Arkadiy Nasonov participates in Cloud Storage exhibition at GES-2 House of Culture. The works on display including Topos Lost – 1 series were provided by Iragui gallery.
The project brings together two groups of artists from different generations — Cloud Commission founded by in 1992 by Arkady Nasonov (b. 1969) and Dmitry Ligeiros (b. 1970), and Polina Abina with Alexei Sebyakin. These artists address archives and their roles in the life of society, methods of chronicling real and imaginary events, digital and analogue information, the life cycles of information units, and why one-off occurrences leave traces that remain forever.
The exhibition begins with an impressive body of artefacts from Cloud Commission that chronicle the association’s history from its foundation in 1992 to the present day. The art group’s name comes from A Guide for Determining Cloud Forms, published by the Head Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad in 1930. Members of the Сommission were asked to register, obtain membership cards, and fill out forms: bureaucratic language was intentionally taken to absurd extremes. Over time, the association was joined by over a hundred “registered observers”, including Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Olga Chernysheva, Pavel Pepperstein and many others.
Arkady Nasonov, a graduate of the Moscow Art Theatre School, has always played an important role in the commission. With his fondness for synthetic artistic solutions, Nasonov’s works feature an interaction between performances, installations, paintings, drawings, and texts, and create a complete artistic image. Motifs from works of popular science, Soviet films, old magazines, and various manuals and guides appear in his work. By organically combining these heterogeneous elements from the cultural space of the Soviet person, the artist creates an existential collage that brings together the rigour of the scientific approach, officialese, and an uninhibited stream of consciousness.
Polina Abina (b. 2001) and Alexei Sebyakin (b. 1989) record their chronicle of human acts in digital format. While in the real, analogue world every act took place in linear time, and the tendency was for things to end or be forgotten, in the digital world they are preserved once and for all. For every act that a person performs, memory and information about it will be preserved eternally, often in the public domain. The artists interpret digital archives as a report on the deeds of everyone living.
The title of their new work Alles habt ihr gut gemacht / Und die liebe Sonne lacht (You have done everything well, and the dear sun laughs) (2023), made especially for the Cloud Storage exhibition, comes from the last lines of a poem written by Albert Einstein in 1929 to thank his colleagues at the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation (the future UNESCO) for an evening in celebration of his 50th birthday.
The artists invite viewers on a virtual journey to a hypothetical world of fragments of information that will live forever, according to the Sebyakin-Abina hypothesis. Their life cycle becomes a kind of parallel to human life — with a single difference that comes at the end: they come into being, are reproduced in the digital environment, and then become immortal.
Cloud Storage will be open until 30 July 2023 at GES-2 House of Culture, 15 Bolotnaya Embankment, Moscow.
