Provmyza

Galina Myznikova. Born in 1968 in Gorky.
Sergey Provorov. Born in 1970 in Gorky.
Participants of the 51st Venice Biennale (Russian Pavilion, 2005). Multiple award winners at film festivals, including the Golden Tiger for Best Short Film at the 38th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2009). Winners of the Innovation Prize (2012, “Visual Art Work”). The group was founded in 1998. The two live and work in Nizhny Novgorod.

Oratorium SARX SOMA
(Videodocumentation of the Performance for High-Rise Construction)
Single-channel video installation, 120 min. Ссылка на видео в бюллетене для голосования.

This performance of loss, as the artists themselves call it, is saturated with texts in Latin. Artaud’s manifesto “The Theatre and the Plague” is transformed by the authors into glossolalia performed by basso profundo. The Latin title consists of two words: sarx (flesh) and soma (body).
That is, “the flesh of corporeality”, its quintessence, and at the same time, “a dead body”.
A ten-metre high construction is transformed by the artists into a steep crossing which receives and returns various bodies and objects. Up and down they move, alive and dead substances on hanging hooks: from dogs, sliding down the mountain and trying to climb back up, to half-rotted horses and compressed cars whirling in a fascinating mourning waltz.The narrative turns into a cycle of living pictures swelling, oozing, and bursting with hidden quotes, allusions, and paraphrases. And whereas the Artaud’s plague acts swiftly, burning through everything like lightning, the chronotope of the performance is a row of arranged static shots. This is an image of culture, exhausted under the load of its own knowledge and its own learning. Every shot awakens a referent, be it from the world of classical art (Pieta, Goya’s etchings), from that of high-brow cinema, from Soviet painting (Zhilinsky), or from contemporary art. There are references to Castellucci’s theatre, the ashes of landscapes and dioramas by Anselm Kiefer, and, finally, the artists’ own installations.
As a result, the performance is perceived as a precious crystal; in order to comprehend its light and mysteries, one has to twirl it in one’s hands for a long time, which sometimes might be agonizing and with a fainting heart.

Sergey Khachaturov

The video installation was shown in 2020 at the Volgo-Vyatsky branch of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Nizhny Novgorod (Arsenal Center of Contemporary Art)

Provmyza_Oratorium Sarxsoma_2020_additional visual material.pdf

Composer: Daria Zvezdina
In collaboration with La Gol Voice Theatre (performers: Alyona Verin-Galitskaya and Daniil Shaposhnik)
The work was created with the support of Dmitry Volkov, SDV Arts & Science Foundation and the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation
The artists express their gratitude to the Volgo-Vyatsky branch of the Pushkin State Museum of FIne Arts, “Cultural Capital of the Volga Region” Foundation and “Dreamlaser” Studio