Dream Limits Automatic translate

Department of Film and Media Arts of the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A. S. Pushkin and the North Caucasus Branch of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkin present the exhibition “Borders of Dreams”, which will show works from the new media art collection of the Pushkin Museum and works by authors from North Ossetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya. The project continues the exploration of the theme of dreams, which began last year with the exhibition “False Awakening” at the Baltic Branch and offers a journey through the worlds of dreams, where it can be difficult to discover the fine line separating reality and the ghostly world of visions.

The project “Borders of Dreams” is the second exhibition within the framework of the “Media Windows” program, created by the department of cinema and media art together with teams from branches of the Pushkin Museum. A. S. Pushkin. “Media Windows” aims to introduce both the key works of the classics of media art, and the works of contemporary artists who shape the landscape of media art today. Many of the works in the collection will be shown to a wider audience for the first time. One of the goals of the program is to make the Pushkin Museum’s collection of new media art available to viewers throughout the country. The project will present not only works from the collection of the Pushkin Museum, but also works by local artists, whose practices correspond to the principles of forming the collection of the Pushkin Museum.

In the works of artists at the exhibition “Borders of Dreams” one can observe how the heroes make their way along the edge of mountain ranges past dzuars - sanctuaries, freeze over bodies of water, and mimic the world around them. This route among surreal landscapes is both a test and a search for oneself, a journey to oneself. The dreamlike path of the heroes of the works becomes a narrative that connects an adventure novel, family history, prayer, and prediction. Time here sometimes flows nonlinearly, speeds up and slows down, twists into a spiral and returns to the source. The viewer, together with the heroes of the artists’ works, finds himself in motion, independently making his way through memories, overcoming sleepy numbness, oblivion, a sense of doom and inaction.

The exhibition opens with the artist Tsugi’s Inner Manifesto No. 0 (2017). The video work is a dream within a dream, where the main character is placed at the center of the memories: he alternates between acting as a narrator and looking at himself from the outside, as if moving between the worlds of sleep and reality.

Homayoun Askari Sirizi in the photographic and literary project “Reading Borges in Vladikavkaz” (2015) creates a secondary reality, layering dream stories on urban reality. Every door or window here is a portal to another world, created as if according to the patterns of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino. It seems that through the optics of Sirizi, Vladikavkaz reveals to the viewer its hidden image of a place where miracles are possible.

The duo “Provmyza” plays a game with the viewer, where the landscape and the person are indistinguishable from each other. In the video work “Despair” (2008), the characters consciously merge with the surrounding dream world, shrouded in snow, in which there is no beginning and end, no distinction between sleep and reality, which means there is an endless and immeasurable space for the wakefulness of the soul.

Marianne Heske uses modern technology to convey the impermanence and magic of the landscape. Her digital “Magic Mountain” (1985–2017) serves as a kind of demarcation line between dreams and reality. Bright, as if filled with electric light, the Heske Mountains become beacons for the viewer on the dream-path through the exhibition.

Anna Kabisova and Evgeny Ivanov, in photographic works from the series “I Believe in the One” (2015), explore the spaces where dzuars, ancient Ossetian sanctuaries, were built. Artists document places of power with an analog camera, using expired film, and thereby create the visual effect of a dreamlike haze penetrating into everyday life.

Video installations by artist Shamil Akhmed “Roar” and “Paths” (2023) are an attempt to comprehend the tragic family memories of deportation during the Soviet period. In one of the videos, a metal cauldron rolls down with a roar from a hill to the foot of which a child is standing as a reminder of the non-acceptance of returning deportees. In another video, the artist himself climbs up a hill, tearing up grass to make a path for himself. Ahmed, considering, as if through a dream, the experience of past generations, paves his own path in reality.

The exhibition will include a public program that will introduce viewers to the history of video art, as well as examine it through the prism of the exhibition and place it in the context of art history. Exhibition curator Alina Stulikova, at the lecture “The Sleep of the Mind Gives Birth to Monsters,” will answer the questions of whether art in general and the art of new media in particular is capable of creating portals to other realities and whether art has the power to awaken the sleeping person. Curator Margarita Maslova will give a lecture “Cinema that opens the dream”, followed by a discussion of mass and art cinema, in which sleep and the search for real reality become the basis of the plot, and a discussion about the scientific side of dreams. There will also be a meeting with the artists participating in the exhibition. The public program will end with a workshop for young audiences, which will be conducted by Marta Yaralova, leading specialist in the media library department of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkin.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on April 2 at 16:00. Free admission. To learn more about the public program, get detailed information and purchase tickets, visit https://alanicamuseum.art/.