Rotaenko Anna

Born in 1990 in Khar’kov. Studied at the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art and the Alexander Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Lives and works in Moscow.

Ringtone

On the stage of ideological warfare, art often explodes with affective special effects, and the artist is born from an “accident”, traumatized by the technology of resource redistribution.
In this, Vadim Sidur is a typical post-war artist. The pendulum of his fate rhymes youth with trauma, his experience as a machine-gun platoon commander with rejection of Soviet power, faith with works that had been accused of pornography.* He described his Coffin-Art series as “the art of an era in which fear has reached an equilibrium”, creating sculptures from rusted pipes, industrial objects, and decayed cemetery fences.
I am interested in the figure of the artist as a filter, recycler, retranslator, and repeater surrounded by a power reproduction industry.
The background noise consists of sounds calling to action: alerts and alarms, ringtones, heartbeats, someone pounding on a radiator, electronic dance music, sounds of war.
The belfry made out of pipes is an acoustic instrument. The sound is produced by the movement of microprocessor-controlled motors, which create a series of beats following the algorithm of a bell ringing. The chime is looped, as is the path from faith to repression, from war to art.
The graphics in the “Ringtone” project acts as a score, a dotted line that describes the cycle of trau- matisation and sublimation, the sound of a part falling between gears.
* In 2015, the works of Vadim Sidur were attacked by “new Orthodox activists”. That moment became the accident that has made his work the subject of new political speculation.

The installation was shown in 2020 as part of the artist’s solo exhibition at the Vadim Sidur Museum (branch of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art

Courtesy of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art