June 22nd, CYLAND MediaArtLab Video Archive presents a video program as part of the Kultorial sestival at the Sevkabel space in St. Petersburg. The video program presents works by Russian artists from the CYLAND Archive. In their works, video artists turn to various forms: from gif-art to public art and social-related problems. They use graphic design, archival photos and their body, documenting performances in the video medium. The videos selected for the problem have no audio in them.
Still from Sonic Sculpture, video by Maksim Svischev
Participating artists: Victoriya Ilyushkina, Alexander Borisov, Ivan Tuzov, Alena Tereshko, Denis Patrakeev and Maksim Svischev.
August 30th and 31st, Luch (Луч) A/V festival is held in Ekaterinburg, Russia. Supported by CYLAND MediaArtLab, the festival connects audience with aspiring artists and established professionals in a space for experimentation and works created with light, sound and digital technology.
The festival was created to comprehend the new digital aesthetics and its understanding by general public, and to help artists working with new tools and meanings generated by the digital environment. It aims to develop new media scene in Yekaterinburg and, more broadly, Russia, an art and music scene be on par with the international community involved in A/V art.
August 31st, on the festival’s second day, Victoriya Ilyushkina will speak of CYLAND’s activities and present a selection of video works from the Video Archive, maintained by CYLAND since 2008. Video works selected for the Digital Perspective program explore our relationship to the present, future and very recent past.
Artists of the Digital Perspective video program: Alexander Antipin, Boris Kazakov, Masha Godovannaya, Anton Khlabov, Dmitriy Lurie, Vika Ilyushkina and Maya Popova, Alena Tereshko, Maksim Svischev, Francesca Fini.
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Along witФото: Любовь Кабалинова/Президентский центр Б.Н. Ельцинаsin Center.
The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center is a new Russian noncommercial organisation, directed at promoting the development of the Institute of Presidency in Russia. The sociocultural Presidential Center includes a museum, exhibition and discussion center, a branch of the Boris Yeltsin’s Presidential library and Center for information and education activities and expertise.
September 28th and 29th, CYLAND Video Archive will present several video programs from its collection as part of the EPICENTROOM festival in St. Petersburg. Dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary Pushkinskaya-10 Art Centre, EPICENTROOM transforms the territory of the art center into a single audio-visual space, a platform for total audio-video performance with a large-scale concert program.
During the festival, works from the CYLAND Video Archive can be viewed at the gallery of non-conformist art and as installations in the space hall of Pushkinskaya-10.
Artists presented in the video programs: Anna Ermolaeva, Masha Sha, Egor Kraft, Veronika Rudieva-Ryazantseva, Alexandra Dementieva, Denis Patrakeev, Ivan Sotnikov, Irina Vasilieva, Alena Tereshko, Francesca Fini, Dmitry Lurie, Boris Kazakov, Tanya Akhmetgalieva, AUJIK, Kseniya Galkina, Anton Khlabov, Yuliya Zastava, Sandrine Daumier, Ivan Tuzov, Viktoriya Ilyushkina, Alex Antipin, Ludmila Belova, Marina Alekseeva.
New media, sound art, video art and a new format concerts of contemporary music become the basic elements of an EPICENTROOM international audio-visual festival. The festival takes place in the Pushkinskaya-10 art center in Saint-Petersburg on 28th-29th of September. More than fifty artists and musicians from Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Peru, Russia, Switzerland, Sweden and other countries are to participate in the festival.
The Festival is organized by Pushkinskaya-10 Art Centre with the support of Culture Committee of Saint Petersburg.
We would like to thank every artist for their submission to CYFEST-12’s VR projects program! CYFEST-12 team is glad to announce and congratulate artists whose works will be shown at the festival’s exhibitions:
Marina Blinova
Sandrine Deumier
Aizek (a. k. a. Misha Anoshenko) and Alg
Martin Reinhart & Virgil Widrich
Malitzin Cortes
Polina Zinziver
Marc Lee
Angelina Voskopoulou
Quentin Lengele
Nikita Shokhov & Anna Evtiugina
Sandrine Deumier (France), Falling
More than 60 artists from 12 countries will participate at CYFEST 12. Those include world-renowned Italian experimental collective MASBEDO; the Lumen Prize recipient, pioneer in the field of generative art Mario Klingemann; independent artist and cinema researcher from Switzerland Max Philipp Schmid; multidisciplinary architect-designer Eduard Khaiman; House of Electronic Arts Basel curator Boris Magrini; Japanese artist, prestigious Prix Ars Electronica winner Nelo Akamatsu; American composer and pioneer in the use of neurofeedback and compositional algorithms in arts David Rosenboom; composer, the Golden Mask Prize laureate Vladimir Rannev, among many others.
