FOCUSES

Opening: May 25, 7 pm

Moscow Museum and Exhibition Association Manege, Triumph Gallery and Media Art Lab Center of Art and Culture present a first solo exhibition of Sasha Pirogova, Focuses. The show will continue the “Fathers and Sons” series showcasing the most relevant works bordering on filmmaking and videoart.

Winner of the Innovation Prize Sasha Pirogova explores movement and its possibilities, combining modern choreography with new tools of video editing. The exhibition Focuses features three works: «Queue» (2014), «Rundling» (2015), «Agon» (2016), which have three focal points — text, place, and process.

In the work «Queue» fragments of the eponymous novel by Vladimir Sorokin portraying the times of the scarce supplies of food and goods in the mid-1980s are accompanying the ritual motion within an infinite loop. The flow of redundant chatter within the collective mind of the doomed is structured by the artist as a march with elements of tango.

The work «Rundling», which was shot during the residency in Leipzig, will be on show for the first time. To some extent, Sasha Pirogova, a physicist by training, gets back to what she had learned: she approaches «Rundling» as an illustration of the motion of particles in quantum mechanics. Moreover, it is also a self-portrait of an individual who waivers exact positions in time, space and history.

In the «Agon» the poststructuralist notion that both organic and inorganic life consists of various kinds of machines is illustrated by four episodes shot in a functional factory. A soundtrack for this work is written by legendary techno musician Anton Kubikov.

Art critique Valentin Diakonov describes a theme of Sasha Pirogovas’s works as «a fine line between a theatrical play and a ritual, between performativity and dance, which transforms rational movements into metaphors».

About the artist:

Sasha Pirogova was born in 1986 in Moscow. Graduated from the department of Physics of Moscow State University in 2010. In 2014 graduated from Moscow Rodchenko Art School, Video and New media course. In 2012 was a prizewinner at the Extra Short Film Festival (ESF). Longlisted for the Kandinsky Prize 2013 in the Young Artist — Project of the year category. In 2014 became a winner of the Innovation Prize in “New generation” category.

Media accreditation: Manege MEA | +7 (495) 645 92 76 | pr.manege@gmail.com