Limits of visibility

A new exhibition "Limits of Visibility" has opened at the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, which continues to collect an anthology of contemporary art as part of the large-scale Winzavod.Gravitation. 

The exhibition "Limits of Visibility" features works by 42 artists, including Vladimir Potapov, Leonid Tskhe, Dmitry Bulnygin, Marina Belova and Alexey Politov, Egor Koshelev, Roman Sakin, Vladimir Chernyshev, Georgy Litichevsky, Platon Infante, Sayan Baygaliev, Pavel Polshchikov, Sasha Puchkova, Misha Goodwin and many others.

The artists explore the issues of vision and the visible, using a variety of viewing points. Curator Sergey Khachaturov suggests considering new ways of spatiotemporal communication with the world, shifting the focus of attention from central to peripheral vision and using visual bypasses, mirrors, oblique trajectories, faceted vision and other fragments to discover a world that cannot be seen with a direct glance. 

"In relation to the central, mainline view, the peripheral view is conflictual. It captures not a system, but a flow, not a structure, but entropy, not a whole, but a network of broken fragments. All these qualities correlate with the dramatic transformation of a person's new identity in the world and the peculiarities of his reception. At the same time, non-classical systems of visual communication make it possible to expand the boundaries of the universe, to include something that had not previously received attention. Thus, it is more difficult and voluminous to understand the world," said Sergey Khachaturov, the curator of the project.

Visitors to the exhibition can build an individual trajectory based on the map of the exposition located at the entrance, use an audio guide or purchase a ticket for a mediation tour. Tours take place daily 4 times a day during the opening hours of the exhibition. 

The exhibition participants touch on the topic of vision in a variety of aspects: from information consumption in the modern world to the generational footprint left on the apartment floor, from light refraction to the imprint of an artistic image on the retina of the eye. 

According to Khachaturov, "it was important to invite masters who were able to abandon academic blinders for the sake of faceted vision. Insects such as butterflies, bees, and dragonflies are endowed with faceted vision. The eye device in the shape of a convex hexagon is able to cover the full field of view. Many representatives of different generations associated with object-oriented art are invited to participate, from masters to zoomers and graduates of the Winery's Open Studios. The main selection criterion is the extraordinary ability of everyone to observe the unobvious and see the invisible." 

The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections, each of which presents different visual possibilities, limitations, distortions and images.: 

• The side view is consistent with the work of a collector and archivist: the art here is artifacts extracted from the border zones of vision. 
• The blind spot and the fixation point define two poles of perception: the brain completes the missing details in what it sees or fixes on the little things and details. 
• Afterimages are interpreted in metaphors, what remains after examining an object with a strictly fixed gaze. 
• The slit and the cut analyze new meanings of the unknown world that arise in the strange cuts of the everyday worldview. 
• The Amsler Table presents whimsical visual puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and optical art attractions.

During the exhibition period, a public program and the release of a research catalog will take place as part of the publishing program of the Central Research Institute Winzavod. The catalog will include documentation of the exhibition and research on a given topic: issues of vision and new vision will be considered from a physiological, metaphorical, cultural and anthropological perspective. 

Catalog book for the exhibition "Limits of visibility"

The book combines texts on modern vision, architectural optics, digital vision, philosophy of perception and bodily practices, and a special ins ert with a graphic novel by Georgy Litichevsky. The publication is divided in to a catalog and a reflection, which becomes an intellectual continuation of the exhibition with articles by philosophers, architects, curators and artists exploring the structure of visual perception in artistic, historical and digital contexts.

"The catalog does not record the result, but continues the exhibition in the text space — with its accents, shadows and distortions. Blindness and vision are not opposed here, but are linked in one field of tension. It was important for us to preserve the polyphony and allow the texts to conflict, complement each other and slip away," curator Sergey Khachaturov.

A special project with the podcast Talk About Art

Especially for the exhibition, the podcast about art, current exhibitions and important topics in art history, Talk About Art, will create a three-issue series dedicated to the problem of vision in the history of art. The authors are art historians Regina Nekhaeva and Julia Karpenkova. In the issues, they tell us how the assessments of artists' work are changing, new facts are being discovered, because there is no consensus on many questions, the answers to which are considered predetermined.

What does the winged eye mean? How are we flattered by the direct perspective on the canvases of Renaissance artists? What did Heinrich Welflin come up with for his students? The answers to these and other questions are in the first episode.

In the second issue of the podcast, the presenters discussed optical experiments that artists of the past were fond of, creating unexpected distortions of reality. 

In the third and final issue of the series, the podcast hosts propose to trace how technological progress, the art education system and the rapid changes in the cultural context are changing the perception of art. 

Artists
Baygaliev Sayan, Belov Ivan, Belova Marina and Politov Alexey, Bulnygin Dmitry, Vasiliev Alexey, Vasiliev Daniil, Gerasimenko Ekaterina, Gordeev Alexander, Goodwin Misha, EliKuka, Zhuravleva Margarita, Infante Platon, Katika, The Toy Team, Koshelev Egor, Lavrov Alexander, Lapshinova Anna, Lisitsa Lena, Litvinova Anastasia, George Litichevsky, Sergey Lotsmanov, Daria Maltseva, Anton Morokov, Slava Nesterov, Gleb Nobody, Alyona Paskhina, Pavel Polshchikov, Ekaterina Popchenko, Vladimir Potapov, Sasha Puchkova, Vanya Repkin, Mikhail Rubankov, Roman Sakin, Nikita Spiridonov, Alexey Starkov, Anna Tagantseva, Yakov Khorev, Leonid Tse, Ivan Chemakin, Vladimir Chernyshev, Elena Sharganova.

Project Curator
Sergey Khachaturov, curator, art historian, PhD in Art History, Associate Professor of the Department of the History of Russian Art at the Lomonosov Moscow State University Faculty of History, lecturer at the Moscow Rodchenko School of Photography, Moscow Art Theater Studio School, Senior Researcher at the State Institute of Art Studies.

He is the author of exhibition programs: the "Ulenspiegel" trilogy (MAMM, the Art Bureau, VLADEY), a series of exhibitions by the CTI Fabrika ("Labor Movement", "Manifestation", "Energy of Expectation", "Et in Arcadia ego", "Notation"). The author of the exhibition program of the ROMAN GOTHIC TASTE online resource at the Tsaritsyno State Museum of Fine Arts: "The Empress's Play Revived", "The Ghost Knight", "Hypnosis of Space", "Cosmorama XVIII", "Bird Concert", "Odoevsky". Curator of exhibitions: "Schwarzman's Helicopters", "Grositsky. Materiality", "Machinery of spectacles", JART (Vladimir Kartashov. Innocent pranks. Technorococo, "Ouroboros") in MMOMA.