Suspense

Victoria Malkova and Pauline Moskvina Personal Exhibition

September 17 – December 13, 2015

Rating: 6+

Organisers: The Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, E.K.ArtBureau

Project sponsor: GC "Stroyteks"

The artistic duo behind the Suspense project has made an up-to-the-minute, youth-oriented work that brings up the issue of artistic choice as the two artists dwell on the creator's ability and possibility to take a fresh look at all-too-familiar things and their right to make a genuine work of art out of everyday rubbish. The artists use archeological methods and the know-how of historical reenactment to reconstruct the cultural layer of our time and day, which is made up of discarded photos and selfies gone wrong.

In the modern age of high speed and mobile networks, we can record every single moment of our lives but there is hardly any time left for these moments to sink in or for us to thoroughly feel them through. The impressions you get from a mountain landscape, a sporting event or a snowboarder’s colorful outfit will last for just half an hour before your flashy post drops way down on the news feeds in social networks. By taking out these moments from the time stream and turning them into art pieces, the artists create a new space enabling them to reinvent well-known stories and images.

To achieve their goal, the artists who usually make installations have turned to more classical art forms, that is painting and sculpture. Some of the artworks at the exhibition are indeed traditional paintings and sculptures. Selfies taken from awkward angles, badly cropped landscapes and other random pictures take on a whole new meaning when given the artistic treatment to become art objects in their own right.

However through the course of the exhibition these objects undergo noticeable transformation as painting becomes a tridimensional installation, which every now and then interacts with visitors, while the multicolored sculpture seeks to capture unfinished movement.

The figures in the artwork, which gave its name to the whole project, are waiting in line to go down the mountain and get their adrenaline rush, while the artists wait for an emotional reaction from the visitors who are willy-nilly involved in the process of waiting. And the classical multi-figured scene, which forms a quasi-archaic triptych, also waits to be transformed. However, instead of the logical completeness that you would expect from this kind of format, the viewers are faced with two types of waiting – contemplative and active, with both directed towards the center, a compositional pause where an action has either finished or has yet to begin.

The Trajectory series consists of tridimensional screens that form a path for the visitors to walk along through the exhibition while also mimicking a downhill piste. Here, paintings, bent like old crumbled photographs, become a tridimensional free-standing shape that – at least in part – functions as a sculpture. In the final part of the show, that is the Track installation, paintings are grouped together so as to resemble a giant video board used to broadcast sporting events. But the only thing seen on this huge screen made up of 18 square canvases is snowboard and ski tracks – with the snow-white field also being in a state of suspense.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•