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Group exhibition showcasing artists friendly to szena gallery in the summer slot
Artists: Apollinaria Broche, Kirill Garshin, Anton Kushaev, Igor Samolet, Aleksei Taruts, Andrey Shental, Sof’ya Shpurova
A ritual belongs to symbolic forms of behavior, and the process of a structured production of hidden meanings makes a ritual akin to artistic practice.
We can trace the connection between the creation of a strong, existential work and a timeline, regulating the routine, appears. In the contemporary disorienting world the ritual gives us tranquility, due to it’s appearing simplicity, naivety, and availability of knowledge. It also lets us arrange the everyday in a way that subjugates life, with its domestic expenses, freeing time and resources for work of the mind. It should be noted, that these practices, and the belief in the influence of unseen and unmeasurable energies is sustained due to the fact that, to a certain extent, they are effective if truly believed. But is there a connection between ritual and artistic practice?
The ritual rarely manifests itself to the viewer through a mystical sacrament, sometimes it is hidden from the wider public altogether. The artist may allude to the ritual through objects and materials, used in their work, through adopted symbols and principles of ceremonials, form and pattern, they can create personal mythologies and embed their practices into discourse. Just as our everyday life is laced with an invisible web of rituals, art is inextricably connected with the field of intuitive archaic knowledge.
As a work of art is created, as when a ritual is carried out, a special plane of matter is constructed-a semiotic double of reality. Symbolic forms of behaviour hold a higher power over people in comparison to natural forms, ritual endows this sistem with meanings which it possibly doesn’t carry. This is where the duality of all phenomena comes from, the ability to be one thing in the everyday, and completely other in the artistic plane. This duality provides a surprisingly fast shift from the commonplace to the value of ritual and the processes in art itself. Therefore, the embedding of rituals into artistic practice restores the transcendental status of the rituals of everyday life.
Daria Yartseva
