‘Theatre is moving towards modern art, and modern art is moving towards theatre’
Contemporary artists from Tatarstan presented works inspired by theatrical production
Modern theatre is not so much about aesthetics as about emotions. What thoughts did the viewer leave with? Could he feel what happened on stage with the hero? But what the audience will do with the experience gained, how it will transform and adapt it, is a question that seems to have nothing to do with theatre anymore. But here's how you look at it. The Zhivoy Gorod Foundation decided to put these adapted emotions on display and presented them at the ES Gallery at the exhibition “I See the Theatre”.
Artists go to the theatre
The Zhovoy Gorod Foundation is engaged in three theatre venues — Ugol Creative Laboratory, MOÑ Theatre and the Demidov Mansion. Together with ES Gallery, they held an open-call, where they selected eight contemporary artists. These are seven visual authors and one audio artist. The curator of the exhibition, Albina Zakirullina, said that the emphasis when choosing artists was both on the creative component and on authors whose works had never been presented in the gallery before. Then, for six weeks, the artists went to theatrical productions that took place in the Demidov Mansion. They watched, felt, and comprehended.
As a result, we got 25 works, which are displayed in the gallery at the exhibition “I See The Theatre”. “This is our first collaboration in this format," said Diana Safarova, the co-founder of the Zhivoy Gorod Foundation.
“One of the main missions of the foundation is to expand and explore the boundaries of the theatre. The theatre tries to meet all kinds of art. But movement from both sides is especially valuable. It is always a pleasure when theatre moves towards modern art, and modern art moves towards theatre. I have not seen such projects in Kazan. But this is not only an exchange of audiences, it is also a cultural exchange. As a result, the exhibition turned out to be broader in meaning than we had originally planned," said Inna Yarkova, the director of Zhivoy Gorod Foundation.
She also suggested continuing the collaboration with contemporary artists, but in a different format. Yarkova sees the next step of collaboration in artists going beyond the gallery and moving them into the walls of the theatre so that they become full-fledged participants in the theatrical process — they wrote music and created decorations.
“What an artist sees, not an ordinary viewer”
The ES Gallery space is small, so placing 25 works is a task with an asterisk. But the curators did it. The entire hall was divided into two parts by rectangular curbstones, which feature works by Yulia Korbut from the series “About sins, not tragedies.” These are decorated bakery products. Several of these “buns” stretched along the entire gallery, and some guests did not hesitate to place their food next to it. Edible and of no artistic value. By the way, Yulia's larger-scale works from the “Caskets hiding shame” series are presented at the “Heirs” exhibition in the government office.
But the gallery's guests see a completely different work first. Before entering the main hall, visitors are greeted by the work of Adelina Abdullina “White Choir”, made of fabric. “It was necessary to show something of oneself, to express what the artist sees, and not the ordinary viewer," said Adelina. The artist was inspired by the play “Taboo”, where a white canvas becomes not only an object of decoration, but also a full-fledged hero who can tell his stories. Abdullina's fabric is a curtain, an element of clothing, a veil, movement, dance, writing, water, the beginning of life, and its end. In addition, the exhibition features two more works by Abdullina — “Deep Red Staircase” based on the play “Beyond the Blue Border” and “Construction in Blue” based on the production “Seryozha”.
Diyora Talipova presented two works at the exhibition: “Splitting” and “Word Forms”. The first one was created as a collective construct from all the performances watched and the emotions that the productions evoked. Also, “Splitting” is a condition that actors often experience when they transform into other people on stage. The work “Forms of Words” was created based on the play “Hemingway Bar”. “At first, you try to understand the dialogues and monologues, to understand them, to concentrate on the spoken words, but gradually the dialogues turn into a hum or dissolve into music — you catch only individual phrases. You pick out for yourself only those words that you can feel," Talipova explained her work.
The artist Alsu Valiullina also has two works at the exhibition “I See The Theatre”. The work “Memory and Patterns” is a fabric work with hand embroidery. It shows the interior of the mansion. “The interior is important for the perception of theatrical productions. The canvas consists of individual elements reminiscent of the scenery of the performances: patterns on the walls, flowing fabrics, spiral staircase, chandelier, latticed windows. Cold lighting made it possible to turn cracks on the walls into new patterns, which served as the basis for vivid textile exhibitions on canvas," Valiullina commented.
Another work by Alsou is the diptych “The Smooth Surface”, based on the play “Beyond the Blue Border”. “When crossing long distances, a swimmer sees only a tangle of light and dark strokes, where the sky, earth and water merge into a single stream, hiding the waves and the sea," Valiullina explained her idea.
The artist KА́RTON created possible decorations for the play “To Save the Chamberlain Pushkin”. “This is solo performance. There are few decorations in it, but the imagination works great. In the story, the main character tells how his life is connected with Pushkin. While he was talking, I had ideas about what the scenery for this performance might look like," said KА́RTON. Upon completion of the work, the artist made several more options, so one of the concepts of possible decorations is presented at the exhibition. By the way, this work was bought half an hour after the exhibition opened. It will hang in the gallery until March 25, and then it will move to a private collection.
The exhibition did not end with the works of contemporary artists. At the back of the gallery, behind black curtains, fragments of performances from the Demidov Mansion were playing out — these are The Hemingway Bar and Taboo. The first is an immersive production about Paris in the 1920s, the lost generation and the time when Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein wrote their masterpieces. The second tells about the fates of three women of the early 20th century — Fatikha Aitova, Sarah Shakulova and Sarah Sadykova. The exhibition played out the storyline of Shakulova — the first Tatar female mathematician. On the contrary, there are creative disputes between Francis Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda.
Ekaterina Petrova — a literary columnist for Realnoe Vremya online newspaper, the author of the telegram channel Buns with Poppy Seeds.
