Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation
Museum and exhibition complex Manege
Museum of screen culture Manege/MediaArtLab
Center for art and culture MediaArtLab
Moscow Biennale Art Foundation
Triumph gallery
5TH MOSCOW BIENNALE FILM PROGRAM AT MANEGE
from September 20 to October 20 2013
12:00 — 22:00
Curators: Catherine de Zegher, Alexandre Kauffman, Olga Shishko
Coordinators: Selena Volkonskaya, Olga Pogasova, Elena Rumyantseva
Place: CEH «Manege», Manegnaya Sq,1, 2nd Floor
More Light / Bolshe Sveta (For a Different Space-time) is the title of the 5th Moscow Biennale. It is an open-ended title, which allows for many interpretations. The diversity of interpretations is apparent in our international selection of films—interpretations of ‘more light’ ranging from the practical to the philosophical, from the material to the immaterial, from the physical to the spiritual.
While being a critical reflection on different structures of space-time—both in the context of capitalist economic overproduction and new technologies—Bolshe Sveta/More Light considers space-time as the energy generated between us, as light, as a creative force. It acknowledges the necessity of passionate commitment and illuminating creation for the development of new thinking. On a global and local scale, artists are investigating issues concerning the increasing lack of time (we have ‘no time’) and the corporate encroachment on space to create ‘non-places’. The 5th Moscow Biennale foregrounds artists whose work focuses on complex ways of giving, taking, and spending time, and questions normative alignments of space-time.
What is remarkable in most of the artists’ projects presented in Bolshe Sveta/More Light is the sense of energy as being accumulative and generative. These forms of energy are in every aspect of our life. As it travels in frequencies and waves, we experience the energy as light, as the heat of the sun, as we work and become tired, in our bodies, or in the intensity of our passions. Light itself is energy and we conceive it as relating to consciousness and being. Seeing is a matter of light and we speak of enlightenment as the opening of consciousness. Space and time imagined as dimensions of energy connect with our thinking of our own life force—an energy that is relational as well as relative.
Art is part of this dynamic and it too can be imagined and experienced as generative energy, an energy created between us in thinking together and in shared understanding, an energy that may counter the negativity, separations, and displacements in a society riven by the aspirations of other and more cruel purposes, of alienation and exploitation. Everything is shifting, responsive, not fixed. Slow space-time is an expansive space-time in which things can happen, can be attended to. It is in the intensity of this attention for each other and for the daily small that our understanding together takes place. When we speak of light in this context, we see it as luminous and we experience it as energy. This is the place of the imagination, and of creation in consciousness.
The films consider practices that are not at the cusp of the false and illusory present of commodity and convention, not at the height of time, but in a fluent, connective, and slow present—an art of a deep and radical present, art intentionally falling out of step with the fast-paced development and instantaneity required by today’s so-called ‘creative economy’. One of the objectives is to reflect on the issue of time that cuts across economy, society, and art, while at the same time tackling the issue of space that has resonance in cultural contexts and institutions across the globe.
Artists: Bani Abidi, Ali Hazara, Victor Alimpiev, Chronos Artgroup, Umida Akhmedova and Oleg Karpov, Vika Begalsaya, Richard Bell, Eva Weber, Dmitry Venkov, Aslan Gaisumov, Anton Ginzburg, Evgeny Granilshikov, Bakary Diallo, Liliane Giraudon and Akram Zaatari, Petr Zhukov, Jan Ijäs, Polina Kanis, Dina Karaman, Elena Kovylina, Elena Koptyaeva, Maha Maamoun, Israel Martinez, Taus Makhacheva, Almagul Menlibayeva, Roman Mokrov, Chico Pereira, Nada Prlja, PROVMYZA group, Filipa César, TSAI Ming-Liang, Assaf Shoshan, Amei Wallach, Yona Friedman and Jan Baptiste Decavele.
