CREATION OF MYTH

September 20 - November 17, 2024

Rating: 18+

Curated by: Dmitry Gaikov and Natalia Gudovich
Texts by: Alyona Dyatko

The exhibition CREATION OF MYTH, hosted by the EKATERINA Cultural Foundation, brought together over 80 artists and explored myth-making as an act of creating a new reality. Each participating artist created their own myth - and their own universe - using various techniques, from painting, drawing, and printmaking to sculpture, new media, and installation. The exhibition represented a polyphonic dialogue of mythologies originated by artists across generations. The show included works by contemporary art titans such as Ilya Kabakov, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Nikola Samonov, Timur Novikov, Georgy Guryanov, Egor Ostrov, Olga Tobreluts, Arkady Nasonov, Aidan Salakhova, Vladimir Dubossarsky, Andrey Khlobystin, and Ivan Razumov, alongside pieces by younger artists, including Egor Koshelev, Ivan Plyushch, Daniil Arkhipenko, Natalia Gudovich, Irina Petrakova, Tornike Bendeliani, Anna Lapshinova, Irina Drozd, Kirill Manchunsky, Nastya Antipova, Vova Perkin, Elene Metreveli, and many more.

Myth is a profound source of human culture, uniting art, religion, and philosophy. The revelations of pioneers, visions of the future, and flashes of alternative worlds that invade our dreams all originate within the "magic circle" of myth. Fantasies, chimeras, horrors, and illusions - whether in dreams, broad daylight, or moments of madness - emerge from the unconscious, from the uncharted depths into which the social consciousness dreads to descend.

Myth is a word. A wondrous word that unfolds into a story with its own rules and heroes. A comforting word: myth is the answer to a question that has yet to be asked. An understandable word, given to people in its concrete and figurative form. Myth is not the fairy tales of ancient peoples, nor an anachronism in the post-Internet era, but a story told by the artist here and now.

Myth-making has never dwindled, remaining constant through all times and circumstances. Myth-making is a deeply personal manifestation of the artist's free will, repeated time and again. Creating a myth always amounts to creating a world - one liberated from conditions imposed by others. Creating a myth resembles dreaming: here, the symbol prevails over the sign, irreality over physical laws, and the lingering images of childhood over logical connections.

Myth should be seen while sleeping, Carl Jung said. In the context of this exhibition, this quote is not just a metaphor but an act of creative psychotherapy, aiming to restore for the artist a system of coherent multifaceted reality, where symbols, personal stories, and the viewer’s unconscious recognition of familiar narratives all coexist.

In the face of information overload, escaping from an uncomfortable reality is impossible, if only because there is no such place which you can flee from. A single reality is no more. The culprit here is the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary art. Having infiltrated all spheres of life, it has intentionally complicated our access to the essence of things: matter has been systematically detached from imagery, words from objects, and meanings from denotations. The fractured language of art has replaced genuine reality. The medium has displaced the message. Fragments have displaced the whole. One struggles to find a foothold in a linguistic space like this. The opacity of contemporary language vulgarizes our speech, reducing metaphors and symbols to mere stylistic devices.

Personal myth-making has become art's sole means of transcending a world devoid of metaphor. Bridging different levels of perception, a metaphor becomes an act of poetic therapy, a conduit between personal experience and the collective unconscious. By bringing back the metaphor to the artistic text of their myth, the artist takes on the role of a demiurge. While nearly all artists develop their own vocabulary of symbols, not all create their own myths.

The worlds created by the participating artists - whether fantastical landscapes inhabited by some strange creatures or abstract spaces filled with elusive meanings - expand personal experiences and emotions into universal ideas, and vice versa. By constructing their own mythological systems, artists not only create an understandable world for themselves, deciphering at least some parts of the complicated reality, but also metaphorically appropriate reality, returning it to the individual. There is more to creating a myth than just the construction of alternative artistic universes; myth-making brings forth worlds where all internal conflicts have been resolved and tranquility forms the necessary foundation for life.

The project was produced by: Untitled Foundation, the artist-run alliance AIDAN STUDIO, and the ARCUS Academy of Creative Competencies.

The project was supported by the HR agency RusPartners, Dina Akimova, LKA-Engineering, Anton Zhidovskikh, and Vera Baranova.

Organizers would also like to thank the Museum of the New Academy in Saint Petersburg and Maria Novikova-Savelyeva, Saint Petersburg New Academy, Marina Gisich Gallery, Vladey Gallery, pop/off/art Gallery, 11.12 Gallery, Anna Nova Gallery, Pogodina Gallery, Artzip Gallery, Evdokimov Gallery, E.K.ArtBureau, FINEART Gallery, Totibadze Gallery, and Alexey Bokov.

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