Depository of Dreams
Olga Chernysheva » Oleg Kulik » & others
Exhibition: 30 Nov – 20 Dec 2006
White Space Gallery in St Peter's
Vere Street (off Oxford Street)
W1G ODQ London
White Space Gallery
London
+44-(0)7949100956
info@whitespacegallery.co.uk
www.whitespacegallery.co.uk
Tue-Sat by appt.
'Depository of Dreams' brings together the work of eight internationally renowned Russian contemporary artists who explore a panoply of collective and private dreams and visions, conditioned and informed by the Soviet ideological utopia. The exhibition takes the form of an installation, where the viewer can access drawings, prints, photographs, paintings and albums by browsing through the storage system of a semi-abandoned depository. The artists in the exhibition represent the major independent art movements in post-World War II and post-Soviet Russia. On show are 1970's 'Moscow Conceptualists' (Ilya Kabakov, Ivan Chuikov, Dmitri Prigov), 'Sots Art' (Vitaly Komar), 1980's 'Paper Architecture' (Alexander Brodsky and Yuri Avvakumov), as well as more recent works by notorious performance artist Oleg Kulik, and well-known social documentary artist Olga Chernysheva. The depository will reveal iconic pieces by Moscow conceptual artists such as Ilya Kabakov's album Mathematical Gorsky, 1974, from the series Ten Characters, Ivan Chuikov's Window painting, and Dmitri Prigov's series of drawings Phantom Installations. Yuri Avvakumov, one of the founders of the 'Paper Architecture' movement presents a series of prints designed as ironic reminiscence of Tatlin's constructivist Monument to the Third International, developing like a scaffolding around the skeleton of Mukhina's Monument to Worker and Farmer, the popular icon of Socialist Realism. United around essential characteristic of Russian culture as a culture of hidden meanings, the artists in the exhibition all converge on the idea of the archive as a way to make tangible the true essence of their history. In essence Depository of Dreams is such archive.