Saint Petersburg CYFEST will engage seven largest city’s art spaces, including Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Annenkirche (Lutheran Church of Saint Ann), the State Hermitage Youth Educational Center, the Time Travel Centre COD, Marina Gisich Gallery, a newly opened Luda Gallery, and Changing Room Gallery (Xassa-Nivet- Carzon Project).
Anton Vidokle / This is Cosmos, 2014 Anton Ginzburg / Constructivist Drift, 2016 Olga Tobreluts / The Manifest of Neoakademism, 1998 Polina Kanis / Formal Portrait, 2014 Sid Iandovka, Anya Tsyrlina / Horizōn, 2019 Almagul Menlibayeva / Butterflies of Aisha Bibi, 2010 Alexandra Lerman / Tree Time, 2019
Between myth and reality
At the turning-point of eras, new philosophical and aesthetic narratives are born. Their adepts and heralds are artists and scholars who are sensitive to the fabric of time and create myths. There is a rich tradition of myth-making in Russian art in the post-Soviet space: Moscow conceptualism, pirate television, neoacademism, necrorealism, medical hermeneutics. Today, Russian and American artists appeal to the study and mythologization of global layers of civilization: to the classical heritage, the ancient epic, the avant-garde, ideas of Russian cosmism and urbanism, ideology, gender and mass-media. This program gives a cross-section of significant works connected with the philosophy of Russian cosmism of Anton Vidokle and the mythology of neoacademism of the pioneer of media art Olga Tobreluts, to computer experiments and new artistic practices of perception through non-anthropocentric awareness.
This video program presents the cult film for Petersburg culture, “The Manifest of Neoakademism” (1998) inspired by the founder of the movement Timur Novikov. The author of the film is Olga Tobreluts (Russia), a pioneer of media art in Russia. The work of Anton Vidokle (USA) studies the roots of the phenomenon of Russian cosmism. Anton Ginzburg (USA) projects masterpieces of constructivism and urbanistic theses from the 1953 treatise by Ivan Shcheglov. Almagul Menlibaeva (Kazakhstan) turns to the national epic and through it conveys the gender ideas of our times. Alexandra Lerman (USA) models perception of nature through the consciousness of trees. Polina Kanis (Russia) reveals the frustration of ideological rituals through performance.
Anton Vidokle, still from Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism (2014-2017). HD video, color, sound. 96’. Russian with English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist.
Anton Vidokle
This is Cosmos, part 1 of a film trilogy on Russian cosmism, “Immortality for All”, 2014
28:10, HD Video
Today the Russian philosophy known as Cosmism has been largely forgotten. Its utopian tenets – combining Western Enlightenment with Eastern philosophy, and Russian Orthodox traditions with Marxism – inspired many key Soviet thinkers before they fell victim to Stalinist repression. In this three-part film project, artist Anton Vidokle probes how Cosmism influenced the 20th century and suggests its relevance to the present day.
Shot in Siberia and Kazakhstan, as well as the Moscow and Arkhangelsk regions, the first film in the trilogy on Russian Cosmism comprises a collage of ideas from the movement’s diverse figures, including founding philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. Fedorov, along with other thinkers, believed that death was a mistake — a flaw in the overall design of the human being, “because the energy of cosmos is indestructible, because true religion is a cult of ancestors, because true social equality is immortality for all.” For the Russian cosmists, the definition of cosmos was not limited to outer space: rather, they set out to create “cosmos,” or harmonious and eternal life, on Earth. The ultimate goal, as illuminated in the short film, was “to construct a new reality, free of hunger, disease, violence, death, need, inequality — like communism.”
