Exhibition project "WORDS and THINGS" Automatic translate

In the Museum and Exhibition Complex of the Russian Academy of Arts, a group exhibition "WORDS and THINGS" is opened, which examines the working conditions of women artists and the problems of social interaction in the field of art.

“WORDS and THINGS” is an exhibition offering to start a complex and in many ways very controversial conversation about the place and status of women of different generations, whose professional activities and biography are in one way or another connected with the Russian Academy of Arts.

The modern Academy of Arts inherited the basic principles of the social policy of labor relations that developed in the late period of the history of the USSR. These principles offer artists competitive conditions that, at first glance, are not dependent on gender differences. However, in a broad sense, labor policy is, in most cases, a male prerogative - like everything that has to do with strengthening power. Nominally, in a substantially altered form, such an ideological scheme is still built into the organization of professional employment and the public sphere of the academic community.

The exhibition consists of three parts that are closely related to each other. The basis of the exposition is about a hundred works - painting, graphics, sculpture, objects and installations created by eight project participants. Lika Tsereteli, Nina Lyubavina, Elena Surovtseva, Nonna Goryunova, Daria Konovalova-Infante, Natalya Sitnikova, Maria Alexandrova, Natalya Baranova represent different generations of artists and work in different directions. Their works can hardly be presented in a single thematic exposition, however, the creative biography of the participants is somehow connected with professional academic education and the life of the art community.

The works presented at the exhibition will be accompanied by extracts from interviews that were recorded by the project participants at the stage of preparation and formation of the exposition. These interviews clarify the opinions of participants on labor issues in the field of art and the status of a woman artist. Thus, the exhibition space acts as a kind of public place for expression, where things - works created by women - are mediated by words - direct speech of the authors, their personal memory and history, private art strategies and the prospect of social transformation.

The third element, supplementing the exposition, is a computer installation “Interview: re-equipment” - a video chronicle of the program “TextAnalyst”, which analyzes the full, live transcripts of interviews with the authors of the works.

“The program performs semantic analysis of the text, automatically revealing the structure in the form of a hierarchy of topics and subtopics. In addition, the program performs a semantic search, taking into account hidden relationships by query keywords. TextAnalyst performs operations based on the object-oriented programming language (OOP), that is, forms objects, a kind, instances in the code that are digital analogues of a real prototype. OOP transforms the format of live text and allows it to be used in new configurations as an empirical fact of the language, which, perhaps, will change something! ”Says A. Salenkov, one of the project’s curators.

With the help of the statements of the participants and the exposition, where words and works are in specific and variable situations of co-presence, the possibility of an environment confused between the materiality of art and the discursive properties of language arises. It is assumed that the exhibition will become a reference point and in the future will serve as the beginning of a large-scale project that will thoroughly and critically analyze the topics and problems of female labor in art.

Artists participating in the exhibition: Maria Alexandrova, Natalya Baranova, Nonna Goryunova, Daria Konovalova-Infante, Nina Lyubavina, Natalia Sitnikova, Elena Surovtseva, Lika Tsereteli.

The author of the idea: Lyubov Evdokimova.

Project team: Maria Belikova, Elena Klembo, Anastasia Kuzmina, Alexander Salenkov, Vladimir Khodanov, Anastasia Shevchuk.