The Children’s Biennale, as the brainchild of the Moscow State Contemporary Art Center is usually dubbed, this time has taken on some European gloss. While in the past years its expositions resembled an anarchic revue sketch show where works were struggling for their place under the sun, now artists enjoy the incredibly vast spaces of CHA (Central House of Artist), with three-meter spacing between the exhibits is left. The works are placed inside an architectural installation of unmatched beauty, with the walls being coated with self-colored chipboards. The choice of this material should probably be perceived as a metaphor of low prices and verdure of the young art. It looks just fabulous as the backdrop for photographing, since the chipboard texture provides soft and opaque ripples. CHA has not seen such a transformation since 2006, when architect Boris Bernasconi covered all the walls with a continuous polyethylene band at a retrospective exposition of well-known auctioneer and sculptor Oleg Kulik.
German curator Kathrin Becker, curator of a video program prepared by New Berlin Art Association, called her exposition Under a Tinsel Sun. She apparently wanted to show that modern-day youth basks in a constant media flow watching the outside world through a rectangular PC window. The exposition’s key motif is that TV pictures will bull their way into everywhere as on the curtain designed by Austrian painter Sarah Decristoforo, where bucolic landscapes are hiding Ku Klux Klan figures, terrorists, blue coat sadists and other news reel bogey whom the artist is unlikely to have ever come across. The works of Italian Danilo Corleone who asked an Indian palm-reader to foretell the fate of the world’s biggest financiers, using their palms printed out from the internet, looks no less primitive but quite typical of the entire exhibition. This kind of art essentially resorts to the same ploys as tabloids and therefore is forgotten as quickly as a note about Vanga’s prophesies.
As opposed to this sharp wit, Becker shows a huge number of photographic reports which are ever more often claimed by museums and art galleries as the photo budgets are sequestered in the world’s largest magazines. We’ve already seen enough of such outstanding authors as Africans Pieter Hugo and Mikhael Subotzky at Multimedia Art Museum. The photographs of migrants Anastasia Khoroshilova and the fishermen of Pablo Zuleta Zahr are somewhat bland for all their professionalism.
Becker has a decent knack for video so that the fastidious spectator should have plenty of patience and a dictionary as almost all films at the exhibition have no translation – the English caption at the most. The thematic range is wider here than in all static pictures taken together: from the apery of Ryan McNamara in The latest from Blood and Bowels to the political video about Berlusconi by the participant of the last Berlin Biennale Marina Naprushkina.
The authors could not avoid Abu Ghraib, Syrian, Libyan and Egyptian revolutions, labor migrants, and the meltdown of financial markets. The works selected by Becker that are not related to politics and reports from exotic and (or) hot zones remind of fire evacuation schemes. Against this background the installation by the participant of Venetian Biennale 2011 Anna Titova named Chulan (Junk Room), representing something like a spatial sketch of the virgin’s bedroom, is perceived as Naryshkin’s baroque. Titova is a young but experienced artist like most Russian participants of Under a Tinsel Sun. Here Becker decided to place her bet on widely known names as a safeguard against all kind of junk and rubbish. This is definitely an adult and mature approach: making a biennale following the contemporary European recipes. Although the stance of a contemporary intellectual passionately dreaming of reinstating art in its life-building rights is permeated with dry didactics: without having enough of its fling, youth sets out for school again. However, learning is also in fashion now.
Valentin Dyakonov
Source: Kommersant-Vlast
