November, 19–21

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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)

www.annenkirche.com

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.

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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.

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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.

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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