THE SALVATION OF SPACES, December
1997

Salnikov Vladimir, Fomenko Vadim, Kotyol Nina

THE SALVATION OF SPACES
Vladimir Salnikov

COLLAPSE-SPHERE
Nina Kotel/Vadim Fomenko

Art Media Center "TV Gallery", Art Manege'97

The project "Salvation of Spaces" by Vladimir Salnikov presents a unique work that examines religion being transformed under the influence of widely spread television and computer networks in society. The artist invented his own "dogma" - post-theological doctrine of the era of electronic technologies, and appeared as a TV "preacher", gathering his flock among the visitors of galleries, art fairs and just curious ones. The project, as a working model of religion organisation in future, has been operating for four years. It is being carried out in the form of lectures, discussions with adepts and opponents in "live air", installations with video and printed documentation on ceremonies and discussions. This is the first example of a completely virtual work. All communication between the preacher and believers is going on not by direct physical contacts, but by means of TV and Internet.

Video installation "Collapse-sphere" is a sort of peculiar archive of disasters, determining the borders of physical salvation. A human being is always trying to cut himself off the dangers. The elements are being tamed. Wild landscape is turning into a set of picture post-cards, while passion is becoming a safe sex. Still, all the efforts to provide safety are too much vulnerable. The elements and destructive forces hidden in the creations of man and human societies and even in man himself, will be always hampering physical salvation. For a long time Nina Kotel, the installation concept originatior, has been working both on the themes of man being the source of ecological threat to nature, and, on the contrary, of wild and distorted nature by man as a threat to mankind’s survival. She touches the problems of compatibility of man and nature, trying to find the proper place for animate and inanimate objects (just remember the installations "Safety", 1993; "Traveling", 1994; "Poison Gases Decorate the Landscape", 1995; "The Cuts of the Sky", 1995). The authors arranged their installation on the base of the archives kindly provided to them by the Emergency Ministry. All the disasters which fragments were shown in "Collapse-sphere", had really taken place on the territory of Russia during the last years. The video installation has been made with the help of sophisticated projectional equipment, i.e. video projectors Sharp of a new generation and with the help of translucent screens, that let the audience enter the picture without throwing shadows. This advanced technical method has been used for the first time in Russia for arranging an artistic exposition.

c r i t i q u e

Khudozhestvenny Zhurnal (Art Magazine), 21
05.12.97 – 10.12.97 Art Manege ’97, TV Gallery’s Pavillion
Big Manege, Moscow
Irina Kulik

At Art Manege TV Gallery presented two already famous projects, "Salvation of Spaces" by Vladimir Salnikov, and "Collapse-Sphere" by Nina Kotel. Nevertheless, an advantageous and unusual way of their new presentation allows to speak about an independent art event, and not only about one more representation (this time in the context of the fair) of the works, which had been shown at the gallery space.

Anyhow, these two projects form around television as a certain foundation of the plot. Vladimir Salnikov accentuates his communicative function, a certain global TV net. A new doctrine Salvation of Spaces spreads via this net. Main postulates of this doctrine formulate the laws of mankind’s existence in the epoch of new electronic communications. In its gallery version a TV-set was, naturally, the central part of the exposition, as the place of a new prophet’s appearance. But the very fact that the point was not the broadcasting, but a video recording, revealed the real ironical state of the project: the prophet, aspiring to be present in every house and to communicate with the whole world, actually is present only on TV monitor and plays the oracle for a pretty limited and small group of viewers. Even the last seance of the project, when TV preacher suddenly began answering the questions of the visitors directly from the screen, revealed not so much the possibility of direct communication via TV, as fictitious, illusionistic nature of the trick – sooner or later everyone could grasp that the "master" was just hiding in the next room, watching the audience through the camera.

In the version presented at Art Manege, a TV-set on whose screen the preacher of "Salvation of Spaces" appears, is not recognized as a habitual object of everyday life. It is camouflaged by a huge lens, through which the personage of Vladimir Salnikov seems not a screen figure, but a gigantic holographic "head of professor Douel", whose electronic nature is similar to the nature of those virtual bodies found by the heroes of science-fiction, who had lost their human cover. Instead of parodying communicational ambitions of a TV preacher, we can see convincingly presented personage of a "posthuman" of the electronic epoch.

Video installation "Collapse-Sphere" by Nina Kotel also turns to a stream of media images. But while at the gallery space, despite their frightening beauty, images from some global catalogue of disasters and natural calamities, replacing one another on the screens, seemed a bit abstract, then in Art Manezh version (which became possible due to new technological calculations and technical equipment provided by Activision Company) where projections appeared on the walls of a small room, a viewer not only got absorbed into contemplation of this psychedelic and fascinating video sequence in the spirit of "Koyaanisqatsi", he really felt he was present in that world of catastrophes. While being inside the Collapse Sphere, as if exploded earth is moving under your feet, and the sky is melting and splitting into pieces over your head, and then you find yourself not in the midst of a certain disaster, but inside this Pandora’s box containing various calamities, which can be easily associated today with a TV-box.

While Salnikov’s project, "Salvation of Spaces", turned out to be alienated from a TV-set and became an attempt to represent new reality of the presence of the electronic world in those "being saved spaces", Nina Kotel’s project as if has been placed back into a TV-set, which appears as a storehouse filled with all possible in the world disasters, Pandora’s box, the entrance of which becomes an intoxicating hallucinatory attraction, and at the same time a meditative visionary experience.

TV Gallery showed at Art Manege not only its two most successful projects, b ut an amazing skill of exhibiting, which made both "Collapse Sphere" and "Salvation of Spaces" manifest their completely different and sudden aspect and which gave them new additional meanings.

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