4th, What
is an exhibition?
Contributors Alina Belishkina Kseniya Butuzova Giada Dalla Bontà Alexander Ivanov Adel Kim, Seoul Anastasia Kolesnikova Alexandra Khazina Maria Kramar Anton Lapov Joana Monbaron Paul O’Neill Mercè Santos Mir Mateusz Adam Sapija Victoria Sarangova Sona Stepanyan Laura Tammen Alisa Taezhnaya Olga Vad Marina Vinnik Alexander Zhuravlev Tatiana Zaidal Dobrynia Ivanov and Svitlana Libet
The Inescapable (dis) pleasure(s)
of Escape
It’s not me, it’s you. Sorry, I meant to say, it’s not you, it’s me – or is that the way it goes? I can never recall correctly. It’s one of my memory blocks; a default setting that always seems to get in the way. Was it you facing me, or me facing you when we stood there opposite each other, and one of us said something like that? Which one of us was looking for a way out? Neither of us would admit to looking for the door. Where did we come in? How could we get out (preferably separately, without each other’s knowing)? There was no way around, backward, forward, left or right. All directions – even up and down – seemed impossible to decipher. We knew we could not escape from each other, from where we were. Somehow, it was too late before we realized that it was each other – us, you and me – getting in each other’s way. Looking back I think it was something to do with desire, with wanting to visualize us differently. Escape, as a concept, may be defined as an act of release – from something, somewhere, someone – accompanied by the wish to be transformed. Escape is a word that makes us grateful, makes it possible for us to imagine an alternative. Linked to a sense of failure and disappointment with the world, it meets our need to at least imagine ourselves differently, elsewhere.1 The phenomenon of escape is bound up in our earliest experiences of play – hide-and-seek, blind man’s buff, kiss chase – in which there is an innate tension between the desire to be caught and to get away. Since the game fails if the hider disappears or the seeker gives up, the skill, when hiding, is not to avoid detection altogether, but to make it interesting to be found. There is a psychology of tentative
escapology, the practice of avoidance being the condition of preparation, a waiting to be eventually revealed. Everyone, reassuringly, is found in the end; no one, in fact, escapes.2 There is an imported remoteness in play – it concerns that which is not here. Consider the ontology of play and how it relates to life – ‘the pleasant game of life [which] ceases to be just a game’.3 It is not that real suffering, or real pain, threatens life in a displeasing or unpleasant way. Rather, the grounding of suffering consists of the impossibility of interrupting life – of escaping it – and its acute feeling of being held fast, of being unable. This grounding reminds us of the impossibility of getting out of the life-as-reality game and of giving back to things their toy-like usefulness – a usefulness bound to and heralding from the moment when infancy comes to an end, and that begins to define the very notion of seriousness as part of growing up. What counts in this experience of being is the inescapability of life itself – of growing up, with all its constraints, conventions and realities. The need to escape, then, is our recognition of this inevitability, where flight from our becoming is a search for refuge. A spatial as much as a temporal metaphor, escape is not merely a matter of getting out of life, but also of going somewhere. Yet the need to escape is found to be identical at every juncture to which its adventure leads it. The path it travels cannot lessen its dissatisfaction with the realisation of this adventure, which keeps trying to lead us away, on toward something else. Therefore, with our need to escape, being itself appears not only as an obstacle that free thinking has to sur-
mount, but as an imprisonment from which one must get out as, according to Levinas, it is existence which is an absolute that asserts itself without reference to anything else.4 Escaping is when the ‘I’ of existence wants to get out of itself, but does not flee itself as a limited being. Putting peace with self-as-a-general-entity into question, the ‘I’ seeks to escape itself not in opposition to the infinity of what it is not or what it will not become, but rather due to the very fact that it is, that it becomes. At the very inner structure of our being as forms of self-positing, escape is a reminder that the event of individual life masks the inevitability of all life as something that comes to an end. It is being itself from which escape flees. Escape can be a stepping outside of time limitation – of life-time – but it is always deceptive. Like all immediate pleasure(s) it folds in on itself. Inevitably, we fail to escape from ourselves. We can become abstracted, get off our heads but not out of our heads, get out of the game but not out of our selves. We can escape in an act of release or liberation from something, somewhere or someone. We can escape, for a moment, from this place and time. In the end, though, escape is always a space of coming back, coming down. No matter how immersive the experience of getting lost – no matter how high, how removed from the here and now – the act of escape always returns us to the pre-immersive space, back where we were but with a ringing in our ears. It is only afterwards that we remember: it wasn’t you, it was me after all.