Anton Vidokle is an artist and the editor of e-flux journal. He was born in Moscow and lives in New York and Berlin. Vidokle’s work has been exhibited internationally at Documenta 13 and the 56th Venice Biennale. Vidokle’s films have been presented at Bergen Assembly, Shanghai Biennale, the 65th and 66th Berlinale International Film Festival, Forum Expanded, Gwangju Biennale, Center Pompidou, Tate Modern, Garage Museum, Istanbul Biennial, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Tensta Konsthall, Blaffer Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum, and others.
“Constructivist Drift” is based on a work by Ivan Shcheglov, “Formula for a New Urbanism”, 1953, a poetic manifesto published by Situationist International as a response to the advancement of Modernism, and its confrontation with the human dimension of the city. Video footage is projected onto a concrete wall. It superimposes passages from the “New Urbanism” text with contemporary video recordings of Soviet architectural environments. The natural change of light that occurs throughout the film’s duration acts as a structural device. As twilight changes into the night, the brutalist buildings in the background become silhouettes and eventually disappear into the black screen.
Anton Ginzburg is a New York-based artist, born in 1974 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, known for his films, sculptures, and paintings investigating historical narratives and poetic studies of place, and post-Soviet identity. He earned a BFA from Parsons, The New School and MFA from Bard College, New York. His work has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Canada, White Columns in New York, and the first and second Moscow Biennales. His films have been screened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR), Dallas Symphony Orchestra (Soluna), Les Rencontres Internationales in Paris, and New York Film Festival/ Projections among others. antonginzburg.com
In the late 1980s-early 1990s, a powerful aesthetic movement formed in the art world of Leningrad – neoacademism, involving experiments and introducing plastic images of classical sculpture and painting into the contemporary context, influencing all spheres of independent Petersburg art. In 1990, artists from the New Academy of Fine Arts made the first films in the neoacademism aesthetic. In 1994, Olga Tobreluts began working on computer video films. In 1998, she received the International prize for the film “The Manifest of Neoakademism” at a festival in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Olga Tobreluts
Acclaimed internationally as the pioneer of media art, has been one of the most crucial influences on the development of digital art in Russia. She was born in 1970 in Leningrad, Russia. She is active as a painter, photographer, sculptor and curator. After graduating in Computer Graphics from the Institute ART + COM in Berlin, Germany, she immersed herself completely in computer graphics, photography and 3D modeling. Then she took an active part in Neo-Academism as an artist and professor in the Department of New Technologies in the New Academy of Fine Arts from the moment of its foundation by Timur Novikov (1958—2002) in 1989. Her works are held in the following collections: The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg; MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New-York; the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; the Museum of New Academy of Fine Arts, Saint Petersburg; the New Museum, Saint Petersburg; “Ekaterina” Fund, Moscow. Olga lives and works in Saint Petersburg.
Polina Kanis
FORMAL PORTRAIT, 2014
08:31, HD Video
The idea of the project is to reexamine the culture of parades and mass processions as one of the most powerful ideological instruments. The ritual of raising a flag seems an attempt to demonstrate victorious strength in a dramatized, directed eternity, but it merely reveals the impotency of the action in place. The flag is raised in an enclosed, publicly unseen territory. Its ceremonial raising becomes a metaphor for a victory that will never come.
Polina Kanis was born in 1985 in Leningrad, where she studied at the Herzen State Pedagogical University before continuing her studies in Moscow at the Rodchenko Art School of Photography and Multimedia. In 2011, she was a Kandinsky Prize winner in the “Young Artist” category, and in 2016 she won the Sergey Kuryokhin Award for Contemporary Art in the “Best Media Object” category. Kanis has also won and been short-listed for various prizes in the Innovation awards for contemporary art. Solo exhibitions of Kanis’ art have been held at the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2016), Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg (2014) etc. She lives and works in Moscow.
Sid Iandovka, Anya Tsyrlina
Horizōn, 2019
07:35, HD video
“An unremarkable random 70s newsreel from the artists’ hometown in Soviet Siberia forms the substrate for a relentless exploration of the representational and narratological techniques: without ever collapsing into a “story” or abstraction, “Horizōn” recants the relationship between analog and digital, surface and reference, sense and experience, past and present” (Thomas Zummer).
