Megastructure

еxhibition of photographs by Bee Flowers

In collaboration with the art magazine "DI"

With the support of the Embassy of Netherlands and the magazine "Project Russia"

Curator: Svetlana Gusarova

November 2 - November 22, 2006
The Ruined Annex

The photographic project "Megastructure", just as other projects of the Dutch artist Bee Flowers, was initiated by his interest in socio-political and ideological phenomena. This time the artist's focus is on the outer areas of Moscow that are usually referred to as sleeping areas. Anonymous, unbounded, living a life away from the inner city. This city in the city was once planned as a new form of housing suitable to the socialist way of life. Extensive research, with resulting norms and standards, was devoted to the development of typified housing projects which would facilitate the replacement of individualism with collectivism and would eliminate social segregation.

The project refers to the failure of a great anthropological Utopia regarding the equality of all people (be it in one country only), and to the illusion that came to ruin from human reality, and to life among the remnants of this illusion. The construction of socialism with the notion of communism laying in perspective was a kind of collective art project, and in its ideological-esthetic experience the viewer and the actor or a manufacturer and a user are in essence the same person.

"There are elegiac strains in these pictures of gigantic, uniform monuments to a failed idea, marking the confluence and passing of Modernism and Communism, anxious, with emotional shadows and only traces of the nostalgia for the Soviet era found currently in Postmodern Russian art. The artist brings us a studied contemplation hinged on largely colorless, cold, drab, austerely gray cosmopolitan outposts, looking more like fortifications than homes, simultaneously longing for, and contemptuous of, the recent past and the failure of its passionate ideology." - writes American critic Luis Gottardi. "It is always Winter in Megastructure. Snow-covered ground, numbing cold, the dark tracery of tree-limbs and grey skies predominate in these pictures, a still and sparsely populated frozen landscape punctuated by these huge blocks of apartments, whose moment has come and gone, the artist shifting and redacting their codification as they become recontextualized in the Post- Soviet era, from the status quo to a monumental requiem for an ideal."

Like the Dusseldorf School, Flowers has abandoned chiaroscuro in Megastructure. He chose a severely-restricted almost monochromatic palette and range of tones, reminiscent of the painting technique known as grisaille, popular in Northern Europe in the 15th & 16th centuries. But unlike the representatives of the Dusseldorf School, Flowers takes a more emotionally involved artistic position: the formality and color restraint notwithstanding, his images are lyrical. Flowers does not task himself with documentary "photofixation". Using different approach strategies to the same material he also diligently avoids creating a Becher-style typology, allowing us not only to see different things but also to look at the same thing differently. In the panoramas, which form a major part of the project, Bee Flowers keeps the uneven edges of the joined parts, transforming them into a frame. In so pointing to the creative process he deliberately deconstructs photographic truthfulness, inviting the viewer to interpret the artistic space differently from the coordinates of actual daily life.

Svetlana Gusarova

"The remote rational outlook of the artist on the world of the megapolis' sleeping areas becomes an expression of the world of ideas. All this is not like the notes of a traveler attracted by exotics and non-similarity of an alien country. Though possibly this may have been the starting point, at some point the topography of a specific place becomes part of a general conversation, involved in the context of a meditation on the global problems of mankind. And with the past existing in the present of one separate country, one city or microrayon, all this is projected to the possible future."

Lia Adashevskaya

"I became differently conscious of the city I live in. I felt captivated by its monotony of shape and color, its stark revoke of individualism, and its Modernistic street-phobia - that denial of the social value of the street as fundamental element of the urban structure. I was by turns puzzled and thrilled by the bizarre and raw rhythms of the randomly dispersed housing blocks that fail to create streets and boulevards in any clear urban idea. The whole suddenly seemed to result from a sophisticated creative system embracing at once controlled chance and even failure."

Bee Flowers
 

Russian version