Happiness is a warm gun, Rizzordi Foundation, St. Petersburg, Rosja

СЧАСТЬЕ/ТЕПЛЫЙ СТВОЛ

26.04.-07.06.2012
otwarcie o 19: 00
wystawa grupowa
"Zabicie Stefana" 243x505 cm, akryl na ścianie, 2012























artists

Adamski/Brzuzan Dorota Buczkowska Bogna Burska Agata Groszek Aleksandra Czerniawska Malgorzata Gurowska Kobas Laksa Jacek Malinowski Jacek Markiewicz Tomasz Mroz Anna Orlikowska Aleksandra Polisiewicz Tomas Rafa Konrad Smolenski Daniel Suchocki Wojtek Zasadni Krzysztof Zwirblis
Anton Akimov Svetlana Baskova VVERH! Alina Gutkina Elikuka Olga Jitlina Irina Korina Where Dogs Run Elena Kovylina Taus Makhacheva MishMash Liza Morozova Georgiy Ostretsov Sergey Pakhomov David Ter-Oganyan


The name of The Beatles song from «The White Album» is a note from arms register that impressed John Lennon. Originally he called it Happiness is a warm gun in your head.
Today many Russian exhibition projects apply to protest theme. In the same time there is a tendency to simplification of the engaged art when the protest is seen as a product with possibility to get its short-term fame on the market. A lot of works rather imitate the engaged approach than they actually are one. The protest attitude in glamorous context of some modern artists’ mentality seems like a one-sided model despite of familiar irony and self-irony attendant to the contemporary art for many years.
Happiness is a warm gun is the research of human motivations, basic attitudes of society and its members in the center. Motivations cause any action leading to persons goals as an individual and as a social identity.
One of the tasks was to find and to show the real critical art as direct demonstration of the basis approach, and also the insider art dealing with it directly. It is quite possible they are alternative form of existing para-engaged art in its academization stage at the moment, as it might appear.
The exhibition touches on the power and the dominance concerning both interpersonal and social relations. But first of all we are interested in the basic reasons of the class system appearance. Therefore we apply to the individual and its subconsciousness, fears, existential anxiety, and searching for what we call happiness.
Every anxiety is filtered through mass-media products. Whether we would mean military conflicts presented to us as media shows or our “sympathy” demonstration – it only confirms and acquits this comfortable philistines position we are in, yet it shows both auto-compensation and hidden submission of ours.
Psychosocial mechanisms of suppression and control are often hidden – usually they are imbibed on unconscious level and are the reason of our everyday behavior. We can talk about many researches concerning the schemes of public life, however it was more important for us to consider the problem in artistic practice context: that the theory does not dominate over the man onlooking.

Curator Katya Shadkovska

With the support of Konstantin Boroshnev
Special gratitude to Katarzyna Sloboda, Olga Makushkina, Olga Donets
Poster Malgorzata Gurowska