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The Gogova Foundation Artists Residency presents a project by Liza Artamonova and Ilina Chervonnaya, "The Pearl Path Route".
The Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nizhny Arkhyz, Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia. 22 April - 20 June 2018.
A project by the Russian artists Liza Artamonova and Ilina Chervonnaya, participants of the third Gogova Foundation Artists Residency, will be presented on 21 April 2018 at the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Nizhny Arkhyz.
The project, entitled "The Pearl Path Route", is a tourist itinerary, where existing artefacts and landmarks of Karachay-Cherkessia coexist with art objects that have been newly created by the artists. The project also includes a guide to the Route and a film about its creation.
"The authors of the "The Pearl Path Route" attempt to rethink the phenomenon of tourism as a standard set of sights and impressions, which are offered to the traveller. In his or her quest for knowledge of the world, the modern traveller - thanks to the efforts of the tourism industry - falls into the trap of stereotypes, so that the experience, which he/she has, ceases to have unique and genuine value. The history of a place is created before our eyes, cultural monuments are given new meaning, and the creation of contemporary sights and associated legends is powered by marketing technologies. As a result, today's tourist routes are a mixture of reality, fiction and potential expectations, so closely intertwined that they can no longer be separated. Anyone can create their own cultural landmark and make it appear convincing. So modern tourist attractions no longer acquire significance from their cultural and historical context, but as a tool for sensing the value of the interconnectedness of life. The motives that drive the tourist-traveller generate a process, in which he/she is simultaneously participant, creator and critic."
Ilya Yakunin, Astronomer
"We have followed the activities of the Gogova Foundation for some time and were always keen to be associated with it. We have a special interest in site-specific work, feel an affinity with the artists who have taken part in previous residences, and were impressed by the Observatory exhibition. But our particular interest is Karachay-Cherkessia. We love hiking and talk a lot about things to do with tourism, including how tourist thinking takes over our behaviour. A person travels and gets used to certain amenities and sights. The purpose of the trip is to get a standard set of impressions. But what if some sight is not on the map, so that it is left out of the list of "best places" where the person wants to spend time and money? Or, on the contrary, what if somebody spends time and money to visit a sight, and then finds nothing there? The residency is a chance to think about these issues, but it's also an attempt to get to know the region from the inside, to look at it with the eyes of an outsider. Projects like this are a way of gathering resources: they mobilize everything that you have learned, everything you know and know how to do. All of that gets used well and to purpose."
Liza Artamonova and Ilina Chervonnaya
The Gogova Foundation for the Support of Contemporary Art and Culture is a non-profit organization founded by Mariana Guber-Gogova in 2016. The main goal of the Foundation is to promote young Russian artists at home and abroad by holding exhibitions outside commercial galleries, including exhibitions in state institutions, and through educational programmes that bring together artists, art critics and curators.
The Foundation launched its programme with an exhibition of works by Olya Kroytor at the Kasteyev Museum in Almaty (Kazakhstan) in September 2016 and a large-scale exhibition of Russian and Austrian artists at the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Nizhny Arkhyz (Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia, North Caucasus) in October 2016, in association with the Ministry of Culture of Karachay-Cherkessia and the Austrian Cultural Forum.
In 2017, the Gogova Foundation launched a residency for emerging artists. For its first year, the programme was based in an exhibition space in the centre of the historic Old City of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The first residents were Ulyana Podkorytova and Vladimir Abikh, both Russian artists, selected by the international expert council. In 2018, the residency relocated to the village of Bukovo in Nizhny Arkhyz, a region of the Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia.
The expert council, which selects projects for the residency, includes Suad Garaeva (Yarat Centre for Contemporary Art), Jarret Gregory (Hirshhorn Museum, Washington), Mariana Guber-Gogova (Gogova Foundation, Artwin Gallery), Ekaterina Inozemtseva (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art), Alexei Novoselov (MMOMA), Simon Mraz (Austrian Cultural Forum) and Olga Nefedova (independent consultant and curator).
Liza Artamonova was born in 1988 in Moscow. She graduated from the Moscow State University of Printing (2012) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (2016) where she took part in the Artist'Exchange Programme with Goldsmiths College in London (2016). She was a winner of the environment nomination as part of the Brewhouse Art Prize in 2016. Liza works with site-specific installation, video, graphics and photography, addressing issues of the boundaries of privacy, escapist practice, and the neuroses and syndromes of the post-information society. Her group exhibitions include: "Borderline Conditions" (MERES multifunctional space, Nicosia, 2017); "Something Went Wrong" (Solyanka VPA, Moscow, 2017); "Brewhowse Art Prize" (Moscow, 2016); "Facade Under Construction", "Pop-up Exhibition", (3 Melnikov Street, Moscow, 2016); "Between the Lines" (GRAD Gallery, London, 2016); "Rituals of Sincerity" (Art and Music Centre, Mayakovsky Library, St. Petersburg, 2016); "15% Refund on Purchase of the Full Set" (Bogorodskoye Gallery, Moscow, 2015).
Ilina Chervonnaya was born in 1983 in Moscow. She graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art (2016), where she took part in the Artists'Exchange Programme with Goldsmiths College in London (2016). She works with video, installation, sculpture and sound. She was a winner of the environment nomination as part of the Brewhouse Art Prize in 2016. Her current spheres of interest are constructed apoliticism and heightened suggestibility, distortion and reinterpretation of perception, the reproduction of memories and the construction of a secondary reality. Exhibitions include: "Borderline Conditions" (MERES multifunctional space, Nicosia, 2017); "Something Went Wrong" (Solyanka VPA, Moscow, 2017); "Between the Lines"(GRAD Gallery, London, 2016); "Rituals of Sincerity" (Art and Music Centre, Mayakovsky Library, St. Petersburg, 2016); "Horizons of Events" (Parallel Programme of the 6th Moscow Biennale, Moscow, 2015).
Media contacts: a@annadyulgerova.com, katya@sao.ru
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