OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, November 11, 2011, 6 - 9 p.m.
EXHIBITIONS DATES
November 12, 2011 - January 28, 2012
Exhibition is extended until January 28.
ABOUT THE SHOW
Leonid Tishkovs social and artistic project DABLOIDS took its origin right after the fall of the Sowjet Union. Created in the 1990s, at a time when Russia was on the threshold to a new society, the project had to stay an unrealised utopia.
Now the Dabloids have come to Berlin: Comics of Propaganda-Dablus and the installation Factory of Dabloids which took off as an action in 2009 in the Kamvolnyj Kombinat in Jekaterinenburg, Ural (a former fabric factory). During this one-week performance, Tishkov paid the dismissed factory workers to produce dabloids.
The so called dabloids are beings of our consciousness. Their form reminds of a little head on a foot in red the colour of life. Dabloids can be understood as symbols for the burden of our personal experiences, views and prejudices which are part of all human beings. Some of our dabloids are to be found worldwide, some are just local. They are representative of all symbols and opinions referring to homeland, nationality or religion.
Changing from human to human, from country to country and continent to continent, dabloids are an expression of language, history and social identity. They are an ultimative symbol and have the power to penetrate our consciousness. This is why it is the most important task to banish them from our heads.
LADOMIR is a project of the year 2006, devoted to an important futurologist and poet of the 20th century, Velimir Chlebnikov, as well as other vanguards: Artist Kasimir Malevitch, scientists Ziolkovsky and Tchishevsky and finally the cosmologist Nikolai Federov.
In the year 1921 Chlebnikov wrote the utopic poem Ladomir about a world of perfect harmony bringing together people of different upbringings, religions and longings. United for a better future they build a new shiny world. At the same time, the inhabitants of Ladomir are prototypes for the chairmen of the Council of Earth.
Leonid Tishkov kneaded these people they consist of Chlebnikov-mass (Chleb means bread in Russian). In the centre of the installation stands the town Sunnystan. Consisting of Malevitchs Architectones, Tatlins towers and Popovs aerials, the town is surmounted by the golden nest house, planes and flying Tatlins. It is a fragile, poetic world which stayed a futuristic dream after the Russian Revolution. Today, macaroni is seen just as food and not as the shining rays of the future. But even if this world seems derelict and abandoned, its volatileness may remind us of a possibility of another, ideal world.
The third utopia relates to a project from the year 2003. From far the light of the PRIVATE MOON radiate into the winter sky and tell of a moon than fell from heaven. A visual poem about loneliness as well as being a response to Chesterton who claimed that a personal religion is impossible as is a personal sun or a personal moon.
The exhibition finishes in a long corridor with embrasures. This is where we meet the last derelict utopia: The CRYSTALL STOMACH OF THE ANGEL. It is at the same time the most personal utopia of the artist. Told in the form of videos and drawings, this utopia might be even more touching than the unrealised dreams of whole nations.