CYFEST 2017: ABOUT FESTIVAL – PROGRAM – EXHIBITIONS – SOUND ART – EDUCATION – PARTICIPANTS – OPENING HOURS AND TICKETS – PRESS AND REPORTS – CONTACTS
Curated by Lizaveta Matveeva (Russia)
January 27 — February 8
LUDA Gallery
Mokhovaya 42
Opening night, photography by Anton Khlabov
The history of the relationship between man and machine began long before the Industrial revolution or the invention of the steam engine and spinning loom. With the development of technology, this relationship has acquired ever greater acuity and tension. The fear of a rise of the machines has been accompanying mankind for several centuries now, and this apprehension has been articulated in many movies and books. As for the machines, they are trying to be more and more like humans and to be able to do the same things that people do in all fields. It is small wonder that they encroached on the territory of visual arts a long time ago: robots imitate the hand of an artist and create graphics or transform original graphics into 3D sculptures. The development of technologies also accounts for the fact that artists have started actively using them in their works: the turn of the century saw the emergence of video and sound art as well as cyber and media art.
Humanism, whose carrier has always been a creator, is subjected to cyberattacks: the simplification of manufacturing everything and the accessibility of archives and high technologies, on the one hand, make an artist an omnipotent demiurge and, on the other, they give rise to resistance and impel the creation of a system of self-limitations. An artist who poeticizes any form of the nonhuman and mechanistic and longingly looks at an old printer or a roll of Svema film made in 1989 carries in their work a nostalgia for obsolete technologies that have become so defenseless. This new tendency has come about in opposition to the ultramodern and super-technological — everything that is considered to be the current trend. This system forces the artist to reject the latest achievements of technology that continues its mimicry of the human being and to turn to materials from the past that have greater credibility — which becomes the theme of exhibition: the interaction and confrontation between the artist and technologies, the original and the surrogate, the accidental and the predictable — an inexhaustible conversation about time and the mechanisms of the emergence of a work of art.
Participants:
About the curator
Lizaveta Matveeva
Art critic, curator. Born in 1991 in Arkhangelsk, Russia. Received a Master’s Degree from the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State University majoring in Art Criticism (St. Petersburg, Russia) and graduated from the Third Moscow Summer Curatorial School organized by Viktor Misiano and V-A-C Foundation (Moscow, Russia). Co-curator at Luda Gallery (St. Petersburg, Russia). Curator and co-curator of exhibition projects in the field of contemporary art including “Disguises” at the Sheremetev Palace (St. Petersburg, Russia, 2016), “New Blockheads” at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art (Russia, 2016), “Shape of Unseen” at the Winzavod Center (Moscow, Russia, 2016), “Let us think on a clear day» at the Museum of St. Petersburg Avant-Garde (St. Petersburg, Russia, 2014). Lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Opening of exhibition project “Mechanisms of Emergence”