Dreamachinery
(2024)
author(s): Ruthia Jenrbekova
connected to: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition presents individual outcomes of the collective PEEK project “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine: Post-Soviet Queerness, Archiving, and the Art of Resistance” (AR 567), which was implemented in 2020—2024 by four artists/researchers: Katharina Wiedlack, Masha Godovannaya, Iain Zabolotny and Ruthia Jenrbekova. The overall conceptual frame, based on the well-known artefact called “Dreamachine”, has been developed by this collective, however, the exposition at hand present a particular approach and outcomes by its author, a PhD-in-Practice candidate Ruthia Jenrbekova.
Our experimental art-research project was a study of queer lives in a number of post-soviet cities. One of the project’s ambition was developing and testing an experimental artistic methodology, which in my version is called “Dreamachinery”. Trying to connect it to a particular artistic tradition that I labeled as “Queer Light & Magic”, I present here a few outcomes of my personal interactions with the participants of a series of workshops that I conducted in the cities of Almaty, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Berlin and Vienna.
Fragments in Time
(2022)
author(s): Tobias Leibetseder, Thomas Grill, almut schilling, Till Bovermann
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The processual sculpture "Fragments" is in permanent development and consists of artefacts of the "Rottings Sounds" project of artistic research*. Waste, things collected, things stored and things put aside, texts, pictures, data, sounds etc. are the basis of the shape-changing work. It is located at the Auditorium of Rotting Sounds. For this exposition, media representations of physical fragments have been arranged, then subjected to multiple stages of erosion processes specific to digital data. Object or exhibition, museum or archive, collection or documentation are moments of intrinsic research and decomposition, accompanying the process and resting in the distant but immediate eye of the virtual observer.
*"Rotting Sounds – Embracing the temporal deterioration of digital audio" is a cooperation of the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as project AR445-G24.
Duncan Higgins- Down on the farm
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Duncan Higgins
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Higgins, D. Down On The Farm (DOTF)- 2015 ongoing.
Artefacts produced in collaboration, partnership and financial support with Latvian National Museum of Art Riga, Lithuanian National museum of Art Kaunas, Latvian and Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and Solovky State Museum Reserve Russia and ACE.
DOTF is being critically evaluated through a series of one-person exhibitions, publications, web presence and education programme that builds on previous research ‘unloud’ 2004 -2014. DOTF is using artistic research to articulate and contribute to the dialectic narratives that are forming from the legacy of particular Soviet histories. It asks how the ‘image’ and the act of ‘making images’ combined with ‘where the image performs’ can offer ways to question, negotiate, communicate or describe moments of erasure or remembering in direct reference to specific cultural narratives. This is situated through an ongoing unique study of The Solovki archipelago in north Russia, site of the most sacred founding Russian Orthodox monastery that was also Stalin’s ‘mother’ of Russian gulags and inter-related narrative historical episodes. DOTF utilises practice based artistic research and autoethnographic methods to explore and contests how to (re) integrate artefacts and actions through art into historically active conversations concerning specific contemporary narrative experiences of violence, displacement and testimony.
The work articulates with contemporary questions of ethics and representation addressed in particular by the Russian painter Borisov, filmmakers Goldovskaya, M and Goddard, JL and theorists Herling,G Agamben,G, Arendt,H, Applebaum,A, Alexsevich,S and Didi-Huberman,G. The distinctive contribution of DOTF to this debate is to situate painting in relation to the contested role of documentary photography and film-making, both through the process by which it came about, and its form when presented. Utilising polyphonic narrative structures and numerous interwoven material montages to contest indexical or capricious documentary facts.