On September 7, Béton Center of Visual Culture opened the exhibition "Future Dwelling". The main direction of the Center's activity is the study and promotion of photography, which is proved by the new exhibition. The authors of the works were the creative group "GrOM", presenting their rethinking of the future and what will surround us: sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes positively futuristic and robotized. Robotized also because a neural network was involved in the creation of some of the works.
The exhibition consists of large-scale digital easel works that show the interiors of rooms for various purposes - libraries, storage-warehouses, hospital wards and rooms of "mad scientists". What unites them is Tatlin's tower with the sphere of the Earth above it. It appears on the shelves as a storage unit or as a decorative element.
Why the Tower?
Tatlin's Tower, an iconic art object, was conceived as a Monument to the III Communist International. It is a project of a monumental memorial dedicated to the III International, designed by the Soviet avant-garde artist Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin. The construction of the monument tower was planned to take place in Petrograd-Leningrad, after the victory of the October Revolution in 1917. The iron grand monument was intended for the highest organs of the World Workers' and Peasants' Power (Comintern), which were supposed to be located in seven-storey revolving buildings. However, the building of the monument was not accomplished, due to the cooling of the country's leadership to avant-gardism in the late 1920s. But it became a "phenomenon" in its own right - a model of Tatlin's tower can be seen in Moscow in the Tretyakov Gallery and in the atrium of the Capital City multifunctional complex, in the Pompidou Center (Paris) and at the Museum of Modern Art. The capital's architects of the 2000s also remembered the creation, so the model of Tatlin's tower crowns the modern house "Patriarch" in Yermolayevsky Lane or you can find "mini-towers" on other buildings of the city.
Utopia of the future
Smart-technologies have found their place at the exhibition "Future Dwelling" - this is a well-known work, already 10 years ago exhibited in the center "Garage", as well as a new concept - "supposedly existing" smart watches, placed on an "alive" strap - this is how the artists see the future (in the form of a fusion of biotechnology and cybernetics).
Many of the works are "utopian", because in making them the group "GrOM" relied on the traditions of the famous Düsseldorf school of photography. These are robots, multi-figure compositions, creation of phantasmagoria and new worlds. Now photography is closely connected with digital technologies and the two phenomena mutually integrate into each other. Sculptural art objects "complement" the image of the new world that the artists wanted to create.
Elena Zlotnikova
