SASHA SVIRSKY
Selected exhibitions
2022
The Master of the Swamps and some other Creatures
Media installation, graphics
Created in collaboration with Nadya Svirskaia for the exhibition DISSIDENTS at the MiCT, Berlin, Germany
Since the 24th of February 2022, our sense of normality has been wiped away. Everyday life has suddenly become much weirder than before, and we have faced the necessity to comprehend this weirdness. It is not a uniform homogeneous substance anymore. We are learning how to distinguish its different types now.
The weird heritage of the distant past is haunting us as a shitty horror under its familiar mythologized disguise. And glorious pictures of glorious historical figures encourage modern cosplayers to bring this horror into our present.
But being weird does not necessarily mean being terrifying. So, to navigate through this all-pervasive strangeness, we need to be able to distinguish hostile types of weirdness from friendly ones.
2022
Something has happened
Media installation
Duet exhibition at ASIFA Keil, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, Austria
Created in collaboration with Nadya Svirskaia
MusemsQuartier web
Something has happened, and reality appears on the surface of the virtuality we have immersed. One cannot simply say it is not that simple anymore. It has all suddenly become black and white. It has become that simple.
2022
Strips are going down
4-channel animated-media-installation
Created in collaboration with Nadya Svirskaia for Kunsttankstelle Ottakring, Masc Foundation, 10 June 2022 - 25 July 2022
Masc Foundation / Kunstankstelle Ottakring, Grundsteingasse 40, Vienna, Austria
4-channel animation installation made by artist Sasha Svirsky in collaboration with musician and composer Alexey Prosvirin, and curator Nadya Svirskaia.
Images of the real world are transformed into abstractionы, blending with 3D objects.
2021
Room with TV
Multimedia 2 video-channel installation, sound, graphic
Group exhibition 'Postanimation. Disorienting Effect'
9 November - 5 December, GROUND SOLYANKA, Moscow, Russia
Loose particles bound by cement harden and turn into concrete. In the same way, random sets of actions and things, becoming repetitive and habitual, are transformed into everyday reality, which we take for granted. But what if we take a piece of this very everyday life (a TV room) and try to expose its random nature by exposing this very piece in such a way that the usual order of things would no longer seem inevitable.
2021
PuWu-R / post-verbal rap
Solo pop-up exhibition
6-7 March, 2021
Qomnata space, Bobrov perenlok, 2, Moscow, Russia
The post-verbal nature of rap is not accidental - it is an offshoot of an ideologically close and equally non-existent musical and political project of the Linguistic Anarchists. The project fights the shackles of language as an instrument of enslavement.
As for the PuWu-R project, it explores the language not so much from the point of view of enslavement, but rather considers it as a kind of fetters or a parasitic organism invading the human consciousness, tying it to the very usual course of things that this project is designed to fight.
2021
2nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art
A Beautiful Night for All the People
11 September, 2020 - 28 Febrary, 2021
GARAGE MOSCOW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
My Galactic twin Galaction
6-channel video audio installation
"Any conventional language becomes an instrument for enslavement" argue the young rebels in Sasha Svirsky's animation The Concise Manual of Linguistic Anarchy, a radical statement that defines the work of an artist who keeps inventing new ways of pushing humans beyond their limits and expanding the body's abilities to infinity, all the while remaining faithful to the very recognizable visual style of the turbulent 1920s. Alexander Deineka's legacy shows through, as does Yury Annenkov's: the Red and the White in the Russian Civil War. In Galaction, as in his other works, Svirsky presents the viewer with a world with no central point of reference. The story is a mental escape from the standard nests of a commuter-town high-rise looks as if it was invented in the epicenter of the Big Bang. Alexey Prosvirnin' gritty disco punk calls in the listener to "fight the evil forces", and it is hard to resist this call. According to Svirsky, of course, "the good and the evil are both circumstantial. Often, what appears evil is simply different."
Curator Valentin Diacanov
EXHIBITIONS LIST:
2024 - Mixed-media installation for the Musao space, Masc Foundation, Vienna, Austria. Opening on 28 September
2023 - Group exhibition at the Animafest Zagreb. Graphics series 'The Master of the Swamps’, Croatia
2022 - Group exhibition “Dissidents”. Mixed-media installation ‘The Master of the Swamps and some other Creatures’, MiCT, Berlin, Germany
2022 - Mixed-media installation ‘Something has happened’ in collaboration with Nadya Svirskaia, duet exhibition at ASIFA Keil, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, Austria
2022 - Mixed-media installation ‘Stripes are going down’ for Grundstein Art Festival, Kunsttankstelle Ottakring, Masc Foundation, Vienna, Austria
2021 - Solo exhibition ‘Pu-Wu-R. Post-verbal rap’, Qomnata space, Moscow, Russia
2021 - Group exhibition “Postanimation. Disorienting effect”. Mixed-media installation ‘Room with TV’. GRAUND Solyanka, Russia
2020 - 2021 - 2nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art “A Beautiful Night for All the People”, 6-channel media installation ‘My Galactic Twin Galaction’. GARAGE Museum, Moscow, Russia
2019 - Group exhibition “Moving of Imagination. New independent animation”, TIAM Museum of History and Architecture, Tula, Russia
2018 - Group exhibition “GRA-FI-KA. New independent animation”, Solyanka VPA Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2017 - 2018 - Group exhibition “Moving of Imagination. New independent animation”, National Centre for Contemporary Art, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
2017 - Group exhibition Grundstein Art Festival, Kunsttankstelle Ottakring, Masc Foundation, Vienna, Austria
2016 - 6th Croatian Illustration Biennial, Klovićevi dvori, Zagreb, Croatia
2016 - Group exhibition Pictures of the World, National Centre for Contemporary, Art Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
2015 - Group exhibition STELLAR - WANDERING STARS SUITE, NORD/LB Art Gallery, Hannover, Germany
2014 - Solo exhibition "Anyway with two unknowns", Open Theatre space, Moscow, Russia
2014 - Solo exhibition dedicated to Mikhail Bulgakov, Bulgakov Museum, Moscow, Russia
2014 - Group exhibition PRICELESS CITY, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia
2013 - Solo exhibition "Worlds and myths of Aleksander Svirskii’’, Museum of Fine Arts, Stavropol, Russia
2008 - Group exhibition "Akkumulyatsiya " State Exhibition Hall "Gallery of the XXI Century", Moscow, Russia
2008 - Group exhibition tour "Prospero's Library", NCCA - St. Petersburg, Russia, Accademia di - Belle Arte, Catania, Italia, Tsaritzino, Moscow, Russia etc.
2007 - Solo exhibition "About scrap", Museum of Decorative Art, Moscow, Russia
2004 - II International Independent Biennial of Graphic, St. Petersburg, Russia
2004 - Solo exhibition "Worlds and myths of Aleksander Svirskii", Museum of Fine Arts, Stavropol, Russia
ARTISTS PRIZES:
● PRICELESS CITY Award, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia, 2014
● Prize of the Union of Youth of Stavropol in the field of literature, culture and art named after the Hero of the Soviet Union Alexander Ivanovich Skokov, 2005
ART RESIDENCY and FELLOWSHIPS:
● Academy of Fine Arts Artist-in-Residency Program, Vienna, Austria, April-June 2022
● MiCT foundation, Berlin, Germany, July-December 2022