Diffused in a variably sized and constituted collective, averting authorship and working across discipline and media, yet celebrating the aura of the artistic object and operating from a position of moral certainty; the work of Natalya Pershina and Olga Egorova is testimony to the idea that post modernity is a nascent form of modernism. The movement of modern art toward pure line, colour, form and space of the ‘internationalist ideal’ is reversed in the work of Gluklya and Tsaplya (Natalya and Olga’s artists pseudonyms) and their Factory of Found Clothing (FNO) who engage directly with the world around them in their various interventions. Continue reading “THE GREATEST IDIOT IN NEW ZEALAND /CURATOR MARCUS WILLIAMS”
INTERVIEW WITH MARINA VISCHMIDT FOR THE “UNTITLED” MAGAZINE /LONDON/2009
Marina Vischmidt in conversation with the Factory of Found Clothes
The Factory of Found Clothes (Fabrika Nadyonii Odezhdii in Russian, or FNO for short) is Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya and Olga Egorova, respectively known as Gluklya and Tsaplya. Founded in 1995 in St Petersburg, FNO have used installation, performance, video, text and ’social research’ to develop an operational logic of ‘fragility’ as subjectivity antagonistic to that which is the state of things – be that the repressive social and political climate of Russia or the reflexive futilities of international art scenes. Continue reading “INTERVIEW WITH MARINA VISCHMIDT FOR THE “UNTITLED” MAGAZINE /LONDON/2009″
THE LABOR AND BREATH OF ROMANTICISM WITH ANJELIKA ARTYUKH,2009
The Labor and Breath of Romanticism
In the art world, Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya and Olga Egorova are better known as Gluklya and Tsaplya. Residents of Petersburg, they have worked together for many years, producing performances, installations, and video works. Their work extends beyond the confines of gallery art. For example, Gluklya and Tsaplya’s videos have been screened several times at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, one of the major forums for international contemporary visual art. Film critic Anjelika Artyukh met with them during this year’s festival.
Anjelika Artyukh: You formed your artistic alliance in the mid-nineties, when you called yourselves The Factory of Found Clothes and you chose clothing as your object of conceptualization. Why exactly did clothing become the object of your artistic practice? Does it retain its importance for you nowadays, considering that your art has become more socially engaged?
Tsaplya: The culture of the early nineties was a culture of living. It was bound up with dandyism, with dressing up. Continue reading “THE LABOR AND BREATH OF ROMANTICISM WITH ANJELIKA ARTYUKH,2009”
Utopian Unemployment Union N1
Our project has its origin in a real story. Our friend has told us about her husband who had been fired and was so terrified that run away to his mother’s place. He was ashamed to look in his wife’s and children’s eyes as it is said: ‘A man without a job is like a horse without a saddle’. The wife and children kept telling him: ‘We love you the way you are, we don’t care if you’ve got a job or not’. But he was devastated. He started drinking and nearly became a drunkard, but suddenly a miracle happened. He found a new job, his wife started working too and the story had a happy ending.. Continue reading “Utopian Unemployment Union N1”
THE GREATEST IDIOT OF NEW ZEALAND
Garden For Businessmen
In 2004 in Stockholm, Gluklya and Tsaplya mounted The Garden for Businessmen, a performance involving 12 businessmen, which posed the questions, as Gluklya puts it: “What is this person except his profession? Is there any life except their business? Who are they as a human? That’s why we proposed to make a kind of dance, with them holding little girls’ dresses representing the more vulnerable, more fragile, part in them.”
The interplay between performance and sculptural object is played out in Garden for Businessman’ where immaculately suited professionals extemporize and perform with children’s clothing in a quintessentially modern corporate environment. In both cases the protagonists play a central role in determining the nature of the work, which again explores the complex interplay between a sensitive, internal humanity and its public face. Like the naval cadets, the businessmen, contemporary symbols of power and authority, express potential layers of tenderness and even powerlessness in a personal theatre of dress play’. They are helplessly drawn into a paradigm perhaps to some degree beyond their grasp; becoming signifiers of an agenda sadly alien to the world of business.
