Ploschad Mira Museum Center. “Both Aleph and Omega”

The Ploschad Mira Museum Center (Krasnoyarsk) is the largest exhibition and presentation venue for contemporary art in Siberia. The museum was created in 1987 as the 13th branch of the Central Lenin Museum, but in the early 1990s it refocused on contemporary art practices: during this time, it managed to gather an impressive collection. It was the first in Russia to launch such formats as the Biennale (1995) and Museum Night (2002). The museum building is a monument to Soviet modernism with many halls and levels, built on the banks of the Yenisei River. The exhibition space is almost 5,000 square meters.

“Working off the karma” of the 13th Lenin Museum, the Ploschad Mira Museum Center strives to preserve and extend the line of inheritance of the modernist strategy of art. As part of the fair, the center presents the works of two artists who were brought together by fate with the museum of “fidelity to the event”: Viktor Sachivko and Igor Tishin. The exhibition is built on the crossroads of the views of the quiet heroes of modernism and the faceted surface of the optical field. In the combination of “matrices” and “portraits”, abstract expression mixes with juicy figurativeness and conceptual narrative. This is how the pictorial and graphic geometry of the “peace square” unfolds as a plastic idea.

On the one hand, the master of heterotopia Borges peers into this flickering something. Despite the fact that he is the “great blind man”, his vision is of a special kind: from listening to language. The opening text of the short story “Aleph” swirls above the head of the Argentine writer. It tells of an encounter with an incredible point in space, in which all other points are simultaneously present. The “concept of aleph” also reflects Sachivko’s composite panels, demonstrating a pictorial “theory of sets,” a mode of diffuse contemplation of the world. Intrigued by the contact of the picture plane, our author confesses to a craving “for the iconosphere, a cloud where everything is mixed, where to see means to think and feel... and vice versa.” Based on the hypothesis of the philosopher Alain Badiou that a passion for the real defines the essence of the era of modernity, we must treat the heroes of the avant-garde as “realists who demand the impossible.” “To produce from the depths of pain, through the always incredible intersection of formula and moment, a previously unknown saturation — such is the desire of the century.” 

Among other conceptual characters of Tishin, the nameless “Little Red Riding Hood” from the scary fairy tale stands out, appearing at the moment immediately after being extracted from the wolf’s womb. Her face still bears the seal of death... But she still hugs a homeless wolf cub. It seems that before us is a “Samokhvalov girl” who survived the camps. She has deciphered the sign of “infinity”.

The eloquent expression “alpha and omega” (“from the first to the last letter” echoes biblical maxims: “both the end, and the beginning…”, “and the Greek, and the Jew”... This way, through its collection the museum tries to express the all-encompassing fullness of the world and manifest the play of flowing meaning: how the alphabet of truth extends from alpha to omega and the body of the word materializes from aleph to the face.

Sergey Kovalevsky

Art Director of the Ploschad Mira Museum Center