87 young artists and art associations, representatives of 36 countries.

According to the curator, the artists’ touch the most important problem of our time – environmental crisis, blurring the boundaries between “nature” and technology, the interaction of transparency and lack of transparency in the information age. We live in an era of discontinuity. If modernism was trying to get to the bottom – zero of painting, the basic structures of human psychology, and historical laws of economics – that today we do not harbor such illusions. Naturally, now that artists find inspiration in the uncertainty, ambiguity, ciphers and conspiracies, talking about instability and multi-dimensional. ”

The main project of 5th Moscow Biennale of Young Art with the theme Deep inside will be shown from July 1 to August 10 Trekhgornij factory building, one of the oldest textile factories in Moscow. Moscow International Biennale for Young Art held since 2008, its founders and organizers – the Ministry of Culture, Department of Culture of Moscow, National Centre for Contemporary Arts and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

The participating artists in the main exhibition “Deep Inside” include:

Ozan Atalan, Turkey — USA
Stacy Belevicheva, Ukraine
Matilde Benmayor, Chile
Julius von Bismarck, Germany
Pamela Breda, Italy
Vladislav Brut, Russia / Alisa Beketova, Kazakhstan — Russia
Ekaterina Burlyga, Ukraine — Germany
Olga Butenop, Russia
Martin Callanan, Great Britain
Noor Ali Chagani, Pakistan
Julian Charrière, Switzerland — Germany
Revital Cohen, Israel / Tuur van Balen, Belgium — Great Britain
Juan Covelli, Colombia — Great Britain
Chris Coy, USA
María Dalberg, Iceland
Jasmin Daryani, Iran — Sweden
Petr Davydtchenko, Russia — Sweden — Great Britain
Jonathan Doweck, Israel
Liat Elbling, Israel
Hüseyin Mert Erverdi, Turkey
Karin Ferrari, Italy — Austria
Christian Fogarolli, Italy
Verena Friedrich, Germany
Veronika Geiger, Denmark — Switzerland
Adam Gibney, Ireland
Iuliana Golub, Ukraine
Florian Goldmann, Germany
Katharina Gruzei, Austria
Logi Leó Gunnarsson, Iceland
Ali Jan Haider, Pakistan
Elisabeth Haust, Russia — Czech Republic
Joey Holder, Great Britain
Marguerite Humeau, France — Great Britain
Marc Johnson, France
Graham Kelly, Great Britain — The Netherlands
Daria Khlapova, Russia
Felix Kiessling, Germany
Paul Kneale, Canada
Fabian Knecht, Germany
Darya Koltsova, Ukraine
Lilia Kosyreva, Russia
Egor Kraft, Russia — Great Britain — Austria
Ksenia Kuleva, Russia
Joshua Leary (Evian Christ), Great Britain / David Rudnick, Great Britain — USA
Juliana Cerqueira Leite, USA
Ekaterina Lukoshkova, Russia
Eli Maria Lundgaard, Norway
Vlad Lunin, Ukraine — Canada
Steve Maher, Ireland — Finland
Nadja Verena Marcin, Germany — USA
Maxime Marion, France / Émilie Brout, France
Zoë Claire Miller, USA — Germany
Alice Miceli, Brasil — The Netherlands
Marina Moskalenko, Russia / Tatiana Smirnova, Russia
Lee Nevo, Israel
Alisa Nikolaeva, Russia — France
Ismael Ogando, Dominican Rebulic
Tim Parchikov, Russia
Pau Pahana, USA — Germany
Claire Paugam, France — Iceland
Davide Quayola, Italy
Marina Ragozina, Russia
Martin Reiche, Germany
Rune Rasmussen, Denmark
Farid Rasulov, Azerbaijan
Paul Rosero Contreras, Ecuador
Vesna Rohaček, Croatia — Sweden
Jeremy Santiago-Horseman, USA
Hadas Satt, Israel
Dagmar Schürrer, Austria — Germany
Julia Selin, Sweden
Jura Shust, Belarus — Belgium
Rustan Söderling, Sweden — The Netherlands
Emmy Skensved, Canada — Germany / Grégoire Blunt, Canada — Germany
Joe Sobel, USA — France
Wilf Speller, Great Britain
Yulia Spiridonova, Russia
Arya Sukapura Putra, Indonesia
Natalia Tikhonova, Russia
Alvaro Urbano, Spain — Germany
Ivar Veermäe, Estonia — Germany
Martin Volman, Argentina — Germany
Addie Wagenknecht, USA — Austria
Beny Wagner, Germany — USA
Andrew Norman Wilson, Germany — USA
Helga Wretman, Sweden — Germany

The fifth Moscow Biennale for Young Art, taking place this summer for six weeks only from July 1-August 10, today announced the participants of the main project “Deep Inside,” curated by Berlin-based independent curator Nadim Samman, who co-organised the fourth Marrakech Biennale in 2012. More recently, Samman was also a curator at the TBA-21 Academy, a branch of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary foundation in Vienna, and oversaw the Antarctic Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014.

