PROGRAM Olivie 9 september -11 october 2010 REAL ART Сurators: Bogdan Mamonov, Sergey Popov Vladimir Salnikov, Nina Kotel, Bogdan Mamonov, Sasha Leech, Boris Smelov, Nikolay Kasatkin, Ivan Lukinyh, Olga Chernyshova, Sasha Sokolov, Tasia Korotkova, Alexander Pogorgelsky, Katya Rogkova. Gruntovka 9-20 september 2010 GOLDEN POT Petr Maslov Curator - Bogdan Mamonov   24 may -24 june 2007 "Now is the winter". Russian&American Contemporary Art Curated by: Nicholas Muelner, Michail Sidlin This exhibition brings together the work of artists from the United States and Russia to explore responses to current states of experience in the cultures of late empire. The thesis of this show builds upon diverse strands of international art practice that enlace cultural and historical representation with a pervasive sense of icy remove – the evacuation of meaning, in word and action, that a moral freeze implies. These artists employ a wide array of media and tactics to variously attack, mourn or mock the silent tyranny of reactionary socio-political culture. Contrary to Dada’s angry, explosive response to a cruel and rapacious modernity, it is the thesis of this exhibition that contemporary art practice can point to moral, political and social horror and absurdity through the presentation of disappearance – of logic, narrative, emotion and knowledge. Susan Sontag famously described the act of photographing as “a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” Now is the Winter offers artwork that maps our soft terror – the abduction and discrete internment of the subject – across the terrain of visual experience. The imagery of these works resonates with blankness, distance, disappearance and hermetic silence. We live in a moral space that is spooky like an abandoned house in a Hollywood film: eerily empty, silent, still, but harboring violence, treachery and helplessness that is always explicitly invisible and implicitly behind our backs. There is an inevitable diversion or masking in public life that occurs in the spaces between truth and rhetoric, and between rhetoric and action. The current economic and political hegemony of globalizing power has managed to enlarge these transitional spaces into gaping lacunae, in which there is a complete and unapologetic rupture between knowledge and language, and again between language and act. This counter-epistemological affront is so bold and thorough as to feel unassailable. This exhibition is an attempt to describe this current condition through these artists’ pointed and subjective reports from the bleak field. But within this cold, alienated mischief is a core of hopeful (if inconclusive) rebuke: an argument of what to do about the cold. A counter-exhibition – at the center of, and isolated from the rest of the show – displaying large, luminously white color photographs of the recent ‘orange revolution’ in Kiev. This counter example, bright with hope and action – white snow and orange banners – recasts the cold landscape of these times as a field of revolutionary possibility: a fragile insistence that mass action still operates against the manipulative language of power. American artists include Miles Coolidge, a Los Angeles based artist whose photographic work presents familiar, vacant settings (most recently, Florida drawbridges in the raised position) in a way that unfailingly describes the impenetrable flatness and absence of sincerity or depth – spatial and experiential – in our lived experience. Sharon Hayes is a New York based artist whose video works present the artist acting out public historical figures acting out themselves. These “re-speakings” eerily and awkwardly present the evasiveness of authenticity and self in the public and political domain. Ithaca, New York based artist Ron Jude’s current project, Alpine Star, isolates and reproduces newspaper photographs culled from ten years of imagery from the artist’s hometown newspaper in McCall, Idaho. These representations offer a world of loss and isolation, as the half-tone language of news gives way to existential isolation and incomprehensible action. Nebojsa Seric Shoba is a New York based, Bosnian born artist whose video, photographic and sculptural works playfully and critically evoke problems of political and cultural identification within the disorienting and contradictory structures of contemporary global society. Paul Swenbeck is a Philadelphia based artist whose painting, sculpture and installation work establishes narratively suggestive but spookily hermetic worlds of dark mythology, violence and magic. Russian artists include Irina Korina, whose constructed environments of plaster forms and fuzzy black and white photographs suggest a world of padded isolation and muffled mystery. Natalia Struchkova creates elaborate digital cartoon paintings whose cheerful seductions quickly dissolve into an impenetrable narrative and iconographic confusion of crossed references and interrupted spaces. Rostan Tavasiev creates work in a variety of media that consistently manipulates the raw material of innocence and pure contemplation into inscrutable and subtly menacing forms. Gleb Vysheslavsky’s recent photographic work embraces both the dilapidated failure of forlorn and unintended sculpture, and the current historical drama of mass protest on the snow-covered streets of Kiev. Marian Zhunin is a video and performance artist whose work consistently addresses the comedy and difficulty of fixing meaning and knowledge in contemporary experience. Recent videos include Day of Poetry, which presents the seriousness of complex language poetry in the compromising circumstances of the social sphere.