illusion of polarity in a single world that is woven from the battle of opposites.
Maria Karol, Evgeniy Korelin (Russia)
PATHND
installation, 2021
Supported by Pro Arte Foundation and CYLAND Media Art Lab
PATHND stands for “past actions that have not been done”. The project began in 2020, and gradually changed before reaching its current form. It now addresses the meeting point of anxiety and fear, while the authors are mainly guided by the emotional nuances of the words. Fear has become an animal feeling, natural and useful, worthy of respect, while anxiety is a sticky organism that is constantly nearby. Anxiety awaits you around every corner in the hope that you will take some action, so that the web of probabilities and deviations from plans grows even larger. Anxiety is the horseman of chaos and unpredictability, but it is from chaos that everything in this world is born.
Damla Kilickiran (Norway)
Psykografier
video installation, 2018
In “Psykografier”, silent animations probe the space and appear as printouts from exploratory mental moods. The abstracted figures resembling hieroglyphs generate associations with mathematical forms such as Möbius strips or vesica piscis, and with fabled animals such as the Phoenix. Historically, psychography as a spiritualistic tool has been reincarnated in various forms. Mainly known as automatic writing or automatism, it was used to make contact with the unconscious. In Damla’s psychographs the space and the projected figures create a semiotic landscape in the process of alteration: a landscape that can be read where language leaves off.
William Latham (UK)
Fantasy Virus (Mutator)
computer-generated VR video, 2020–2021
The project was created by William Latham in collaboration with Stephen Todd and the Mutator VR Team with audio by Peter Todd. The aim was to see if they could use their Mutator/Form Grow generation system to generate “Virus like” mutations using their “evolution by aesthetics” approach. The work is a response to the COVID-19 epidemic; though viruses are terrible, this video art celebrates and parodies their intricate geometry. The video is inspired by what the team have learnt through their scientific work visualising structural biology data for the University of York and the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine.
Huang Lingdong, Wu Ziwei (China)
Mimicry
video installation, 2020
“Mimicry” is a multi-screen video installation powered by computer algorithms and inspired by mimicry in nature, the unique way species protect themselves by changing color and pattern in response to the environment. In this experimental art piece, cameras will record plants in real-time, and through a genetic algorithm the color and shape of virtual insects will be generated and evolved over time, toward the ultimate goal of visually blending into the recorded background. This simulated breeding, selection, and mutation are visualized across the video monitors positioned in front of the living plants as they progress.
In addition to exploring the intersection between nature and computation, the artists find that this work has relevance to human society as well. As Walter Lippmann writes in his book “Public Opinion”, people construct a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world. The real environment, pseudo environment, human behavior and consequence influence each other, constructing a loop structure. To a degree, everyone’s pseudo-environment is a fiction.
Patricia Olynyk (USА–Canada)
Dark Skies
multimedia installation, 2018
In collaboration with Sung Ho Kim
“Dark Skies” responds to the omnipresence of light pollution, defined as an excessive amount of obtrusive artificial light in urban environments, affecting brain wave activity and the circadian rhythms of human and non-human lifeforms. The title is an astronomical reference that recalls remote places free of hazy, human-made light. The installation reveals two distinct timeframes on the 24-hour clock simultaneously: a crepuscular sky, and one that is pitch black with milky streams of light. It also offers an evocative soundscape that adds an interactive and immersive quality to the work.
Mariateresa Sartori (Italy)
New Wind
sound installation, 2020
Sound engineer Victor Nebbiolo di Castri, PASE Platform, Venice
“New Wind” is a project that seeks to anthropomorphize and domesticate an immense natural force over which we have no control. It is an attempt to stem the chaos by giving a human voice to a phenomenon that is only visible through what it moves, a characteristic it shares with the forces of the unconscious. The sound of the wind imbued with human voices moves in a circular motion, creating a vortex whose abyss is both inside and outside us.
David Hochgatterer (Austria)
Time to X
sound installation, 2013–2014 (new version: 2020)
The installation transforms the fourth dimension, time, into a geometrical expanse. A short audio file is sliced into short fragments that are played back simultaneously, so all the acoustic information of the sound is continuously audible. The listener experiences a “still picture of a period of time”: from a distance a noisy picture can be “seen” at once, while approximation focuses the view and reveals small details.
Boris Shershenkov (Russia)
Etheroforming: Tower
audiovisual installation, 2021
The installation is an archaeological media study of the electronic synesthesia phenomenon and works with analogue television signals. It is based on test generators with added systems for automatic control of signal parameters, analyzing data from digital TV broadcasts and visitors’ movements in the installation space.
“Etheroforming” is an experiment to detect anthropogenic effects on the etheric environment. The “Tower” installation broadcasts pure audiovisual signals on the transmission frequencies of abandoned analog television channels. TV test tables of almost Suprematist properties collide and distort in the etheric space of the installation. These fluctuations are displayed on analog TV sets located at certain points in the room and tuned to different channels. The TVs form the audiovisual map of the television broadcast layer, allowing the audience to become immersed in it and travel inside.