The Pushkin Museum INTRO “Media Art: Practices and Optics”

Media art introduces us to new ways of interaction with the world around us. Video artists, inspired by the discoveries of the early 20th century, create contemplative, slow cinema that origins in experiments with colour, light, rhythm, and sound. Capturing the moment of transformation of the physical into the metaphysical, the masters focus on the images of chance that shape our reality, inviting the viewer to look beyond it. On this journey, we will meet the works of Bill Viola, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Abbas Kiarostami, Anri Sala, Malcolm Le Gris, Jonas Mekas and other artists and directors of the 20th and 21th centuries. 

Speaker – Olga Shishko, chief curator of the Pushkin Museum XXI, head of the Department of Cinema and Media Art of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

Digital performance allows artists to construct events beyond our reality – in a virtual world, within the context of creating scenarios for the future, which may not yet be fully defined but are filled with irrational and even deceptive elements. Works by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, Olya Lyalina, Ryan Trecartin, Cecile B. Evans, Ian Cheng, Amalia Ulman, Blast Theory, Rimini Protokoll, !Mediengruppe Bitnik inherit the performative practices of László Moholy-Nagy and Oscar Schlemmer, Dan Graham and Allan Kaprow, Joan Jonas and Stelarc and aim to create connections between people, offering the viewer a new perspective on the possible transformation of the world and the horizons for its development.

Speaker – Anna Bouali, curator of the Department of Cinema and Media Art of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

Deep media exist at the intersection of art, science and philosophy. They explore the possibilities of human interaction with the environment and create conditions for equal dialogue between human and non-human agents. The works of Guy Ben-Ary, Nelo Akamatsu, Cecilia Jonsson, Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::), André and Michel Décosterd question the presuppositions of a human-centred world and show how humankind can exist in total symmetry with the reality around.

Speaker – Dmitry Bulatov, a curator of the Baltic branch of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

New technologies – video installations, VR, surround sound – found their way into a contemporary theatre a while ago. Frank Castorf, Katie Mitchell, Simon McBurney, Robert Lepage, William Kentridge, Romeo Castellucci, Peter Sellars and Bill Viola, Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué, Rimini Protokoll – all of them create a theatre language that uses media not as a spectacular trick bit as a new way of communicating with the audience. Sometimes new technologies evenreplace real actors on stage. Still, almost always they change the way audience perceives theatrical reality and audience’s role in the theatre process, blurring the line between contemporary theatre and contemporary art.

Speaker – Marina Davydova, Editor-in-Chief of TEATR magazine

Personal computers and the Internet have significantly changed the world of art: every Internet user has access not only to the means for creating artworks but also to the opportunities of their distribution. But it is not only the means that were revolutionized; there also a new space for artistic research appeared. Internet-based projects of Eva Grubinger, Kathy Rae Huffman and Eva Wohlgemuth, Douglas Davis, JODI, Heath Bunting, Vuk Ćosić and other artists formed the aesthetics of net.art, defined topical issues of new human living space – the global network. And we can see the way the aesthetic and thematic paradigms set by the pioneers of internet art in the 1990s influence our world today.

Speaker – Alexei Shulgin, curator of Electromuseum in Rostokino, artist