[spectre] Wtrlt: IT'S TIME

[Oliver Grau]

>>> Polina Gireeva <polina.gireeva at mail.ru> 7.9.2010 2:19 >>> 


IT'S TIME
Shockworkers of the Mobile Image, the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial of contemporary art


IT'S TIME the new piece by Olga Kisseleva and Sylvain Reynal will be presented at Uralmash as a special project of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial of contemporary art.

Uralmash (the Ural Heavy Machine Building Plant) is one of the famost  plants of the former URSS. Founded in 1933 in compliance with the plans of the Government of the USSR for the industrialization of the country, during the pre-World War II period, Uralmash manufactured its products (blast furnace equipment, sintering machines, rolling mills, presses, cranes, etc.) for the mining and metallurgical industries located in the Urals and Siberia. The majority of these products were produced from individual designs. At the same time the plant began to develop military equipment. During World War II large-scale production of armoured materiel was organized at the plant. At first the plant manufactured armoured tank hulls, later expanding to production of T-34 tanks and the SU-122, SU-85, and SU-100 gun tank destroyers based on the T-34 tank design. The self-propelled gun mounts built at Uralmash demonstrated their effectiveness on the battlefield as a successful combination of maneuverability of T-34 tanks and huge fire power of ordnance pieces.

IT'S TIME is an interactive installation that challenges one of the overarching question that pertains to the post-modern world, namely, the acceleration of time induced by collective behaviors, and the level of frustration it induces on individuals. The frenzy that most of us experience in modern life is the consequence of a bundle of constraints that were originally initiated by us: from the individual level to the collective level and back, the path followed by these constraints (and the stress it induces on individuals) is complex and meandering, going through the turf of religion, culture, politics and education. This complexity makes it difficult for us to fathom out where the path is sufficiently loose to be altered so that we may, eventually, deliver ourselves from a constraint we no longer accept.
This is this very path that IT'S TIME proposes to sketch.
The work is based on the quantum information theory and its connection with statistical physics, error correcting codes and Monte Carlo markov chain methods.

The opening of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial of contemporary art "Shockworkers of the Mobile Image" that will be held in Ekaterinburg Septermber 8-12, 2010. The biennial will take place in the Ural Workers Printing Press (the main project) and in four large industrial plants (the special projects) from September 9 till October 10, 2010.
Ekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk, is the capital of the Soviet Union's industrial heartland, the Ural. When the USSR collapsed, the city's many heavy industries fell prey to economic malaise. But today, Ekaterinburg has become one of the hubs of Russia's resource economy, a site of accumulation following an era of shock privatization. How should we understand all this new investor architecture, empty as of yet, all these new service industries, all that new imaginary "symbolic capital" produced by "creative professionals" and their underlings? What role does and can contemporary art play in such a place, when it comes to the half-operational spaces of Soviet industry?
Curated by Cosmin Costinas (Amsterdam/Utrecht), Ekaterina Degot (Moscow), and David Riff (Moscow/Berlin), "Shockworkers of the Mobile Image" draws together the work of more than 40 artists and filmmakers in a dense curatorial narrative.
The exhibition at the biennial's main venue is accompanied by a program of special projects, curated by Alisa Prudnikova (director EB NCCA). It inhabits the operational or defunct premises of some of Ekaterinburg's largest industrial plants and features the works by artists from Russia, Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Mexico, the USA, France, Finland, and Sweden.


September 9th  - October 10th  2010 Opening days: September 8th - September 12th  2010 Ekaterinburg, Russia

National Center for Contemporary Arts
Ekaterinburg branch
620014 Ekaterinburg, 19a Dobrolubov str.
+7 343 380 36 96
info at uralncca.ru, www.ncca.ru
www.uralbiennale.ru