UDOLI
Participants:
Ira Shirokaya, Tanya Nedelskaya, Nikolas Topor, Mike Rozenthal, Lena Kozak, Katya Khassine, Dasha Loyko, Rita Sokolovskaya, Tanya Silivonchik, Vika Nazarova, Maxim Sergeev, Nadya Molochko, Marianna Titova, Sveta Kovalyok, Yana Evdakimovich, Maria Trofimova, Azad Asifovich, Mikhail Iampolskiy, Ira Znamenskaya.
Udoli is a collective project, a multi-level ecosystem created by Hanna Zubkova in collaboration with artists, curators, performers and theorists from Minsk, Moscow, Paris, London and New York. Participants worked on the project from a distance, relying on text descriptions of each other’s works and of the gallery space.
For the creation of the Udoli experience, the artist uses the geographical location of Triumph Gallery that is surrounded by a police station, a church, a bank, shopping lanes and the Kremlin.
The topo-symbolic units shape a concentrated context of hierarchy and infrastructures. In this environment, the gallery appears as a designated place for art and simultaneously as one of the checkpoints along the viewer-participant journey. This journey can be compared to a peripeteia of a hero in a myth, a videogame, a saga, a parable or to everyday wanderings with unpredictable (or perhaps predetermined?) configurations of transition, trajectories of circulation and return.
The ideas of space, topology and infinite transition from one continuum to another set the configuration of Udoli, which in Old Slavic is synonymous with ‘valleys’ or ‘a life journey’ .. The idea of a loop, of a structure with no beginning and no end, where only motion and relations between points exist, is the project’s formal structure as well as the metaphor that inspired the participants to develop their works specifically for Udoli.
first floor
ouverture
It’s Here
Live stream back projection,
plexiglass 240×140 cm
Hanna Zubkova
The List
audio Performance, 5-15 min
Hanna Zubkova
minus first floor
arias
Paradise
sound sculpture, 28 min 9 sec
Tanya Nedelskaya (1983, Orsha, Belarus, lives and works in Paris)
Telefunken MC 100
Sound installation
Maxim Sergeev (1976, Saint-Petersburg, lives and works in Moscow)
Ad-agio
video performance, 14 min, 7 sec.
Hanna Zubkova (1988, Minsk, lives and works in Minsk and Paris)
with an independent dance theatre «Skyline» of Ira Shirokaya (1990, republic of Georgia, Abkhaz ASSR, city Gadauta, lives and works in Minsk)
Performers: Lena Kozak, Tanya Silivonchik, Vika Nazarova, Nadya Molochko, Marianna Titova, Sveta Kovalyok, Yana Evdakimovich, Maria Trofimova
Waiting for Grodoudou
Gameplay recording, 30 sec – 2 min
Mike Rosenthal aka Vector Belly
Echos from Interzone
video, 3D animation, 5 min. 13 sec.
Nicolas Topor (1979, Paris, lives and works in Paris)
In Fact
videoperformance, 3 hours
Dasha Loyko (1995, Minsk, lives and works in London)
wasteland
resolution
002040
Katya khassine, rita sokolovskaya, hanna zubkova
performance
The story is told of a group of coachmen in a small town in the backwoods of Russia who heard some disturbing news from the big city. Frightening things were happening in the world: bands of iron were being laid across the plains and forests of Russia, upon which an iron monster, who ate coal and spewed fire and smoke, would move three times faster than the fleetest team of horses. It was said that this demon could pull a hundred iron coaches and thousands of passengers. No longer would anyone need to hire a coach and coachman to go from town to town. No longer will merchants negotiate the price of a wagon to take their wares to the market in Leipzig. People were already travelling from Moscow to Petersburg in this manner, and soon these roads of iron will connect every town in Russia.
“And how many horses does this machine use?” asked Misha, the oldest and ablest of the coachmen. “None whatsoever,” said Grisha, who was the source of the news. “That’s the whole point: no horses, and no coachmen.” “Impossible,” said Misha with authority. “A hundred iron coaches, no horses? Impossible!”
“But here’s the letter from my cousin from Smolensk. He writes that the iron rails have already reached the city, and that next month the first of these machines will arrive from Moscow.” After much debate, the coachmen decided to travel to the city and see for themselves.
At the appointed time, they stood at the edge of the crowd that had gathered on the platform at the newly erected station. They heard it before they saw it, an unearthly sound of crashing metal and a thousand charging bulls. And then, in a huge cloud of black smoke, it appeared: a line of iron coaches stretching as far as the eye could see, traveling faster than the mightiest horse, a shrieking iron monster at their head. It pulled up alongside the cheering crowd, let go a final ear-piercing wail, and died.
As the crowd surged towards the train, the coachmen remained rooted to the ground, mouths agape, stunned to the very core of their souls. Misha was the first to recover. Ignoring the train of carriages and their disembarking passengers, he boldly approached the engine. Carefully he circled the still shuddering monster, running his eyes over every inch of its surface. He peered into the engineer’s cabin and crouched between the wheels to examine the undercarriage. Muttering to himself, he rejoined his fellow coachmen on the platform.
“Amazing!” he kept saying to himself. “What a horse! What a horse!”
“A horse?” asked his colleagues.
“Of course,” said the veteran coachman. “There’s got to be a horse hidden somewhere in there. Think of it—a horse, probably no bigger than a kitten, who can pull one hundred iron coaches. What a horse!”
Rabbi Yanki Tauber