Artist’s talk: Tuesday 6 October: 7.30pm-8pm
Artist’s talk: Tuesday 6 October: 7.30pm-8pm
Opening night: Tuesday 6 October: 6.30pm-9pm
Pushkin House in London and Maxim Boxer are pleased to announce the opening of a site-specific installation Детали Москвы/Fragments of Moscow by Vladislav Efimov. This is the artist’s second show in the UK after his successful exhibition Safety Factor held by Ravenscourt Galleries on Cork Street in 2011.
The installation is based on an ongoing photography project started by Efimov in 2008, Детали Москвы, involving numerous images of the city.
In this work for Pushkin House, detailed views of Moscow interact with the urban life of London. Translucent images fit into the frames of the original sash windows of Pushkin House, overlooking a busy Bloomsbury Square, to be viewed from the interior in daylight and from the exterior of the building at night. Inside, in the building, a historic London interior is transformed by hundreds of circular images of fragments of Moscow. Downstairs, a film shows 9,999 frames of Moscow images from the whole life of the project by Efimov.
The installation reflects on the identity of Pushkin House as a London home for Russian art and culture. The current situation in some senses presents political challenge to the work of Pushkin House, and Efimov’s installation is an indirect reflection on this.
Efimov’s cityscapes of Russia’s capital are not glossy expressions of patriotic pride. They reflect the casual, unsentimental view from the streets and pavements of the familiar, long-term Muscovite. The camera is held at waist-level, creating images without dis-
tant horizons or wide perspectives. Often the eye of the camera is trained straight on to a brick wall, or on to an architectural detail on a marginal building. Just occasionally, there is a fragment of sky.
There is no life depicted here: no people, no cats or dogs; even birds are excluded from these views of the city. Only architecture is in focus: not the architecture of strength and power, but the architecture of Moscow as it is experienced by people who live there. Efimov depicts the architecture of Moscow in its unsettling contrasts, seen all the more explicitly when ‘displaced’ into the context of central London. We believe that the architecture of a city derives its forms from the ideas circulating in the society living there. How do we perceive the architecture of Moscow, viewed through the windows of a Queen Anne house in Bloomsbury?
Vladislav Efimov is an internationally known Russian artist who works with photography, video and interactive installation. From 1994 to 2010 he worked in collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev. He teaches at the Rodchenko School of Photography, one of Moscow’s most important schools of contemporary art. He has participated in group shows in Russia and abroad and has had many personal exhibitions in galleries and museums in Moscow, St Petersburg and elsewhere in Europe. He was shortlisted for the Kandinsky Prize in 2014 and won the Innovatsiya Prize in 2009. His works are in the collections of the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg; the Beaubourg Centre in Paris; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; the National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) in Moscow; the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, and many private collections.
Pushkin House
5A Bloomsbury Square WC1A 2TA
www.pushkinhouse.org
