No, it doesn’t hurt
Noise Exhibition / 2021 / St. Petersburg / Individual Experience Space STYD / Curated by Alexandra Generalova
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to description
No, it doesn’t hurt
Noise Exhibition / 2021 / St. Petersburg / Individual Experience Space STYD / Curated by Alexandra Generalova
to description
to description
No, it doesn’t hurt
Noise Exhibition / 2021 / St. Petersburg / Individual Experience Space STYD / Curated by Alexandra Generalova
to description
to description
"No, it doesn’t hurt" is an "immersive performance" where there is someone else present besides the viewer. The noisy session lasts for 15 minutes (there are a total of 96 sessions). Before visiting, you are warned that you cannot speak to the artist, but you can communicate through other means. When you enter the gallery, it’s somewhat disorienting: a small room, no distance, darkness, and you are immediately immersed in noise. Mayana in a mask resembles a mythical creature. Stroboscopic flashes of light pull fragments of the installation out of the darkness. A fur rug is laid on the floor for comfort.
The installation is organized as an assemblage of strange elements, their illogical accumulation serves as a visualization of noise, or conversely, noise becomes the sonorization of visual chaos and disorder. Trees or stalagmites of a non-human garden — body horror sculptures made of silicone with embedded portable speakers. These are the bodies of noise machines, which are, in fact, exhibited, becoming true subjects of the unfolding act. The machines become flesh, merging with it (as in Cronenberg’s films): "And then they sort of came alive. Like first a voice appeared, then a mouth, then a throat, and everything else." The noise they produce becomes an analogue of the flesh that envelops them. The noise refers to that "something" within us, innate and internal, which is no longer strictly us. It makes noise. But that is also the flesh within our bodies: boundless, formless, impersonal. Flesh from within undermines the form of the body, growing with proliferating tumors. Flesh declares itself in pain. But it’s not painful (pain is not painful).
Noise represents a shock therapy, immersing us in reality (including that "something" within us which is no longer us). Noise shock adapts us to the reality in which we are disoriented, and, perhaps (as one would like to believe), tames or "enchants" this reality itself (endless streams of noise-capitalistic nonsense). In any case, through a sympathetic-magical gesture, noise "orients" us in what otherwise appears as a mere stream of noise: now we ourselves enter this stream.
Maxim Evstropov
The installation is organized as an assemblage of strange elements, their illogical accumulation serves as a visualization of noise, or conversely, noise becomes the sonorization of visual chaos and disorder. Trees or stalagmites of a non-human garden — body horror sculptures made of silicone with embedded portable speakers. These are the bodies of noise machines, which are, in fact, exhibited, becoming true subjects of the unfolding act. The machines become flesh, merging with it (as in Cronenberg’s films): "And then they sort of came alive. Like first a voice appeared, then a mouth, then a throat, and everything else." The noise they produce becomes an analogue of the flesh that envelops them. The noise refers to that "something" within us, innate and internal, which is no longer strictly us. It makes noise. But that is also the flesh within our bodies: boundless, formless, impersonal. Flesh from within undermines the form of the body, growing with proliferating tumors. Flesh declares itself in pain. But it’s not painful (pain is not painful).
Noise represents a shock therapy, immersing us in reality (including that "something" within us which is no longer us). Noise shock adapts us to the reality in which we are disoriented, and, perhaps (as one would like to believe), tames or "enchants" this reality itself (endless streams of noise-capitalistic nonsense). In any case, through a sympathetic-magical gesture, noise "orients" us in what otherwise appears as a mere stream of noise: now we ourselves enter this stream.
Maxim Evstropov