NEITHER FISH NOR SLAVES solo show, Triangle gallery, Winzavod, Moscow 29.10 - 10.12.15
The name «Neither fish nor slaves», tells us that the presented here underwater society is impossible to control. The understanding of time is expanded, this is the silent world or the world pent in the "bubble". In these video installations and portraits of its inhabitants, the artist Dmitri Boulniguine shares his pleasure of the game and the metamorphoses like making circles on the water.
The dear to the author theme of "morphing", is reflected here in the process of adapting the organic forms of nature to the human forms or vice versa (video "Flowers", 2009). This time there are underwater installations set in warm seas visible under the single angle. These interventions convene the technique of "mapping" which plays with perspective in different volumes (the recent work "Aquarium", 2015).
Underwater the artist uses process of montage and associations commonly explored by the kids. Also he uses the experience of surrealists: when they claim an anticolonialism discourse through identification or even ownership, to perceive otherness. Local people are transformed into "faces to Arcimboldo." Made of composite worlds, each of them have his own logic carried by the waves. They are so plastic that not a single state or arrangement can be reached. These micro-worlds remind society of Thelemic invented by Rabelais in Guargantua: “How can I govern others, who can't even govern myself?” - the author doubts.
Our underwater inhabitants are representatives of a perfect society shown in a series of portraits arranged through refusing of verticality: came from a reality where the relations are reversed and lightness is shifted due to the water prism and the absence of gravity (video installation "Pour la verticalité", 2014). The society without hierarchy, without top and bottom, the seabed is a model of freedom with it’s approach to three-dimensional space and opposition to a flat reading.
Louise Morin
digital photo, 30х40 cm, 2015
digital photo, 30х40 cm, 2015