2012 – Marina Razheva

2012 | Video installation

Catalogue title: Dispensary

Exhibition: The Eye Never Sees Itself
II Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Main Programme
Venue: Ural Worker Printing House, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Dates: 13 September – 22 October 2012
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade

The Work

The work was installed in a darkened room within the former printing house.

Its walls were covered with the words: “Никого нет” (There Is No One).

A video projection (I, II) showed the same room. A person entered, looked around and said that nobody was there. Other members of the Brigade then entered the room.

The visitor entering the installation therefore encountered a situation that had already been played out and recorded.

But the statement remained impossible to sustain.

Someone was already there.

The visitor was there too.

Prophylaxis

The Brigade called the work a “prophylaxis of the self”: “Remember yourself. Guard your own dignity.”

The work uses the simplest possible contradiction — saying that nobody is present while being present yourself — to turn absence into a question of perception.

The empty room is not actually empty. Its meaning changes when someone enters it.

The work therefore depends on the visitor not simply looking at an image, but recognising their own presence within the situation.

Exhibition Context

Prophylactorium was presented in the main programme of the II Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, The Eye Never Sees Itself, curated by Yaroslava Bubnova.

The exhibition occupied the former Ural Worker printing house, a constructivist industrial building in Yekaterinburg. The biennial explored ways in which artistic vision can analyse and transform the world through acts of looking.

The Brigade’s installation opened the exhibition and became one of its first encounters with the viewer.

Documentation

The project was realised collectively by the Brigade.

Elena Gladysheva, Viktor Oborotistov, Marina Razheva, Vladimir Romanov

Original project documentation →

Catalogue: 2nd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art: The Eye Never Sees Itself, 2012, pp. 95

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2012 | Spatial transformation / Performance

Exhibition: Caution, Artist!
*Parallel Programme, II Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art
Venue: PoLe Gallery, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Dates: 11 September – 8 October 2012
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade

The Exhibition

Caution, Artist! brought together artists who had once worked in industrial production, many of them holding actual production jobs before or alongside their artistic practice.

The exhibition explored the blurred boundary between artistic and industrial labour. Paintings were accompanied by information about the artists’ former occupations, while original industrial safety signs and other traces of factory culture formed part of the exhibition environment.

Within this context, the Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade transformed the gallery itself.

The Transformation

The Brigade developed the spatial intervention and carried out its installation as a performance.

The existing paintings and watercolours remained in the gallery, but the language of the industrial workplace was introduced into the room.

“Entrance–Exit” signs appeared on the ceiling. Arrows marked the floor. Safety regulations covered the walls.

The exhibition space began to resemble a place of production: a space organised by movement, instructions, functions and rules.

The intervention did not replace the exhibition. It altered the conditions in which it was seen.

A gallery that had been familiar as an exhibition space became something else without ceasing to be a gallery.

The Brigade

The transformation was one part of the wider exhibition, which also included paintings, documentary materials and a collection of authentic industrial safety signs from the 1970s–1980s.

The title Caution, Artist! therefore worked in several directions: as a warning, as a reminder of the artist’s vulnerability, and as a playful transfer of industrial safety culture into the field of art.

The Brigade responded to this context not by illustrating it, but by allowing the language of production to enter the exhibition space itself.

Documentation

Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade

Original project documentation →

Catalogue: 2nd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art: The Eye Never Sees Itself, 2012, p. 252-254.
Catalogue →

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