Sid Iandovka, Anya Tsyrlina
Siberia-born visual artists with a background in electronic music and new media, whose current collaborative projects combine the structural and material concerns of experimental cinema with documentary and archival practices. Their moving image work has been screened at film festivals and venues, including International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands), Viennale (Austria), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (UK), European Media Art Festival (Germany), VIDEOEX (Switzerland), Bildrausch (Switzerland), Moscow International Experimental Film Festival (Russia), and others. Sid Iandovka lives and works in New York, USA. Anya Tsyrlina lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.
“This is an ancient love story of the Sufi poet’s daughter Aisha Bibi and Karakhan, the Central Asian version of Romeo and Juliet, visually transformed into a modern-day drama of unfulfilled longing, unconditional love and its underlying gender discourse, addressing a never-ceasing problematic synergy/symbiosis deeply rooted in the civilizations born between the elements of earth and sky” (Priska C. Juschka). Menlibayeva works thematically with the history and present- day reality of the new post-Soviet Kazakhstan and the fate of its indigenous people through the lens of the human condition and with a focus on spirituality, gender and ecology.
Almagul Menlibayeva
Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Video artist and photographer. She holds an MFA from the Art & Theatre University of Almaty, Kazakhstan. She has gained international recognition by participating in the 15th and 18th Sydney Biennale (Australia); the 51st, 52nd, and 53rd Venice Biennale (Italy); the 10th Sharjah Biennial (UAE); the 4th Moscow Biennale (Russia); the Arsenale 2012 (Ukraine), and the Mediterranean Biennale of Contemporary Art (Israel). Lives and works in Kazakhstan and Berlin, Germany. almagulmenlibayeva.com
Alexandra Lerman
Tree Time, 2019
03:08, Video 4K
Tree Time imagines a relationship between nature and technology unmediated by human presence. Shot by a drone in the Amazon rainforest the film depicts a point of view as disembodied as the AI-generated voices discussing a series of images of annual tree rings. These natural data-inscriptions record man-made ecological distress into the body of the tree just as humanity uploads the information it deems important for posterity into the cloud.
Alexandra Lerman
Born in 1980 in Leningrad, Russia. Artist. She holds a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art (New York, USA) and an MFA from Columbia University (New York, USA). In her “projects-investigations” Lerman researches how human beings are affected by systems and ideologies that control the post-industrial world of immaterial labor and the human’s influence on the planet’s ecology. Her projects have been shown at Artists Space (New York, USA), Queens Museum (New York, USA), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA), Signal Center (Malmö, Sweden), Manege Exhibition Hall (St. Petersburg, Russia) and “Contemporary Art in the Traditional Museum” festival by ProArte Foundation (St. Petersburg, Russia). Lives and works in New York, USA. alexandralerman.com
From 12 to 15 March in Clermont-Ferrand, France, the festival of video art and digital culture VIDEOFORMES will take place. The festival was founded in 1984 and is a major international platform for contemporary digital and video art.
On March 13, an exchange of ideas for professionals in the field of digital technology and art Digital Acts will take place. The professional meeting day – Digital Acts – will focus on presentations of curators, artists, researchers, interspersed with short panel discussions on a digital theme. Free access and open to all, this day concerns all the digital and art professionals : artists, curators, producers, broadcasters, teachers, students… with a special highlight to «La Scam Invite» on «Virtual Realities».
We are pleased to announce that Victoria Ilyushkina, curator of CYLAND Media Art Lab, has joined the VIDEOFORMES jury. On March 13, Victoria will take part in a session of professional exchanges, will hold a presentation of the St. Petersburg festival “Videoforma” (Kuryokhin Art Centre), and will also organize screening of video works from the CYLAND VIDEO ARCHIVE collection.
CYLAND VIDEO ARCHIVE artists participating in the screening: Inal Savchenkov and Franz Rodwalt, Anton Khlabov, YOmoYO, Victoria Ilyushkina and Maya Popova, Alena Tereshko, Tanya Akhmetgalieva, Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai, Yulia Zastava, Marina Alexeeva.
Marina Blinova – Who is the Player? (05:44, 2018, Russia)
AS PART OF THE CYFEST-13 International Media Art Festival (February-April 2021, St. Petersburg, Russia). Festival theme: Cosmos and Chaos.
