BURO. ИEW COOГ: KIRILL MAKAROV

This October, as part of the BURO. ИEW COOГ cross-cultural festival hosted by Buro 24/7, the Cosmoscow Foundation will open the exhibition project “20:20. Time has stood still" at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. It explores new rituals and habits that appeared or exacerbated in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic and general social instability. As a preview of the exhibition, St. Petersburg artist Kirill Makarov presents his new project “The Sun Has a Musky Taste in a Salty Sand” created in collaboration with the poet and psychoanalyst Ksenia Kononenko.

The project is a virtual play space combining elements of media technology, art and poetry. By placing objects of everyday experience into the ‘game’ space and working with various types of language products, the authors use the mechanics of constantly updating the world in the virtual space, and by adding a neural network to the game to constantly generate new objects and maps, the artist expands the user interactive experience. The world into which the player is immersed is unstable and variable, it adapts to people and give them maximum freedom. The world created by the authors brings together poetry and art objects together in a decision to encourage the ‘player’ to interact with the phenomena of excessive beauty and structural nonsense. Makarov is close to Pierre Huyghe’s concept of intensifying the real: in the world of visual poetry, boredom, indifference, mistakes and restrictions on movement transferred from the real world serve as something like dotted lines, borderline states, denoting the possibilities of interaction with virtual reality, hinting at possible interpretation and questions, working to support desire, thought and action. The artist sets himself the goal of creating a new toolkit, a place for experiencing subjectivity in a world where we all feel the lack of basic things for the human – lack of time, lack of beauty, lack of meaning. In addition, the game includes a neural network that regularly generates new objects and maps, which expands the user experience. The artistic universe of Makarov resembles an artist's studio turned inside out or his working desk. Its key imagery is transformed into characters that can be perceived in different ways, which helps players to come up with new ways to interact with reality and with other people. The artist sees the goal of the project as creating a new space and tools so that in a world where there is a lack of time, beauty and meaning, each of us would feel like himself.

Kirill Makarov was born in Leningrad in 1988. He graduated from the Stieglitz St. Petersburg State Academy of Art and Industry. Kirill is an artist working with various media, including painting and computer graphics, exploring game engines and human relations with images and the machines that produce them. The art of Kirill Makarov is based on very different and sometimes seemingly incompatible technical and artistic means and approaches. Despite the fact that Makarov’s artistic practices mostly result in paintings, it is always preceded by practices that go far beyond the classical approach to their creation. For a long time, the artist's imagination was occupied by experiments revising the canons of painting. He wondered how it would adapt to the realities of the present era, a time when the transformations of the social and political fabric are in a state of drift.