1 Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box: On the Arts of Escape (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 157. 2 See Mark Hutchinson’s essay, ‘An Art of Escape’, accessed at http://www. markhutchinson.org/ writing/writing%20art%20 of%20escape.html and Phillips, op cit. 3 Immanuel Levinas, On Escape, (Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 52.
Paul O’Neill, 2015
4
Ibid. P. 55.
The Last Biennale in The World
#4thMoscowCuratorialSummerSchool #iwascleaningupthefloor #itisallaboutcollaboration #thuglife #zine #numberone #whatisanexhibition #worktogether #обожаю #whatisthevoid #teambuilding #тусовка #involvement #fuckyoupaul #groups #team #JorgeLuisBorges #why #deadline #content #paulsaidwecantearpagesout #productionimperative #genericset #emptyset #safetyspace #limitation #void #socialengagement #preconditionedcontentproduction
Curated by Ksenia Butuzova Alexandra Khazina Sona Stepanyan Alisa Taezhnaya Olga Vad
In the beginning of the exhibition there is a lot of poetry. Then it is shrinking. By compromise and communication, by bureaucracy and documentation, by media and production, by self-censorship and concentration. There are always too much words and they are never enough. We experience over-thinking. Exhibition turns to a pile of papers, to thousands of rejected ideas it’s not clear if they are brillliant or mediocre. The last biennale in the world will spread this ideas without hierarchy. Rejects are welcome, they need space to exist, they need to replace objects we are loving instead of ideas. Teamwork of chaos instead of teamwork of order. No results. Survivng the banality, feeling the ups and downs of it and leaving it all behind. Remembering the unimportant and failing to end what is started. Let it be. Let all the bad jokes be pronounced, let all the stupid things to be shown. No one cares. Losing it and getting it back. No sweat, no pain, take it easy.
* I am a communist. They will have been. Intense tense. Discourseivity-ivity. I will be melting but I want to stay. I hope they can let me stay. I stayed. Everyone who entered felt me. Living before and after me whatever I am writing here. Hinting integrity and honesty. Taking this integrity for granted. He was looking the people going in and out, the light fading and he was feeling too tough, too obvious, too grey, too old. You study physics well or did you spend the time reading Umberto Eco as I did? My presence was unnoticeable though I was fulfilling everybody’s bodies.
IROULETTE What do you really need to do before the end? Do you know? If you want a cheesburger, a coke or a can of soup – like these last meals they have for people with death sentences – it is easy to have in a corner shop. But what about another type of consumption? iROULETTE is your own guide to your last exhibition. It looks like glasses but there’s so much more to it. iROULETTE is a algorythm of codes that can basically read your mind and your soul based on quick DNA-analysis and a snapshot of your retina (to crack into your psychology and personality) that happens immediately after you put the glasses on. Everything counts : how tired you are, how happy you are, temperature of your coffee this morning, the sanwich you ate yesterday, the words your friend told you a week ago when you had an argument, a book you read 10 years ago, the la-la-la song that is stuck in your head... Based on the received data the code builds a virtual world where you enter the exhibition you really need. Yes, it is your opportunity to find yourself at Le Salon des indépendant. Or at the permanent exhibition in the Tretyakov gallery. Or in this gallery in the middle of this Bulgarian city you’re already been to but forgot… Or maybe at one of these hippie exhibition of amateur photos hung on the trees in the forest… Or maybe what you need is just a good exhibition of dogs… or plants… or furry coats… or gardening instruments? Or an exhibition of a military technique… let’s say… in Venezuela? Or one of these when you just eat altogether with other spectators and you are yourself a work of art, a performance? Or the one where there’s only talking about art, and the discoursivity, and what you are feeling? Anyways, no one knows and everything depends on you and your condition. You should also be aware that what you really need is not always what you really want, think about it before putting iROULETTE. But don’t do too much thinking too.
