Victor Alimpiev, "My Absolution", 2008, 7'35''

Ministry of Culture, Russian Federation National Center for Contemporary Arts, Ekaterinburg branch in collaboration with International Fine Arts Consortium and Perpetual Art Machine (PAM) Presents Walking a Fine Line Parables of the Sublime and the Subversive in Russian Video Art.          January 9 (Friday), 7:30pm Monkey Town: 58 N 3rd St. (btw. Kent & Wythe), Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211 Admission: $5, $10 minimum, reservations are recommended NCCA Ekaterinburg Curator, Ksenia Fedorova will be introducing the program and discussing the work of each artist. Questions will be taken after the screening. So if you want to learn a little about new Russian video art you should be sure to RSVP now because seating is be limited. The program showcases the recent Russian video art works that reflect complex and controversial attitude towards the phenomenon of the sublime in Russian culture and mentality. Artists confront mystification and sacralization, engagement and spiritual detachment with strategies ranging from epatage to derision, eccentricity, and radical activism. Whom to blame? What to do? The viewer is invited to ponder upon these and other perennial “Russian” questions and find his/her own “fine line” of authentic response. Research on characteristics of national and local identity is one of the main foci of the Ekaterinburg NCCA. The search for identity in post-Soviet Russian society and the development of a new value system have been raised in interdisciplinary projects like “Novorusskoe (The Nouveau Russian)” (2005), “In Transition Russia 2008”, videoprogram “Dreams in the Epicenter” (2007), and others. The penchant to extremes, paradoxicality, and irrationalism have become stereotypical characteristics of "Russianness". In such a way, contemplative submersion sometimes rather easily turns into subversion, a response of blunt satire or heavy-handed irony. The fact of contemporary reality is that the radical “other” is embedded into the surface of what is already here, which is none other than the everyday, the event of life itself. Shifting perspectives, whether as a radical gesture, or just slightly, we are all groping to find that most authentic fine line that connects the limit and its beyond, the spiritual self and the social other. Russian contemporary artists demonstrate how a national feature speaks the common (universal) truth. Artists: Leonid Tishkov, Blue Soup Group, Vladlena Gromova, Vladimir Logutov, Bombily Group, Alexey Buldakov, Yury Vasiliev, Victor Davydov, Victor Alimpiev, Veronika Rudyeva-Ryazantseva, Provmyza, Blue Noses Group.   Curators: Ksenia Fedorova, Alisa Prudnikova Contact: www.uralncca.ru , This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it monkeytownhq.com , 718.384.1369, This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

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