THIS OTHER WORLD OF OURS
1999

New British Realism. This Other World of Ours
Tatjana Goryucheva
Khudozhestvenny Zhurnal (Art Magazine), #30/31, 1999

The installations of young British artists – Ceal Floyer, Mat Collishaw, Jillian Wearing, Jane and Louise Wilson, presented in the framework of the expositional program, being far from what is usually understood as "realism", still operate with a concept, which Roland Barthes used to call "reality effect".

To introduce to the Moscow audience the art of contemporary British artists actively using media, the curators of the exhibition, Francesca Piovano and Gianmarco Del Re, were supposed to find such way of presentation, which would allow, within the framework of one compact exposition, to join various individual artistic methods, and at the same time to create an atmosphere for the viewers’ adequate perception. Most of the works selected were laconic and straightforward with regard to the realities of the objects reflected in them. The world seen through the magnifying glass (the camera objective) looses the clearness of distinctions between Our and the Other. In order to make out each other during the war, the enemies wear different uniform. In order to get closer, people discuss common and intimate problems of their everyday life. A popular device of using the contradiction between alternative concepts in the name of the project, "This Other World of Ours", turned out to be not a paradoxical metaphor (the curators, perhaps, longed for) but a literal characteristic of the relationship between the art works and the presentation context.

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