OWN PROJECTS

“Help me find a film” — this is how most posts begin on internet forums devoted to identifying films from descriptions. In just a few words, a person tries to convey what they remember of a film they once saw. Sometimes it works: the film is identified. At other times, the description is so vivid that it deserves a screen adaptation of its own. This book brings together comics based on descriptions that make the original film difficult to identify, but make it easy to imagine another — one that has never existed.

“Imaginary cinema is a wonderful idea, in the spirit of Borges. A film that does not exist can appear in anyone’s dreams, but only the most daring can bring one to life on the pages of a book — someone like the author of this catalogue of other people’s bizarre fantasies.”

Anton Dolin, film critic

It is remarkable. In electronics stores, customers have developed a peculiar ritual: they feel compelled to test the camera on a smartphone or tablet by taking a self-portrait. Whatever the result, they move on to the next device, leaving the picture behind on the previous one. Perhaps everyone assumes that the photographs will somehow delete themselves. Instead, they remain stored in the devices’ memory — sometimes hundreds of them. I collect the best.

The collection currently contains more than 500 images.

The exhibition is an offline version of an online project of the same name by the St Petersburg-based artist Eldar Karkhalev. The concept is simple: the artist scans his graphic works and puts them through an image search engine (Google, Yandex, etc.). Then he picks out the most interesting suggestions and places them on the project’s web page.

For the exhibition, the artist was offered to do the same trick using works of several young artists: Polina Grinberg, Ilya Grishaev, Mikhail Zaikanov and Asya Marakulina, all of whose graphic works are equally notable for their abstract and polysemic imagery. Everyday life used to be a fertile soil for creating art works. Quite predictably, perhaps, the search engine uses everyday visual material, too, in order to activate the possible meanings and sensations contained in the art works.

But it does so with a known measure of randomness. The development of the theory of computer vision, of course, would require not only the works picked by Eldar, but also all those that were left behind his artistic selection. In this way, the project serves more as the possibility of creating such a computer theory — in the sense that the artist’s experience is verifiable, repeatable and can be further explored by the viewer.

Andrey Shabanov, curator