MOSCOW.- The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition based on the film Under Electric Clouds (director Alexey German Jr, art director Elena Okopnaia). The project Now 2017 will open at the venue of a new MMOMA building at Gogolevsky boulevard on the day of the film’s official first run in Russia. The exhibition will be an artistic improvisation intended to show that an art process goes far beyond the demonstration of an art product. The project will include objects, photos, videos and sculptures, involved in the film.
Now 2017 is an ambitious attempt by the project curators Antronio Geusa and Elena Okopnaia to reproduce off screen the artistic concept of the film Under Electric Clouds, thus resuming the dialogue with its viewers in the museum space by way of an exhibition. The film by Alexey German Jr is a pretext, a canvas used to create new imagery. This project can’t be described as a mere compression of a film to fit into the space of an exhibition gallery or as the 3D documentation of a cinematographic process. It is far from being just an accompanying piece to the film. These are two equipotent if interdependent visual experiences. According to the exhibition curator Antonio Geusa, the exhibition develops as a variation of the artistic experiences dating back to early 1970s and known as expanded cinema. Yet, in this case expansion doesn’t correspond with intentions of the innovators from 1970s, precisely, to create a new cinematographic form breaking with the traditional one-channel 2D projection in a dark room and to develop new ways to tell a story through image and sound.
Props in the film are for the most part art objects specially made for it by artists and sculptors. The Dialogue, a large-scale installation of a flying man, has already been presented on May, 16th as a part of the Night of Museums event. Among the works on display one will see the openworked 280 kilogram metal horse created by the sculptor Antonina Faikhullina in her signature transparent 3D technique, as well as the photo documentation of a five-metre Lenin sculpture installation, the sculpture which appears in the film many a time and has been installed in the Gulf of Finland by the commercial divers.
Under Electric Clouds, a consistent and consummate artwork with a linear structure, expands into a series of artworks, which are to be seen differently by each spectator depending on the individual perception of self within the exhibition space. Now 2017 is neither a new form of cinematography nor a new form of contemporary art. It is the dialogue between the two. It may be even seen as a duet of art forms. The viewers enter the familiar Museum space to find a foreign explosion of a film created for a cinema hall. ‘Now is the year 2017,’ says the off-screen voice, ‘a hundred years has passed since the Russian revolution.’
The plot of the film takes place in the year 2017. The threat of a new great war hangs over the world. The lives of film characters have nothing in common, yet every one of them ranks among the so-called superfluous people of the classical Russian literature. It is the story of their life, battles and strife. It is also the story of an unfinished building their fates revolve around. The film Under Electric Clouds was awarded the Silver Bear of the Berlin Film Festival for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for Cinematography in 2015.
