“TEMPORARY MONUMENTS” EXHIBITION, MARINA PECHERSKY GALLERY, MOSCOW, RUSSIA (September - October 2016)
Marina Pechersky Gallery presents the first exhibition of Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich in Russia ”Temporary Monuments"
September 13 - October 9, 2016
"Temporary Monuments" is the result of two years of research and performative practices provoked by the historical situation (for the last few years Fyodor has been living between Moscow and São Paulo). Seven monuments coincide with the seven scenes of the slaves’ sufferings, both borrowed from history and recently recorded in Brazil. Each of the scenes is a reflection of intentional or unintentional attempt to rip the chains, break the shackles or speak out loud. Despite the fact that the artist’s work is based on the socio-cultural context of Brazil, the project involves the global problems and has the universal significance.
"My exhibition is not at all about the affinity of the two nations. But both countries are struggling to cope with the heavy legacy of the totalitarian heritage: the Brazilians still often think of themselves as slaves or slave-owners, while the Russians consider themselves the best and the sole nation in the world. My project is about how a slave continues to exist, in one form or another, in the head and in the body of each of us. Each monument lasts seven hours, since "7" is the maximum number of hours that the human brain is able to visualize. (In some ancient cultures after the number "seven" came the numeral “many” as they weren’t able to count on). And each monument is now captured, firstly in my memory (including physical, as in most cases it was quite exhausting), and secondly, in the form of installations and microfilm. I do not believe in the conventional monuments. Their meaning melts away over the years. What remains is a physical monument - but it does not necessarily continue to have the same meaning for the spectators as it was conceived by the author. When the temporary monument has a chance for a deep imprint in the memory of the beholder - as the memory retains the ephemeral much stronger than the physical. Making the first monument I climbed high up on the palm tree and stayed there for seven hours almost until dawn”, - Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich.
«I feel that the very notion of freedom and un-freedom is essential to the artistic practice. Exhibition of Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich is about external, socially constructed manifestation of one of the most extreme forms of un-freedom - slavery. But if we are to abstract ourselves from the social context, one of the most dreadful forms of un-freedom is the internal one. It seems to me that everyone in his/her life overcomes such stages of the internal deployment through the breakage of the prohibitions, certain traditions, through pushing his/her own limits and through self-cognition. In fact Fyodor’s 7 performances are the metaphors of the external and internal states of slavery, where the person is left alone with himself more often, alienated from the world and from society». - Marina Pecherskaya
