Great Expectations

A new project title "Great Expectations" was established in support of contemporary art by Manage Museum and Exhibition Association, Triumph Gallery and MediaArtLab Center for Art and Culture in December 2013. Over the past year solo exhibitions by young Russian media artists have been presented monthly at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall. For the artists it was a unique opportunity to present a solo show to a wide audience while retaining freedom of an artistic experiment.

The exhibition finale of the first cycle of the "Great Expectations" project displays the works of thirteen artists - participants of the project. They are not united by a single theme, each author has his or her own recognizable signature and means of expression, but working in one social and exhibition space they also express the general tendency, style and direction of research of the same generation of young people.

I will show some works, which I found interesting.

Alexey Taruts's work is called "Exploring The Borders", which is 5 minute single-channel video. The main idea is that the creative industry has colonized social communications and a regime for the production of images and design which is capable of engulfing any event, or indeed of manufacturing any event.

Alisa Taezhnaya through her work asks - can the screen be larger than a surface for the image, and the viewer more than a viewer? Her installation "Point of Exit" is constructed from barely noticeable hints and suggestions made around the conflict between museum and theatre spaces. This work about attention and overcoming imagines several scenarios for predictable viewers' reaction and limited behavior specifics limited by psychology encountered when we find ourselves under the hypnotic influence of moving images and sounds and intuitively search for solutions among the obvious.

The last work on this exhibition, on which I paid my attention, was Elena Koptyaeva's "Combinations". In this work images appear and interact with one another a natural bend in space, an angle, the joint between two walls. We imagine the forms and objects that we see, we replaced the real with the imagined. This human capacity for imagination gives us a key to the present that makes a possibility real.This virtuality of thought is used by modern man as a space for experimenting and modeling.

From all works of this exhibition, as if from a distinct "generational cross-section", conclusions may be made on what it is that interests the new generation of artists, as well as what array of conceptual and technical instruments they are using to formulate their ideas.

Anna Vardanian, 5 Level