The film Siberian Trance (2016, 14 min, HD) has been produced as a draft for a larger exploration of material gathered during the Trans-Siberian Artist Residency Moscow-Vladivostok 22 – 28 September 2015. “Siberian Trance” takes as its literal point of departure a cinematic walk from the front to the very end of the train. This walk, featuring co-resident Susanne Skog as a main guiding character and the viewer’s perspective, has been shot in one take, smoothly edited to maintain a constant speed. The walk ends with a rear window view on the rails left behind during the trip.
The work acts both performative and descriptive in that it lasts for the length and real time of the walk, depicting a transformative environment of moving time and space with moving image. Its key concept is the very unstable motion during shooting the film and riding the train, a kind of shakiness that is essential to the artist’s experience during this residency: objects/subjects moving and being moved by the train, strange encounters with people resulting in shaking moments, a constant shaken and destabilised time. The shaking motion, the depth of space and the unstable transformation of the temporal-spatial experience of the train walk are concepts to elaborate further in a following work residency in Gotland, Sweden. The work was presented embedded in Susanne Skog’s and Nadya Gorokhova’s sound installation, both to which the audience can connect image and sound, in effect providing a closed circuit of works that further reflects on the surrounding working conditions.
The long term Mobile Institute project by the Swedish artist collective r a k e t a is presented in this exhibition with two interconnected research residencies. The starting point of the research trip is a knowledge sharing platform created at a wooden house in Kenozero National Park in Arkhangelsk region, restored and re-thought by r a k e t a, and it is followed by a week on a train reaching Vladivostok.
Trans-Siberian artist residency: anthropological research takes the theme of this year’s biennial – Eurasia – to a new, almost physical level: artists will cross this continent with the help of self-proclaimed migrating Trans-Siberian residency, staying on the train during the time of the Biennial (22.09-1.10). Artists from Sweden and Russia keep textual, audio and video logbooks, similar to those of anthropologists: soundscapes and images, taken with the direction as hearing, touching, smelling rather than seeing. This research trip happens between both the West and the East, crossing the whole country and constantly shifting the site while artists stay together 24 hours a day 7 days a week in a perpetual contact with an audience.The exhibition at the State Darwin Museum presents the material from both of these research residencies.
Read more about the project at 6th.moscowbiennale.ru
Organizers: State Darwin Museum, r a k e t a, Maria Kotlyachkova
Curators: Maria Kotlyachkova & r a k e t a
Venue: The rooftop of The State Darwin Museum
Address: ul. Vavilova, 57
Opening: October 3, 2015 at 5 pm
Dates: October 4 – November 8, 2015
Residents on the train:
Ilya Grishaev, artist, Saint Petersburg
Maria Kotlyachkova, curator, Stockholm/Moscow
Nadya Gorokhova, sound artist, Saint Petersburg
Susanne Skog, sound artist, Stockholm
Timo Menke, artist, Stockholm
Participants:
Allyn Hughes, artist, New Haven
Cornelius Stiefenhofer, curator, Munich/Arkhangelsk/Tromsö
Ilya Grishaev, artist, Saint Petersburg
Irina Peshnova, Arkhangelsk
Jens Comén, musician, composer, Östersund
Oleg Samoilov, artist, Arkhangelsk
Maria Kotlyachkova, curator, Stockholm/Moscow
Nadya Gorokhova, sound artist, Saint Petersburg
Sam Perry, curator, artist, Cardiff
Sindri Runudde, dancer, acrobat, choreographer, Stockholm
Stig Nilsson, carpenter & restorer, Kälom
Viktor Fedoseev, researcher, Arkhangelsk
Yulia Medvedeva, Artist Union, Arkhangelsk
& friends
/ r a k e t a / RAKETA _ PRESS
Camilla Schlyter Gezelius, architect
Cecilia Enberg, artist
Jann Lipka, photographer
Johanna Bratel, landscape architect
Magda Lipka Falck, graphic designer
Susanne Skog, sound artist
Timo Menke, artist
Veronica Wiman, curator, professor at Tromsö Art Academy
Åsa Lipka Falck, artist
Organizers:
State Darwin Museum, r a k e t a, Maria Kotlyachkova
R a k e t a is running interdisciplinary and collaborative projects and experiments within art, design, architecture and digital media, ongoing since 2000. RAKETA _ PRESS is an independent publishing house founded 2004. www.raketa.nu / raketapress.tumblr.com