Moscow Department of Culture
The Manege Museum and Exhibition Complex
The Museum of screen culture Manege/MediaArtLab
«Triumph» Gallery
EXHIBITION "PASTORALE" ROMAN MOKROV
WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF "GREAT EXPECTATIONS" EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
Opening date: December 3
Exhibition dates: December 3, 2013 — January 12, 2014
Location: Central Exhibition Hall Manege, Media Library of the Museum of Screen Culture Manege/MediaArtLab, 1, Manezhnaya square
Curated by Alisa Taezhnaya
About Great Expectations exhibition programme
Great Expectations is a new exhibition programme in the Museum of Screen Culture Manege/MediaArtLab with the participation of the Triumph gallery. The project is a progressive platform for visual experiments and media innovations for young Russian artists. They have their own voice and a recognizable approach but continue to search permanently for the new means of expression. They have participated in many exhibitions, but are ready to try new methods of communicating with the audience, experimenting in spaces, taking risks and exploring border areas of visual arts and multimedia.
Great Expectations exhibition programme presents a series of personal exhibitions in the Media Library in the Museum of Screen Culture Manege/MediaArtLab. Each exhibition of the series will last approximately one month, when the artist uses his recognizable style in new exhibition area and presents his new work to the public — these video and media installations that have never been seen before. Each exhibition of the Great Expectations series is a unique statement of an artist and his curator, a special screening of lively new pieces of work. This exhibition in the artist's biography marks the transformation from a young promising author to a serious professional. It opens new perspectives in personal research and self-identification in the art system. And of course Great Expectations is a great possibility for a young artist to open a personal exhibition for a large audience in one of the main exhibition halls of Moscow, and still enjoy freedom in his experiments. The following artists who will present their work in the framework of Great Expectations in Museum of Screen Culture Manege/MediaArtLab are Evgeny Granilschikov and Dina Karaman.
Roman Mokrov “Pastorale”
Russian artist Roman Mokrov in his video work of the last few years explores the mythology of the post Soviet space where the imaginative and the desired conflicts with a disappointing literalism of reality. His multimedia pastorales always look as if found round the corner — in everyday landscapes, that are looked at with a tired eye and perceived as banality or underdeveloped public spaces, abandoned recreational zones or monuments of the glorious past, stuck in an uncertain present.
Overgrown ponds, concrete fences, sandy beaches and slimy swamps in Moscow suburbs are not only the natural environment where the artist grew up and has lived his whole life, but it is also a metaphor for a wild reserve of contemporary Russia, whose inhabitants lost faith in the miraculous long ago. Roman Mokrov, on the contrary, creates fantastic worlds on the basis of everyday imagery at the intersection of the collective unconscious, folk domestic culture, national habits and media images. In the works that are united in the Pastorale series the artist uses industrial cinematic special effects or invites characters to complete silent natural landscapes and animate empty spaces where a viewer’s eye usually doesn't find anything special.
The concept of the exposition is based on the artistic methods of Roman Mokrov. He invents a tangible virtuality on the base of brazen simulations, ironic video editing and reproducing habitual patterns of popular leisure. In Roman Mokrov’s video works synthetics and organics are always bound but hold a contradiction: like the sofa from a living room or an air mattress, his videos only graphically imitate reality using various tricks and still remaining an optical idyll. All video works of the Pastorale series are unified by the theme of water whether it is a touching pulling against the water flow on a tourist mattress, meditative Zen sitting in a street puddle, observing an overgrown pond from a sofa or a dramatic submarine emersion in the middle of a quiet pool. Pastorale is not only an artistic work with natural environment in tense dynamics and familiar stasis, but also a special method of dissecting reality in parallel to the casual state of things. Mokrov’s video sketches are an apt statement about nature and state of mind, about searching for a tourist inside a bored settled aborigine, but first of all it's about moving opposite of the context and recognizing meaningful and interesting details when others are looking away.
About Roman Mokrov
Roman Mokrov is an artist and a photographer. He was born in 1986 in Elektrougli near Moscow.
He graduated from the Moscow State Regional University, 2010 (Master of Psychology), studied in Free Workshops School for Contemporary Art at MMOMA and Institute for Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2011. Since 2013 he has sutied in The Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia.
In 2012 he was nominated for Innovation Contest of contemporary art with his work Endless Story and received Special prize, as well as Special mention by the jury of the international video art festival Now&After’12. He was nominated for Kandinsky Prize in “Young Artist Project of the Year” in 2012 and Kuryokhin Prize in 2013 in category “Best Media Object”. His personal exhibitions include "Non-Moscow" 2012 in Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, "Destiny of a Man" 2012 in Triumph Gallery, "Protective Screens" in 2013 in Nina Due Gallery, Milan. He also took part in a few group exhibitions in the National Centre for Contemporary Art, the Central House of Artists, the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, the Central Exhibitional Hall Manege and the State Tretyakov Gallery.
He lives and works in Moscow and Elektrougli.
Additional information:
Alisa Taezhnaya, [email protected]
ACCREDITATION:
+7 (495) 645 92 76, [email protected]
Olga Druzhinina, [email protected]
Maria Gorelova, [email protected]
Daria Pastuhava, [email protected]
