Exhibition “Capital of Nowhere” at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Parallel with the 55th Venice Biennale in Italy

The artist conceptualizes the possibility and impossibility of freedom by simulating a baby’s view from the stroller with a camera. In all its seeming simplicity the work refers to the classics of Soviet avant-garde: Rodchenko’s angles and Eisenstein’s films.

This work uses the archaic aesthetics of outdoors advertising of 1960-80s to reconstruct the bygone Soviet reality. The LEDs highlighting the rusty tin may seem to be the symbol of light at the end of the tunnel, but it is not a flash of hope, it is an assertion of total solitude. The Russian language used in the installation puts emphasis on the individual nature of a private story and its inscrutability for others.

For Generations artists sought doors of different eras in St. Petersburg and combined them into a vivid conceptual composition of time and identity.

The installation passed into the collection of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice after the exhibition.

In this video installation, the image is interactively connected with the viewer’s movements. When a person walks into a room, he gets inside the video projection of white noise (a physical term used in astronomy; also used figuratively to describe constant noise) filling the walls. There is a mini stair stepper in the center of the room – a metaphor for ascension. Making an effort walking the stair stepper the spectator changes the projected image: vague noise turns into luminescent silhouettes of flying seagulls filling the space with their cries.

The installation consists of three light objects. Two of them are connected to the RSS feeds via computers while the third transmits atmospheric data of the place. Computer searches RSS feeds for everything related to the concept of fear for the first object and the concept of desire for the second one. The more connections there are, the brighter the LEDs shine. The third object is based on the same principle but it uses the atmospheric data of the place.

A spectator can get into the constructions that have additional air pressure sensors. When he blows in them, the lighting of the object changes thus visualizing the simple act of breathing and its importance.

Old furniture doors of various sizes are painted with different architectural structures – arches, columns, temples, houses. Together they form a city assembled from modules that start a game of scale – the ‘buildings’ seem to be ‘erected’ now near, now far from the spectator. Minimalist execution (the outline of the buildings is painted with one stroke of the brush, so that the buildings are perceived as a whole) makes the nuances of color and line particularly important. The austere and dignified simplicity of elemental forms defines the no man’s character of this architecture that traces back to the world of Platonic ideas. The long-present classic architectural forms show us not the temporary values prone to historical recession, but the eternal and timeless ones.

Large-scale monochromatic drawing represents an abandoned construction site, reminding of ruins of an ancient city. A video is projected on the picture: it shows a daycycle – sunrise, noon, sunset, stellar motion. Everlasting circulation of the cosmos over futility of human efforts.

Skyline is based on a number of photos representing walls of St Petersburg buildings. Traces of paint, plaster and rust on peeling walls form dramatic landscapes – without houses, without trees, without people, empty plain areas, the Earth before Adam or after a global disaster.

This work is а large-scale installation that is crossing boundaries between art, design and cinema. Like all of Anna Frants’ works, this installation is part fantasy and part instinctive immersion bound by programming and robotics.

In the series Made in Ancient Greece classical clay vessels continue to tell stories by contemporary visual means, but instead of paint the artist uses video. Ridiculing culture clichés, such as the idea of perfect proportions of ancient Greek fine pottery, she proves that an object from the past can be a great vehicle for a narrative about the present.

The name was chosen to remind of female names given to hurricanes. Breaking a tile wall Petr Shvetsov acts like an irrational storm. He just marks the action of the natural force with expressive check cracks or a brutal gesture which shows evanescence of an illusive well-being, and that is enough for the artist. Petr Shvetsov is attracted to simple objects and events by their expressive texture that enable him to work beyond stereotypes.

Kazakov draws caricatures directly on 35mm documentary films produced by amateur Soviet studio in the 1970s to change meaning of primary archival records.

Icarus is a self-portrait portrayed in dance against the classical St. Petersburg landscape. Dynamics contrasted against steadfast architecture, Shelganov sweeps over city rooftops symbolizing a new freedom of the ’90s, a rough era and collapse of the Soviet Union: the time of perestroika.

Created for The Lev Gumilev Museum in St. Petersburg, this film reflects the institution’s namesake and his father, Russian poet NikolayGumilev. Lev Gumilev – a scientist and author of passive theory of ethnogenesis – served two terms in Stalin’s GULAGs. Silver Age poet NikolayGumilev was an African explorer who secured a rich collection of artifacts for the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St. Petersburg – only to be shot in 1921.

In the video of Maxim Svishev, the Aurora Cruiser, a symbol of St. Petersburg’s revolutionary past, that is anchored for an eternal moorage, comes to life upon the artist’s decision, that is to say, it surmounts the time boundary. The artist visualizes this transition by animating a series of avant-garde symbols and by including music by the St. Petersburg composer Oleg Karavaichuk.

In “Farewell to Slave Labor” is a descent into madness. Handing out leaflets to St. Petersburg citizens, a man gradually ceases to distinguish an imaginary world from reality. He begins to play as a child, pretending to be a penguin who admires the Finnish Gulf or walks in the Mikhailovsky Garden – even finding others he perceives are like him. Ultimately, the penguin man finds out that his imaginary tribe left only empty shells, and his presence turns to be a commercial costume.

Capturing the delicate juxtaposition of a park and city, nature and civilization, past and present this film features Bolshoi Drama Theatre actress Pauline Tolstun.

Lurie depicts his own private landscape on Super8 film and then transcribes the imprinted lit images within theprism of his memories and sensations. Here the black and white, urban, dreamlike scenes from the flatland of St.Petersburg and Kronstadt – the old Russia’s marine fort – refract into subdued colors of the pristine mountain terrain of Northern Norway.

Complex forms are born from a grid of finishing tiles that graduate from abstract planes and lines to easily recognizable objects. A city outwardly acquires varied forms but inherently remains the same, deepening the complexity of inferred meaning.

Maya Popova, contemporary dance choreographer at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, performs a dance of lonely desperation on a dirty snowdrift in anticipation of spring.

The artist crafts her own mythology around the image and symbolism of a notorious object – the battleship of the revolution – turning it into a lively, likeable character materializing in different worlds.

Footage from a found karaoke video tape amusingly recalls endless intervals between TV programs of Soviet era. The brightly colored flowers gently swaying in breeze is a nostalgic symbol of the seemingly trouble-free past accompanies a collaged soundtrack of popular songs about Leningrad/St Petersburg.