with support of the Austrian Cultural Forum
The study of the suburbs cultural landscape and the urban outskirts, the associated issues of their development, the utopian life of their communities become a main framework for APXIV (Archive) art-collective new project, created in association with Austrian Cultural Forum and its director Simon Mraz.
The focus point of our attention was one of the several old Soviet cinemas, Baikonur cinema theatre, which is currently under reconstruction. During the research work conducted by a group of APXIV residents aka employees of the specially created «Unidentified Space Agency» and Simon Mraz, it was revealed that this particular cinema theatre was not just an obvious cultural heritage, but a complete individual phenomenon, which requires some commentaries and more elaborated glance.
The special ontological status of the cinema via its presence in contemporary being interrupts the linearity of history. Like a phenomenological rabbit’s hole, the cinema theatre connects the time periods , several power lines come together. That has attracted our attention most of all.
Any self-organized collective objects disintegrate themselves and fall into chaos and so we have come to the reflection over the decay, which has overtaken the cinema, through both the idea of entropy and thermal death of the universe and the concept of the capitalist system as an accelerator of these processes.
During our research it was found out that the Baikonur space station, which gave a name to the cinema theatre, had a copy. For the sake of secrecy and to confuse a probable enemy, the wooden replica of the space station was built in 1950 right in the village named Baikonur just in 300 kilometers from the original one.
The exhibition presents the results of the research and a report on the «Unidentified Space Agency» activities.
Artists
Anastasia Soboleva
Olga Klimovitskaya
Sofya Ovchinnikova
Leo Kem
Ya Nzi
Vladimir Savostin
Nikita Kaem
Anna Kobzeva
Peter Pirogov
Lika Gomiashvili
Ruslan Polanin
Gosha Golitsyn
Maria Cheloyants
https://www.facebook.com/events/2044200639130512/