SOSкa Group. Distance. 2011. Digital print. Variable sizes

Author

SOSкa Group

Year created

2011

Work Description

This series of photographs captures artists alongside stars of contemporary art, including Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons. The shots were taken at the afterparty of the exhibition opening at PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv. In the staged images, Ridnyi and Popov seemingly have fun at a party with colleagues with whom they actually had almost nothing in common: “The connections recorded here are a fiction of friendship; at the same time, they speak about the impossibility of communication between different segments of contemporary art and, moreover, contemporary society as a whole [1].”

The project was exhibited at the State Museum of Contemporary Art of the Russian Academy of Arts in Moscow, where the series was complemented by an installation that recreated the interior of the SOSka gallery-laboratory in Kharkiv. The installation contained kitchen utensils and bathroom furniture, as the gallery operated in a residential space that the artists squatted. Just as the series of photographs illustrates the distance between artists from Eastern Europe and commercially successful artists from Western Europe, America, and Asia, the rusty household artifacts capture the gap between the underground conditions in which contemporary art is created and the spaces of affluent museums often with an imperial past.