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Alexey Pankin

Alexey Pankin was born in 1976 in Novomoskovsk. From 1999 to 2001 he studied in the Advanced Courses for Film Directors and Screenwriters (in the workshop of Fyodor Khitruk and Eduard Nazarov) From 2007 to 2008 he attended seminars given by Anatoly Osmolovsky. In 2010 and 2011 he took part in the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) project “New Artistic Strategies”, and he had a solo exhibition at the ART4 contemporary art museum in Moscow. His works have been part of group exhibitions in Moscow

He feels at home in the May beetle song

The title of the exhibition is a quotation from the work of German-language poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). In the final poem of his collection No One’s Rose (1963) Celan alludes to a well-known seventeenth-century German nursery rhyme about a May beetle — a piece of folk art that combines childish naïveté with unbearable grief over the loss of parents and home in a bloody war. The feeling of dread that arises from the paradoxical combination of a naïve form with disturbing content is present in the off-white figures frozen in small groups across the exhibition space.

Artist himself considers “questions about the genealogies of embodiment, the long history of representing the body” as the main thread in his artistic interests.

“I am concerned with how ‘body’ senses itself today in the view of the ‘numbness’ induced by the way that everything in the culture from before is now in simultaneous existence. In these figures, a reduction and hypertrophy of classical standards come into contact with stiffness, limping, bad posture, dizziness, alienation and not knowing how to play the guitar”.