PROCESS, May, September
1997

Vitukhnovskaya Alena, Martynova Aliona

c r i t i q u e

"OM", September, 1997
Drugs as a joke, jail in reality Exhibition "Process" at TV Gallery

Aliona Martynova and Alena Vitukhnovskaya presented "drugs of future" at their exhibition "Process" at TV Gallery. As they say, you can get jabs, smell, lick and swallow them without any injury to your health. An epoch-making invention was illustrated by the photographs of a certain laboratory where the experiments had been made, by a guinea-pig in a 3 litre jar, and mainly by treatises and "scientific" diaries of Alena. Some of them she wrote in Butyrsky jail, where she stayed during a preliminary imprisonment on a charge of keeping and distributing of these very drugs. The idea expressed in poetical metaphors, is pretty clear – there are no "taboo" means in art. But we cannot be sure whether our Phemis will accept it in the same way – court examination is still in process. As for the "drugs of future" placed into test-tubes, they turned to be just colored scraps of paper intended purely for visitors’ imagination, and quite a number of them looked pretty disappointed. But it was ridiculous to expect anything else from the authors – for them the process is much more important than the result.

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