DO YOU CARE?
iROULETTE can be experienced only individually but it is a sharable practice. By speaking about your last exhibition and your impressions you are «contaminating » the person you speak with and s/he can then find him/herself in the same place you were. But this is a game of chance and the contamination is not always full. There were cases when one person was trying to share the experience of the Velasquez retrospective in Paris but lead his friend to an underground show of fake holland paintings. The other couple tried to find Andrey Roublev’s icons and found themselves in an exhibition on the world of Marvel. The cases of Pollock exhibitions that lead to exhibitions of aboriginal art are a classic. The iROULETTE code was written by #b0b71 - hacker who – as some sources tells – was a wikileaks contributor before turning his interest to the discoursive practices. The tricky part of i-ROULETTE is that in case of technical problems only some elementary parts can be fixed by the programmers because the core path is classiffied. As #b0b71 do not answer my emails anymore and therefore can be considered as virtually (and maybe organically) dead no one can know if iROULETTEactually works right and if the destination is really the place where the spectator needs to be… But does it matter?
It was an exhibition in a kindergarten: a lot of crafted small things made of plasticine and autumn leaves made by 5- year olds.
Lyoka: Rene Magritte’ s exhibition. It is like the glasses are on you but actually you are in it.

“Harry Potter exhibition in Paris...”
Kirill: “Exhibition of ritter sport chocolates”
Konstantin Filonenko, writer and researcher: “Exhibition “Artists, odds and ends” — personal things and findings of great people...”
Anton: I always had a few words to say to Leonardo and Caravaggio and hopefully I met them and they guided me through their exhibitions
Olga: “It was “Polooshka” shop”
pavilion of insignificancy
pavilion of insignificancy It seems to me as though I am somewhere in Russia, in the wilds, in a plain country house. The chamber is large, low-ceiled, with three windows; the walls are smeared with white paint; there is no furniture. In front of the house is a bare plain; gradually descending, it recedes into the distance; the grey, monotoned sky hangs over it like a canopy. I am not alone; half a score of men are with me in the room. All plain folk, plainly clad; they are pacing up and down in silence, as though by stealth. They avoid one another, and yet they are incessantly exchanging uneasy glances. Not one of them knows why he has got into this house, or who the men are with him. On all faces there is disquiet and melancholy ... all, in turn, approach the windows and gaze attentively about them, as though expecting something from without. (From Ivan Turgenev’s poem “The End of the World�)
#AFTERLAST #possible future #it’s here it’s now #seeing online #living online #exhibition – knowledge #art as information
Public The garden exposition Reality ends imitation when pavilion. you Works like final judgment.
feel your free will again.
Don’t come if you don’t wonna know.
