Tania Nikulina / Friend of the Moon: The Feast

As if the main contradiction of the present didn’t lie in the very problems we are currently facing, from climate change to the revival of populism and misinterpretation. Perhaps the most serious pitfall of today is our inability to share these problems and fears, as well as values, visions and solutions.

There is a name for our involvement with the world, its building and suffering — it’s simply work. We don’t necessarily have to understand it as an occupation but as a process in which our activities and ideas are given sense and co-shape the world in which we live.

By extension, art is not just the production of exhibitions and artworks; it enters our shared imagination, enriching it with images, visions and criticism. At our exhibition for the Fait Gallery we are trying to open up this process, to invite the viewer closer, to the podium which dominates the gallery space and provides the installations with a joint framework and context.

The platform is modified for art, as well as for work and leisure in the form of a co-working space and two in-built lounges supplemented with chairs from Pavla Sceranková’s previous art projects. The podium-table thus assigns the meaning to the individual installations while at the same time it also invites the audience to enter the process, the cycle of work and leisure giving sense to both works of art and our world.

Pavla Sceranková shows the human situation ruled by the current work culture. In a series of plasticine figurines created by the pupils from an art school (the work is called Klára) she lets us observe the dissolving of shapes and the blending and merging of matter. The number of endangered species becomes a metaphor for the current environmental issues, as well
as for joint and applied work which is inevitably multiplied, affected by social expectations, and still can be shared and useful and mediate values, including aesthetic ones.

Milada, again named after a person devising the particular project and working on it, combines an elastic suit with performance. It invites you to a flexible, enchanting but subjugating part-time life which enfolds you like tight-fitting underwear. In contrast, Miloš, a figure rooted in the gallery podium, seeks a base and anchoring, perhaps even the return to reflections on nature and the corresponding rhythm, harmony and deceleration.

Our presence, be it social time or personal experience, seems to develop in loops intersecting the show, as demonstrated by the Ilja installation. It is not just a suspended loom, the return of working techniques to the space of a former factory, the picking up of the threads of work which was interrupted. It also manifests the cyclic nature of work as such, the circle of knitting and undoing, work and leisure, creation and destruction.

Dušan Zahoranský incorporates in his work the subject of communication. In a series of fake phone calls written on dummy cell phones (Mária), he comments on the overwhelming presence of (online) communication today, as well as on the isolated, private, almost absurd dimension of the possibility of instant communication.

The monumental ring (Libor) encircling the gallery ramp brings to the space office furniture and the issues of the stereotypization and commodification of work, or semiocapitalism. Our work environment and application are often subordinated to phenomena such as open space, home office, flexitime, as well as the necessity to be constantly available on email, mobile phone and social networks. In this way, capitalism does not only appropriate our time and work but also the creation of meaning and sense.

In addition, Zahoranský views critically the idea of a universal, non-specific or fully transparent language. In a series of coloured grids of digital characters, Mirek and Kateřina, he stages a combination of type, communication and digital culture, while in the central installation entitled Dušan he symbolically “stole” the letters “o” from his own email communication.

The artist works in similar fashion with the sharing of films on the popular server uloz.to (Artur series). He cut one minute from each film and uploaded the files again; not only to alter the films circulating among the server users, but also to work further with the “stolen” time. This time appears to represent the negative of work time and circulation, the possibility of hiding (as an artist) and working outside the affective loops of digital communication and the capitalist order.

Project was created with financial support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and
Statutory city of Brno.

Tania Nikulina / Friend of the Moon: The Feast

21.02.2018 - 05.05.2018

Fait Gallery PREVIEW

Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Vernissage: 21.2.2018 at 7 pm
Curator: Tereza Rudolf

The sewing machine needle goes up and down at a steady pace. The work finished is observed, with equal persistence, by a sliding camera of the Friend of the Moon video. The close look at fabrics and their structure is typical ofTania Nikulina’s work. The camera which she uses always seems to stare a bit too long, longer than it is pleasant for the viewer, as if it was trying to penetrate the surface of objects and things which it observes, or as if trying to grasp the relations of the people in the video that are far too human, and not only for a machine. The seams of objects inhabiting Tania Nikulina’s stories are created by the same hand as the editing of the final videos. Digital cuts of the individual takes are layered like the multiple materials used by the artist, be it plastic, felt, naturalia, foam or polystyrene.

A motif often present in Nikulina’s work is the longing for a touch. This involves the need to touch a soft fabric with one’s hand, as well as touching unusual structures only with one’s eyes, like performers (in a video or gallery) not only touching one another but also simultaneously present for the objects-costumes which they inhabit and which touch them. It might be slightly exaggerating to say that this trend is stronger with the artist as a sculptor than with others, as touch can be understood as one of the primary elements of communication, both direct and indirect.

Friend of the Moon video has been stripped (with the exception of the final section) of expressive rituality and theatricality characteristic of Nikulina’s previous efforts. In contrast, the video is unusually plain, striving to appear as a routine affair. Nonetheless, the behaviour of the characters (character) in the video differs from what we see as ordinary. Not so much in the sense of strange clothes and the manner of speech, but the Moon or its friend (or both) differ from the rest of the society and find it difficult to participate in its rhythm, time and manners. Based on Sasha Sokolov’s book A School for Fools, the artist asks what our surroundings mean to us: the surroundings which sometimes softly enwrap us and at other times choke us furiously. She asks: who am I, who are you, and who are they? In the end, we all meet at one feast at one time or at different times. Some are protected by their costumes, others are imprisoned in them.

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