We are glad to invite you to the vernissage of the group exhibition “Garden of unearthly consolations” as part of the “Focus” exhibition program.
Participants: Lyudmila Kalinichenko, Alexander Sedelnikov, Anna Feldman, Anna Marchenkova
Curator: Alisa Sycheva
“The garden was filled with discordant cries, birds singing and chirping, animals roaring, squealing, and screeching. Never before had Christo seen such unusual animals. Unprecedented animals lived in this garden ”
Gardens have always been cultural codes. The garden is the quintessence of the current time of the natural narrative. A landscape park of romanticism, a regular part of the French Enlightenment, the archetype of all historical discourse about the garden is the Garden of Eden.
Today, de-romantization of nature is noticeable – it is now a history of environmental disasters, the consequences of the Anthropocene epoch, an economic resource. At the same time, the concept of dark ecology is gaining momentum, a return to the medieval perception of the creepiness and danger of a world full of monsters and diseases as God’s retribution. Finally, erasing the boundaries between the living and the inanimate, people do not stop erecting “gardens” as concepts of new possibilities for talking about the “earthly”. Nature in its artificiality acquires a new divinity, out of control of the will of disaster, mutations, global changes in the landscape and climate, also learning the disappointing ways of coexistence with a man.
What is this new Arcadia like? – half terrifying garden, full of medieval symbolism, half laboratory of the Solaris station researcher looking for the answer in the extraterrestrial intelligence of the planet. Like the garden of the Argentine surgeon Salvator from the novel Amphibian Man, it is inhabited by mystical creatures, people who eat artificial meat. Stones shed tears at the time of their own freedom from man. And humans are still staring dreamily at the sky, creating new constellations with food waste-based phone apps. This brave new garden is strange and full of unearthly consolation attempts.
03.03.2021 / 18.00-22.00
Media partners: ArtTube, curate.moscow, Cultobzor
Studio of the Foundation of Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin
Duration: 4.03 – 12.03.2021