Call open: April 12, 2020
Deadline for submission of proposals: May 20, 2020
Winners will be announced on June, 15
Curator: Victoria Ilyushkina, CYFEST Video Program & CYLAND Video Archive Curator
Information
Today, fundamental changes are taking place on our planet, and our entire lifestyle is being re-examined. We’re seeing other forms of life existing in what feels like a parallel universe – which we used not pay such close attention to – now invade our lives. Such inalienable rights as freedom of movement, meeting friends, socializing, and saying our last farewells have suddenly become impossible. The pandemic caught us unaware. Like in Noah’s Ark, we are locked up with our families and pets, or on our own as we move towards a new technogenic life. Virtual reality has suddenly crept into our lives and is asserting its rights. Social networks are becoming the only form of contact with the outside world, with friends and family. If personal QR-codes contain all the information about a person, including biological data, then where will the boundary of state interference in our private lives be? Perhaps, this crucible of changes will change society and our everyday reality drastically, help us to shed the unnecessary and superficial things in life, and to gain a better understanding of ourselves and the people around us.
Naturally, the artist of today makes sense of our present situation, and creatively transforms a vision of the future in the time-honored paradigm of chaos-cosmos.
Prize Fund
Taking into account the realities of this complex situation for creative workers, we are announcing a competition with a prize fund. First prize — $1,000, second and third prizes — $500.
Applications should be submitted to competition@archive.cyland.org. In the subject line of the email, please use the following format, where the first word is your family name: jones_competition_2020
You can send up to 3 art works to the competition. The art work should be at least 1 minute long, but not more than 30-40 minutes. Creation date should not be earlier than 2018.
Application form should contain:
— link to 2 screenshots, 2 frames from the film;
— general information (name, author, length, year);
— project description (up to 150 words);
— artist’s biography (up to 100 words).
The work should be uploaded to any viewing resource (Vimeo, YouTube, artist’s website etc.)
We are interested in new digital art of all kinds, no matter what screen it is displayed on – a game device, computer, telephone, film etc. Important key words: web-based art, generative art, GIF, augmented reality, VR, AI, 3D modeling, neural network art.
Selected art works will take part in CYFEST-13 International Media Art Festival.
CYLAND Video Archive is pleased to announce that two early short films by Evgeny Yufit «Spring» (1987) and «The Woodcutter» (1985) have been added to the collection.
Evgeny Yufit is a cult figure in the underground art movement of Leningrad/St. Petersburg. He’s considered to be the key filmmaker of the Parallel Cinema School, is the founder of the independent film studio Mzhalalafilm, is one of the first Russian independent directors, and is highly regarded in the classics of world cinema. He is the director of five 35-mm feature films, including Knights of Heaven (1989), Papa, Father Frost Is Dead (1991), Silver Heads (1997), Killed by Lightning (2002), and Bipedalism (2005).
Evgeny Yufit pioneered necrorealism, a radical artistic movement in Russian art, which turned into the theme of death through the prism of black humor, pivoting on aesthetics of punk and social grotesque.
«In Yufit’s films and photographs the living dead move across the frame. No, they haven’t risen from the grave because of an unspecified man-made disaster, as in the films of Yufit’s big fan George Romero. Yufit’s characters are neither living nor dead. They are excluded from the social order, forced to roam the outskirts of big cities. They cannot die because they cannot live. They wander on the remains of universal ideology, a new order that enslaves man no less than the totalitarian regimes had.
Yufit is one of the most radical artists. His radicalism lies in his steadfast artistic and social stance. Death and human psychopathology are the unshakeable foundations of his ontological-aesthetic program.»
— Olesya Turkina, Viktor Mazin
Evgeny Yufit’s personal exhibition is currently on view at Marina Gisich Gallery. The project is curated by Olesya Turkina, a friend and researcher of the artist’s work, who curated a large-scale retrospective of necrorealism at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMoMA) in 2011.
Watch an online tour on Marina Gisich Gallery Instagram.
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The films were published with the permission of the artist’s family.
CYLAND MediaArtLab would like to thank Timofei Yufit and Masha Godovannaya
