МХ_21_070

Rotaenko Anna

Moscow-based artist born in Khar’kov in 1990. In addition to making large-scale installations, she works with electronic music, video, and digital imagery. Studied at the ICA Moscow and the Rodchenko Art School. Nominee for the 2018 Kuryokhin Prize, won a special prize for the Innovation-2019 prize. Personal exhibitions were held at the Triumph Gallery (2015), MMOMA (Moscow Modern Art Museum 2016), Cité internationale des arts in Paris (2019) and Vadim Sidur Museum (2020).

Ringtone

During a war of ideas, art often explodes with an affective visual effect, and an artist is born “by accident”, affected by the mechanism of resource redistribution.

Vadim Sidur is an example of a post \ war artist. As a young man he experienced trauma; serving as a machine-gun platoon commander he rejected the official Soviet ideology; he became disillusioned with what he used to believe in; he was a religious person and was accused of producing pornographic work*. He described his “Coffin-Art” series as “the art of an era of equilibrium of fear” and created sculptures out of rusty pipes, industrial elements and dilapidated cemetery fences.

I am interested in the figure of an artist as a filter, who is involved in recycling and reviewing everything amid power reproduction unfolding around him.

The soundtrack for the show consists of sounds that call to action: an alert sound, ringtone, heartbeat, the sound of someone tapping on the battery, rave, war. Using metal-rolling materials, I construct an imaginary mechanism, a hybrid of a body that fires rockets (the so-called Katyusha rocket launcher) and a bell tower.

The belfry made out of pipes is an automatic acoustic instrument. The sound it makes is produced by motors controlled by a microprocessor and making a tapping sound in real time following the bell-ringing rhythm. The bell-ringing sound is looped, just like the journey from faith to repression, from war to art. My work is, in a sense, a monument to all the “murdered artists”, as Alexander Brener called artists that were forgotten or poisoned by life circumstances.

Graphics in the “Ringtone” project acts as a score, a dotted line that describes the cycle of traumatization and sublimation, the sound of a part falling between gears.

* In 2015, the works of Vadim Sidur, in which he refers to Christian stories as the embodiment of universal values, were attacked by “new Orthodox activists” and that moment turns out to have become an “accident” that has made his work the subject of new political speculation.

Anna Rotaenko