Taking place in the Trekhgornaya Manufaktura, one of Moscow’s oldest textile mills, the main exhibition will feature 87 works by 93 artists, selected from over 2000 applications, under the curatorial focus of tackling recent issues in ecology and economics. The project will also tackle questions regarding the dangers presented by new technologies and social instability.

“Ours is the time of fissures, of prying apart, of penetration and cavities,” Samman said in a statement. “We are climbing, or falling, ever deeper into a kind of black hole. As we do, it is perhaps to be expected that artists should be fascinated by opacities, by occultations, encryptions and conspiracies—the other side of the event horizon. Also, that they should rhapsodize about instability and polydimensionality. Deep Inside is a view from the chasm,” he explained.

The Moscow Biennale for Young Art was first held in 2008, and grew from the combined efforts of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) to offer a platform for emerging artists. Now in its fifth iteration, the biennale—commissioned by Ekaterina Kibovskaya—continues its mission to draw attention to a new generation of artists representing recent developments in the global art community.

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How to Construct a Time Machine
MK Gallery Milton Keynes
23 January-22 March 2015
Review by Edwina Attlee

In his essay on the history of photography Walter Benjamin charges patent-law problems and a coincidence of industrious inventors as the cause for the accelerated development and misty history of the medium. Conditions were created ‘that for a long time ruled out any kind of looking back.’ (1) The irony is that photography created the conditions for a backwards-look, an arrest and exposure of the momentary that made looking back, both pastime and pleasure. What was it now possible to look back at? Nothing more than the optical unconscious. This was Benjamin’s term for the hitherto unseen, the blown up, the magnified, the halted and the reversed. After photography people could see, for the first time, ‘their posture in the split second of their stepping out’. It is its revelation of the split second that makes the camera a time machine. Obsession with the split second is not a new phenomenon as the 26 works on show here, spanning 1896 – 2014, make clear. Film, video and still-image animation make up the largest proportion of an exhibition that includes drawings, sculpture, musical scores and recordings. From the grainy magic of Georges Méliès and Louis Lumière to Teching Hsieh’s 8,627 single film frames depicting a year of clock-punching, the screen-based medium seems to be the one that is turned to and returned to for attention to the timely.

The show’s curator, Maquard Smith, set himself this question, ‘what is particular – historically, conceptually, aesthetically – to the recent temporal turn in contemporary art?’ He writes that each work ‘makes it possible to play around with, to transform and reinvent the ordering of the past, the present and the future’. What the works do side-by-side is in fact to reveal the opposite, they might desire to subvert and escape time but not a single one does. The medium of photography and film is satisfying because it can be manipulated; it permits the fantasy of slowing down, speeding up and holding still.

The art historian Carol Mavor has described her essay on nostology (the study of aging) as ‘an embarrassment of helplessness’. This exhibition reveals the construction of time machines to be a similar endeavor. The machines betray a discomforting obsession. Their makers are desperate, compulsive, and I suspect, always to be frustrated. On Kawara’s date paintings are only a more legible version of the lines scored into prison walls, made by a captive so as not to forget. But not to forget what? Are dates so important? Are times? As Martin John Callanan’s ‘real time’ departure board, for all the planes in the world, scrolls through an improbable spew of lift offs from Ho Chi Minh City, from Bradford, from Tibilisi, the effect is nonsensical. These events (flight, waking, falling asleep) are both countable and uncountable, or, counting them does not add up to an amount that contains or stands for what is ‘real’. An attention to time does not hold it still, nor does it empty it of its contents.

Which is not to say that this is a pessimistic exhibition. Although redolent of Samuel Beckett’s gallows humour, a lot of the works are extremely funny. After all, a good joke is all in the timing. Thomson & Craighead’s ‘The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order’ calls out ‘machine, machine, machine, man, man, man, Morlocks!’ A number of the pieces give glimpses of a technological unconsciousness, the unbidden pictures and patterns that emerge from automatic systems of ordering. Manfred Mohr’s programmed expressionism uses algorithms to make art. The humour of these pieces works side-by-side with the discomforting sensation of the inanimate made animate.

It is always funny (and tragic) to think about what is happening at the same time as something else. Upstairs from the exhibition, in an empty Video Room, I watch John Cage and Merce Cunningham dance and make sounds on the same stage. Purposely near to one another but conscientiously dislocated they try to make their work without influence from the other. Cage describes it as ‘two things going on at the same time, which is characteristic of life’. It is the ‘at the same time’ which is the most contemporary of concerns for the time machines whirring in the gallery below. Current technologies make simultaneity visible, splitting seconds and distributing their image. The desperate work of the self-consciously timed machines continues – and the clocks still work.

(1) Walter Benjamin, ‘Brief History of Photography’, One-way Street and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2009) p.172

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