Graduates of the Garage Museum of Modern Art Master's program ‘Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Art’ presented the project ‘Experimental Unit 13 16 45’ in the Narkomfin Building. The curators define the genre of the project as an ‘inset’, since the artists' works are not just ‘exhibited’ in the space of the house, but are embedded in the architecture of the building, complementing it and offering new options for human interaction.
The Narkomfin Building is a Cultural Heritage Monument of constructivist architecture, built at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis. The building was conceived as ‘transitional type of experimental house’ and a new way of life in general. The building was divided into several blocks, the largest of which were communal and residential, divided into two-level apartments-‘units’. However, the changing tenants were forced to adapt them each time to unforeseen life circumstances. During building exploitation several apartments were combined and that’s how the end-to-end numbering was lost, and now there are no units with numbers 13, 16 and 45 in the building.
The curatorial concept of the project is built around these lost apartments. The invited artists metaphorically populate the missing units and fill the space with a variety of alternative systems of people's relationship with the building and with each other, that’s what the constructivist architects did not think about.
For this project Fedor Hiroshige created a total installation ‘Glitter in the Red Night’, offering an experience of spiritual interaction with a rationally constructed house. Hiroshige suggests becoming an accomplice in an experiment to develop alternative approaches to building life and utopia. The artist's works offer to take part in meditation to the image of Sailor Moon, to look at an angel, to discover a third eye on your face, to build a tower or a castle in a sandbox with salt, to touch the points of screws to feel the insidiousness of love, to knock bells with a hammer or to remember your pet.
Participating artists: Dmitry Belkin, Alexandra Urbanovskaya.
Artists of the project: Fedor Hiroshige, Lera Lerner, art group ‘Babies 18:22’, art cooperative ‘Beads’.
You can see the project until July 8 on weekly excursions-meditations on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays by pre-registration.
