PREMAPPING OF DESIRE, November
2001

Salnikov Vladimir

The idea of this project goes back to the year of 1993, i.e. it was the word: , which initiated further steps. Almost at that very time the author started taking photographs of women at the moment of touching their naked bodies - .As a theoretical ground for his work the artist turned to Derrida's comments on Levinas's ethics, who insists that a man should unconditionally accept the different. Although Derrida calls in question radicalism of this kind. Then the project was shown at the exhibition of the graduates from Curators' School, Contemporary Art Center (1994). Also, Vladimir Salnikov introduced his work to the members of the workshop called Virtual Anthropology Studio. The theme of offered to the workshop members by Valery Podoroga, curator and philosopher, became the basis of the artist's conception. is a kind of a border which sympathy permanently has to overcome. Any contact is always a problem.

The dominating part of the video installation, projection on the hand-made screen, plays up the theme of getting close. Physical intimacy is usually controlled by speaking, which keeps individuals at some distance. To cross the border of words means to plunge into a whirlpool, it is always risky. Anyhow, the artist's touches to the bodies of his models are not so much the facts of his biography or documentation of his diving into a whirlpool, as the evidence of the ambiguous character of the situation, plunging into a whirlpool after some time, because all these situations of getting close only show the risks, just like it happens in a play or a movie.

The fragments from the artist's animation film (directed by Alexander Fedulov, Ekran Studio, 1988) shown on 4 monitors, give ironical comments on the main text of the exhibition.

A separate monitor shows the examples of physical intimacy basing on the history of painting, including both live and dead bodies. In bags there are presented some tactile substances; opening them, the visitors as if discover something different in the next different.

video 1: 128 Kbps. fragment

video 2: 28 Kbps. fragment; 128 Kbps. fragment

The site has been created with the assistance of the "Open Society Institute" (Soros Foundation). Russia