Last Hour Workers

Moscow Department of Culture

Manege Association

The Triumph gallery and the Manege Association present a solo exhibition of Provmyza Art Group (Galina Myznikova, Sergey Provorov). The exhibition is held as part of the “Fathers and Sons” cycle, which aims to showcase a cross-section of the most advanced contemporary works bordering on film and video art. 

The artists have worked in different genres, particularly arthouse film and video art, installation, performance and theatre, exploring the trend toward the blurring of boundaries between them.

As the authors put it, “an artist can be compared to a sphere, with creative multiplicities playing within it, closer to its center, ready to break away beyond the boundaries of the form. Artists are to some extent prone to absolute creative shamelessness in their desire to speak simultaneously from various artistic grounds, placing risky hooks for different types of art”.

One of the most significant radical projects by the duo was the aerial sound installation Idiot Wind, which was presented at the Russian pavilion during the 51st Venice Art Biennale. The project’s main idea was to completely abstain from art’s visual approach to focus on the tactile mechanism of communication. However, their most well-known works have been linked to film and video art, which has allowed the authors to sustain their coherent signature style between works even with their unceasing creative search and experiments on the movie language. The artistic “videosummary” of Provmyza constitutes an attempt to apply artistic methods to grasp the unique mental challenges of humans by way of overcoming the overly confrontational and harshly dehumanized environment of nature.

The artists have counted more than two dozens of video works to have featured at various international exhibition projects. 

Many of their films received awards at international film festivals, including the Tiger Award for Short Film of 38th International Film Festival Rotterdam, Gran Premio for the Best Competing Film of 25th Asolo International Art Film Festival, Best Experimental Film of 15th Chilean International Short Film Festival, Best Art Film of 5th “Imaginaria” International Film Festival (Conversano, Italy) and others. Their direction of the film “Inspiration” made it to the Orizzonti competition program of the 67th Venice Film Festival, while their film “Eternity” received an invitation to feature in the Cinema XXI program from Director of the Rome Film Festival Marco Mueller (the Maxxi museum, Rome).

The exhibition at the Manege will feature four works by Provmyza dating to different periods in their creative path.

Karina Karaeva’s remarks on the exhibition:

“The Provmyza group has worked with figurative aspects of visual texts, offering an alternative setup of dramatic and illustrative codes. Playing on the narrative approach, the artists reproduce it as a feature of form in its cyclical nature, immediacy and, at the same time, aspiration to be perceived in a wider frame of impression, leveled down, though, by precision of expression and a certain academic style in the creation of the matrix of the visual text.

Thus, breaking up with perception means attaining a new status of origin of a visual idea, which dissipates in the space of recognition of visual definitions in their interrelation with a certain conservative view of them. There comes the constant replacement of the visual idea, its meaning and its interpretation, which can be viewed as an interrelation of different visual forces. This constant play, or rather flirtation, with meanings creates the emptiness of the narrative formal base, which is used by the artists as a zero image.”

Media Accreditation:

Manege Association | +7 (495) 645 92 76 | pr.manege@gmail.com
Elena Karneeva | e.karneeva@moscowmanege.ru, +7 (926) 576-40-53

Full ticket price: 100 rubles, special rate – 50 rubles.

18+