paradise network

Recycle Group

December 20, 2012 — January 21, 2013
Multimedia Art Museum

The exhibition at MAMM will present 17 installations by Andrey Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov, graduates of the Krasnodar Academy of Art and Industry, winners of the 2010 Kandinsky Prize in the nomination "Young Artist. Project of the Year". The exhibition will include well-known Recycle works, as well as a presentation of a new project.

The "Cultural layer" really prepared and at some point was reborn into our current project about a modern miracle — the miracle of the social network, in which we saw the features of a completely new social system, with its own laws, traditions and rituals. Here, as in the "Cultural Stratum", we are interested in the question: what remains of our era in history?

The Gates
2012
Corrugated pipe, lightbox
400 × 400 × 140 cm

The "Cultural layer" really prepared and at some point was reborn into our current project about a modern miracle — the miracle of the social network, in which we saw the features of a completely new social system, with its own laws, traditions and rituals. Here, as in the "Cultural Stratum", we are interested in the question: what remains of our era in history?

It differs from other eras in that it lives not only in real time, but also in virtual space. There is an old stereotypical juxtaposition of material and spiritual substances, but the realities of today’s life show that there is also a third dimension. It is neither material nor spiritual, and yet it promises a person — or rather, his profile — eternal life, appropriating the functions of religion. And it’s not just about memory, but about eternal life. No data that gets into Facebook is erased, and sometimes the pages of long-disappeared users even continue to send messages with mailing lists. Sometimes this profile is also "spammed", it still has "friends", somehow the exchange of "likes" continues, etc.

And one of the main symbols of this world and the people living in it, of course, is the letter "F" — the first letter of the word Facebook. For example, our parents got a computer almost simultaneously with Facebook. And the transition to working with modern material is probably due to the fact that we became interested in looking for a new meaning in what we have now, because no one except your generation (maybe a little older or a little younger) will see it the way you do. That’s why we decided to take the Facebook situation and embed it in the existing architecture of the myth of eternal life, which man has always needed.