Experience description After your death you wake up here & get into public garden. They say, all districts reflect each other, but I just gonna say, what I’ve seen. There is only that public garden from that moment and forever, but actually there are several other places (I’ll tell you). The public was made this way: imagine the childhood. Imagine the best the lightest day of May from your childhood. Imagine yourself running & running. And suddenly you run into public garden. This is small public garden & you go there everyday. This is tiny public garden, there are some flowers in the middle, there are some colorful but rather lonely swings, some empty benches made for moms and nanas with bassinets. You run into public garden every day. But in that moment —suddenly — oh, what a public garden! See, it’s May. It is May, it’s smells like May, there is nobody around & and all the greenery simultaneously is new born & mellow, so fleshy. And the light from the above come through it as if it’s someone’s unbearable presence. And the ground is wet but worm, and the swings are moving so soft by the wind or even not by the wind, by something that could happen only in May, only in your childhood, only at a run. And in this second you suddenly stop with all of your small body — and you feel hap-
piness lump in your throat. And you understand that you’ll never leave this public garden. Never, never, never. You are a child and in 5 minutes you will be heading towards the swings and everything will turn to an ordinary sunny day and the swings will vexatiously bite your butt. In 2 minutes you will be called from the playground and you will be running without thinking — because it’s May, you are running and you are a child. But in someway you never leave the public garden as long as you’re alive. It’s one of the greatest God mercies (that is usually called advance): as long as you are alive, you have this public garden somewhere inside. When you die and come to hell, you come to this public garden again. This time you are a grown up. The swings are slitty. The ground is humid. Windy. And when you die and go to heaven, you come to this yard as a 5-year-old. As then. Linor Goralik Oral folks art in district M1
This phenomenal writing is the last judgement about art, curating and non-curating. They covered it all. Fresh, brilliant, sharp and witty. Now we can chill in eternity with calmness in our hearts. —The Last Day on the Earth Times
Marina Vinnik so Maria Kramar oh no Marina Vinnik what the fuck, I’m sleepy too Maria Kramar I’m rolling a joint Marina Vinnik I look trough the letter, there is no place for our group. only two big groups. Maria Kramar Yes. I don’t give a shit. Maybe we should articulate this place as safety space for the reader, for the audience? Marina Vinnik and what about the void? Maria Kramar this is the void! However, it is important for spectator as well Maria Kramar it is kinda a sofa on the exhibition. Time to exhale. We are like house keepers. Marina Vinnik did you roll your joint? and where is Anton? Maria Kramar I don’t want to produce more content. I don’t want to produce any content to fulfil the empty space. What is really important for me here is the communication between the groups, relationship between people and pages here, its mediation and limitation itself. It’s not a rejection, it is not a punk pose, it is not not-engagement. It is the articulated statement.
Marina Vinnik Oh yeah, baby. Marina Vinnik Btw, I’m not against the producing the content. I just don’t want to make a statement neither on first or second topic we have in zine. It’s frightening me. What is also frighting me is the categorical imperative of production something. I produce loads of things every day and I want to feel self-confident. But this is unreal to feel yourself confident in such situation when other already decided loads of things. But some of people will be always excluded. There is a huge amount of excluded stuff. Maria Kramar I like this production imperative. What is more interesting here is not even capitalistic policy but social policy. What do we lose if we are not participating in that groups? They ate a huge amount of pizza today. And they will have a discussion of the project with drinks for sure at the night. What do we lose? Social engagement, connection with establishment, possible proposals, free drinks? Marina Vinnik Yes, you are definitely involved in social system if you are ready to collaborate. Maria Kramar Career….. Marina Vinnik We ware about the void and Anton is really not here. Maria Kramar He does’t give a fuck about our Facebook chat. It is not about collaboration. Anton Lapov Sorry, I slept occasionally all the time.
Anton Lapov The question we still have how would we articulate our statement? How do we realise and demonstrate our idea of the void? We probably can use a graphic image of ‘empty set’. Anton Lapov I have two suggestions. So the first one is about the concept of ‘empty set’, and particularly, about its interpretation in critical theory. We can write a text related to empty set considered not as a position of non-participation-boycottdeclining but related to critical analyse of preconditioned content production. Anton Lapov The second one is anti-discursive option - the link to the external audio file. I thought to work with audio record of workshop with Simon Sheikh. As I remember there were moment of ‘ominous silence’ when nobody wanted to talk any word. Those fixed silence during discussion curatorial theory and curatorial world is probably might be metaphoric reflection on empty set and simultaneously non-participating / non-production. Anton Lapov The link in this zine will lead to soundcloud for example, where is all the part of group silence. Anton Lapov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_set#/media/ File:Nullset.svg
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soundcloud.com/mscsrg/zine_1