Mаrkus Williams
Strange People Never Surender, 2005
1th Prague Bienniale – curator Aleksandra Arhipova, Moscow
The Strange Never Give Up
Installation, 2005
The installation consists of a) a table with photographs of the “Strange”. Notes and commentaries, written by hand, b) a clothes-hanger with clothes of a special design, projected to reflect the inner world of the “Strange”. Strolling around Narvskaya Zastava, you can find them everywhere. They are everpresent, coursing through the world’s capillaries like blood cells. Usually, the beauty of the “Strange” goes unnoticed, even if there are far more of them than people who live on the borderline, who have nothing left in common with society at large, such as the homeless, lying around on the asphalt, the “Full-Blues”*, who are hardly strange at all; instead, they provoke feelings of horror, pinching sorrow, pity, or anger. The “Strange”, however, provoke a feelings of surprise and exaltation, maybe because these people continue to exist, despite the inescapable poverty of their fate. Just look at how they dress! Their clothing is armored plating, designed to defend us from the heaviness of reality! There can be little doubt that the life of the Strange is reflected in their costumes. I swear: these people are far freer than the “Full-Blues” or that the “Well-Dressed”. The slight madness of the Strange eloquently tells us that they live in their own world; often, they march forward at a determined pace, busily carrying their burden in an elegant plastic bag…
Father Transformer And The Chorus
Father Transition and the Chorus
55th Oberhausen festival opens with a live performance
Father-transformer and children chorus. Performance 30 min 2009
Performance and opening of 55th Oberhausen, Festival.
We did our research for this performance by interviewing unemployment fathers. The father in the first part is a working father repeating, “I have to work, I have to work”, then he becomes unemployment. The chorus of children react differently on these different psicho conditions of the father.It can be esxplained in the context of research about musculinity.The enourmous presser that man identity is the only can recognised as a “working man”is put by us under the question.
Queer Culture Festival
Dear friends,
We have a new page on Facebook for the upcoming Queer Culture Festival in St. Petersburg. There will be updated information about the festival – programme, pictures etc.
International Queer Culture Festival /http://www.facebook.com/pages/International-Queer-Culture-Festival/147727131920287?ref=ts
Feel free to invite your friends. Hopefully we see you in September!
Best regards,
The Organizing Committee International Festival of Queer Culture 2010
http://queerfest.ru/?lang=en
queerfest.spb@gmail.com
Mister Grey Adventure
Love-research excursion
spring-summer 2010
The collapse of the old rules and anticipating new rules, even if only formal, is where aesthetics and social resistance meet (Paolo Virno)
Our project is a research about conservative stereotypes in human relations and gender fixing frontiers in a context of cultural values of contemporary neoliberal society. It is a critical research about the ‘Myth of Love’ as well as the myths about the concept of history, tourist expectations, cultural standards and art autonomy. It’s obvious that investigation of the myth means historical knowlege. This part of the project is important and we are happy to collaborate with the art-historian Peter Wagemakers who kindly agreed to take part in our project.
Our hero is a tourist who came to Amsterdam. His name is mister Grey. He does not know what he wants. Maybe love? But what is this? He is just very tired from his life, responsibilities, bills, problems. He has a mid-life crisis. Never in his life he hurt anybody or brought pain … maybe only slightly by his indifference. His mind is in a transitional state, ready to change. Traveling through Amsterdam his mind changes completely.
Our project consists out of two parts:
Social research based on interviews and the excursion as a result .
Video-film.
We would like kindly to ask you if you’re willing to cooperate in our project by letting start the excursion in the W-139. and to distribute headphones and give deskinfo.
Partners of the project will also be the Rijksmuseum and the Lloyd Hotel and
probably De Balie.
Time
As far as we do not now when we can get the support for the project we are planning the realisation of the project approximately around spring-summer 2010 .
Mister Grey adventure