Valery Katsuba
dal 18/5/2010 al 9/6/2010
Segnalato da
18/5/2010
Valery Katsuba
GMG Gallery, Moscow
Air Flight - Body Shock. 20 colour and black-and-white photographs, music, gymnasts' voices, slides and videos create a marvelous show, a space that glitters with many meanings, lures the viewer and makes him feel empathy. The artist decided to make a project about circus relying upon his own feelings.
Curated by Andrey Khlobystin
The exhibition about two generations of trapeze artists is more than just a photo exhibition. It falls within the genre of “art about art” and reaches what Wagner considered a peak of creativity – a synthesis of arts. 20 colour and black-and-white photographs, music, gymnasts’ voices, slides and videos create a marvelous show, a space that glitters with many meanings, lures the viewer and makes him feel empathy.
The artist decided to make a project about circus relying upon his own feelings. This is not a very trendy topic in contemporary art. Maybe, true affection, immersion into the subject of art can become a way out of art crises which turned into appendage of market conveyor, a part of entertainment industry, various discourses and “rational” perception of reality.
Phrases “a stretch of imagination”, “a spirit hover” carry one away into the world of irrational, world of dreams which the circus always appealed to. Human dream to learn to fly doesn’t derive from birdwatching, but evolves out of flying experience in our dreams, as well as from the internal “free fall”. One can hardly rely on Freud, who interpreted it as a fundamental sexual basis and educed origins of aircraft from Leonardo Da Vinci’s erotic dreams (“fellatio”). Flight is our unconscious desire enclosed in the memory of body and brain by evolution as a potential ability. Dream of flying is a “dream reality” that puts body under control and trapeze artists’ way of thinking turns into their lifestyle.
The whole structure of Katsuba’s exhibition underlines spiritual and classic origins of the “first generation” gymnasts – Vladimir Burlakov and Nina Chuglaeva (who created in the 1970-s together with Vladimir Volzhansky their show “Prometheus”). Thirty years later they transferred this “additional feature” that turns trapeze into high art backed by the “memory of body” to their disciples – Olga Golubeva and Eugene Efremov. Katsuba depicts young artists as an almost mystical reincarnation of their teachers. Their performances place an accent on beautiful forms of high art. Suddenly Dante’s Paolo and Francesca – two cuddling shadows floating together, who don’t part even in the hellfire – appear behind the photos showing elegant compositions built of young bodies. But the point of high art is that even in the most extreme circumstances it “performates” stress and recoil into high artistic conditions. In this sense the exhibition comprising several kinds of art and creative minds as co-authors, is about elevated things – it terms of gravity, ideas and feelings.
Parallel program of the Moscow Photobiennale 2010
Opening 19 may 2010
GMG Gallery
2A/1 Leont'evskiy pereulok, Moscow