At the peak of the polarity – Newspaper Kommersant No. 234 (7435) of 12/16/2022

The first international biennale “Art of the Future”, organized by the Multimedia Art Museum (MAMM) and shown within its walls, moved to the regions. We started from Norilsk: in the Art Gallery, selected biennale projects are shown with the works of artists created in the local art residence PolArt. About art focused on the latest technologies in the harsh realities of the northern city – Igor Grebelnikov.

Dreaming about the future today is much more difficult than a year ago, when the grandiose scale exhibition of the Biennale “Art of the Future” opened at MAMM. The seven floors of the museum were chock-full of works by artists passionate about new technologies. From the very beginning, MAMM planned to show the “Art of the Future” in the regions: they settled on the format of including biennale works in local projects.

It was no coincidence that we started with Norilsk: the city-forming enterprise, the Norilsk Nickel company, is a partner of the Biennale, patronizes the local art residence PolArt (artists from different regions come to work in it) and announced the construction of the Arctic Museum of Modern Art – the building of the former House of Trade is being reconstructed for it, the opening scheduled for 2026. In the meantime, eight works from the Art of the Future biennale are shown at the Art Gallery of the Norilsk Museum, along with projects created at PolArt and predictably addressed to the problems of a polar industrial city.

So, Mila Mikhailova studied the influence of the polar night and the illumination of Norilsk on the emotional state of the townspeople, collected their wishes and, based on them, proposed a new color scheme for illumination. At the exhibition, viewers can evaluate the artist’s work by examining and comparing each other in the new and old lighting. With a similar urban message is Anna Tolkacheva’s TsvetNor project: she filmed the streets of Norilsk on video and made a device that can be used to sort frames by the colors that dominate them. The viewer is invited to press the buttons and discover the city from a new, “color” side.

Andrey Chugunov’s installation is a visual diary “written” in sophisticated digital technology while traveling in public transport (you can join it with virtual reality glasses), as well as a video “Whose cloud is this?”. It captures the moment when sulfur is released into the atmosphere: the resulting cloud inspired the artist to poetically reflect on the environmental consequences of mining — the poems are credited to the video.

Next to these works, biennial art may seem more obsessed with transitions from the virtual world to the real world and back. The emoji with which we supplement the messages seemed to Maxim Svishchev similar to ancient masks: on their basis, he created his emoji in the form of large holograms that make faces at the audience. This is part of his YOmoYO project to adapt digital creations to real life.

Maxim Zmeev has become so accustomed to the Fallout 76 computer game – its action takes place after a nuclear war – that he has collected a collection of virtual shelter bases that players build from the wreckage of a lost civilization. Having studied the types of buildings, he clarified the structure of society (according to the game, it will still arise after the end of the world): nothing surprising, the guards will be the most numerous layer. The black-and-white shots taken by Zmeev’s in-game camera seem to be stylized as conceptual series by Düsseldorf photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who have been shooting deserted industrial buildings at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries since the late 1950s.

The “dreams of a machine” by the Gray Cake duo (Katya Pryanik and Sasha Serechenko) resemble animation, but a soulless neural network was involved in “animating” a huge array of retold dreams – surrealists would be delighted with such an “exquisite corpse”. Rostan Tavasiev studied astronomy to design “space sculptures”: their material will be planetary nebulae, their shape will resemble hares (the artist, who once started with paintings on which real plush hares jump, is true to his characters), the project will unfold in space. Future sculptures are presented in dizzyingly beautiful digital images: in the configurations of nebulae, the outlines of frolicking hares are visible. Whatever scientific and technical justification Tavasiev gives for his sculptures, this, of course, is pure utopia. However, her good-natured, childlike gamble is more comforting than the high-tech art that the Art of the Future Biennale lavishes, especially now that the future has become very hard to imagine.