VIDEOS AND PHOTOWORKS 2002-2006
9 November - 2 December, 2006
Wednesday-Friday, 12-6; Saturday 12-4
Private view Wednesday 8 November, 6-8.00 pm
Matthew Bown Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo show in London by the Siberian duo Blue Noses (Vyacheslav Mizin and Alexander Shaburov). For up-to-date information about current events surrounding the show, please read the press release.
Blue Noses are known for their satirical and provocative videos, photographs and performances which parody and critique Russia's past and its present day capitalist boom. Their targets include political leaders, sexual and political correctness, and the platitudes of art history. Using low-tech methods they ape the look of high-tec. Blue Noses' intentions have always been to create work that can be understood and engaged with outside the restrictive realm of contemporary art; a populist approach for 'pioneers and pensioners'. Their energy, black humour, irreverence and sense of the grotesque distill the spirit of Russian art (and life) today.
For their exhibition at Matthew Bown Gallery, Blue Noses will present an array of works created over the last five years. In the series entitled Mask Show (the title derives from a Russian TV programme), the artists portray themselves in a domestic setting wearing little more than oversized masks of Putin, Bush and Bin Laden. The photographic works The Lady And Death and She's Going On A Date address taboo issues of representation in the post 9/11 world: the twin towers, and a suicide-bomber in burqa. In the series Kitchen Suprematism, abstract compositions of iconic importance to Russian art historians are reduced to humble arrangements of cold meats, cheese and bread. Blue Noses also show two video works projected vertically into cardboard boxes, Boxing A Trois and Bowling, which deal with sexual and gender stereotyping. Longer movies, including Two Against The Russian Mafia, will run on the gallery video display.
Blue Noses emerged from a loose association of artists active in Siberia in the 1990s. Shaburov's conviction that art should flow from the everyday was expressed in works such as My daily route from home to the bus-stop: photographs every 15 paces (1987); in his hosting of the TV show Guess The Melody, where he mouthed words silently and viewers had to guess the song (1993); and his receipt of a Soros Foundation grant to produce the project Tooth Repair, documenting a trip to the dentist (1996). During the nineties, Mizin explored performance and action art, making films which parodied the Moscow Actionists, including a series in which the leading role is played by his own virile member and another in which he destroys rival artists. On the eve of the new millennium (31 December 1999), in an attempt to avoid the promised year-zero computer apocalypse, Mizin, Shaburov and friends shut themselves in a bomb-shelter in Novosibirsk and made a series of videos in which they wore blue bottle-tops on their noses. The epithet Blue Noses was coined and stuck to Mizin and Shaburov; they finally gave up trying to shake off the brand in 2003, when they arrived at a hotel to find that they were booked in with the surname Blyunosez.
Blue Noses have represented Rusasia at the Venice Biennale and shown widely in Russia and internationally.
The Girl Has A Date, 2006, colour photo, 140 x 100 cm
The GirlAnd Death, 2006, colour photo, 140 x 100 cm
Kitchen Suprematism, 2005, colour photo, 90 x 90 cm
Kitchen Suprematism, 2005, colour photo, 75 x 100 cm
Kitchen Suprematism, 2005, colour photo, 75 x 100 cm
Kitchen Suprematism, 2005, colour photo, 75 x 100 cm
Kitchen Suprematism, 2005, colour photo, 75 x 100 cm
Mask Show, 2002, b/w photo, 75 x 100 cm
Mask Show, 2002, b/w photo, 75 x 100 cm
Mask Show, 2002, b/w photo, 75 x 100 cm
Mask Show, 2002, b/w photo, 75 x 100 cm