The rhetoric of modernization has definitely turned into a dominant language of our political and cultural elite.
It assumes that obtaining an arsenal of we powerful instruments as well as manuals on how to use them we would be able to part with our current backwardness. In this view, the distance between wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness, the past and the future can be easily overcome with the help of new technologies.
Art, in this framework, is given the role of an essential element of “inclusion,” an innovation that needs to be owned to get access to the future. Such a pragmatic appropriation of art must be problematized.
The participants of the exhibition “On/Off” will try to do this each in their own way – from questioning the connection between technological growth and historical change (works of Ivan Brazhkin, Ilya Budraitskis) to doubting the universal application of technology itself (Alexandra Galkina, Sveta Shuvaeva).
But the main unresolved question remains to be dealt with by the visitors – who is the one pressing the button that activates the technologies of modern domination?
Ilya Budraitskis
Сайт: www.onoffproject.ru