Concerts Opera Dance Theater Gigs Exhibits

	NCCA The prize for Best Work of Visual Art went to "Lake" by the group Blue Soup.

State of the Art

The NCCA Innovations Awards celebrate some of the biggest names on the Russian contemporary art scene.

By Marina Kamenev
Published: March 28, 2008

Innovation was not the first word that came to mind when looking at pasta sculptures, reincarnation's of Malevich's black square and a video of two opera singers at the National Center of Contemporary Art (NCCA) in Moscow.

These were among 25 works nominated for the third Innovation Awards Ceremony, which took place at B1 Maximum on Wednesday.

The Innovation Awards, initiated in 2005 by the NCCA, are the first awards for contemporary art in Russia supported by the government. There were five entrants in each of five categories: Best Regional Project, Best Curatorial Project, New Generation, Best Work of Visual Art, and Best Work in Theory and Criticism.

The ceremony was cringe worthy. The opening featured art scholar and philosopher Iosif Bakshtein crooning in a black-and-white video as he was walking through the NCCA. Bakshtein did not take the Billy Crystal route and host the event; instead, it was hosted by film actress Tatyana Drubich.

Drubich announced the wrong prize for one of the awards, got the first name wrong when introducing a guest, and half-heartedly announced that Oleg Kulik would not be there to collect his prize, before the person presenting the award had opened the envelope.

An ironic interlude about women in art, by Aidan Gallery owner Aidan Salakhova and the director of the Moscow House of Photography, Olga Sviblova, dressed in black with white maids' pinafores, showed why Russian feminism might struggle in practice. The two sang and giggled through their own song with the only discernable lyrics being, "Can you imagine a man as an object."

Despite the awkward ceremony, the enthusiasm of the NCCA is commendable: It has served as a platform for many young artists since its conception in 1992. Curator Irina Gorlova, on a tour of the exhibition, even found something interesting to say about works that were not particularly attention grabbing.

On the second floor of the NCCA, there were sounds of opera, jovial music and banging nails, and every crevice of the room was taken up with artwork.

A particularly interesting installation was Ilya Trushevsky's "Metro," nominated for the New Generation award. Dirty, gray glass suspended from the ceiling hung above a stained aluminum floor. A beam of light ran across the background to simulate being in a metro carriage.

But it was Irina Korina who took the award with her ambiguous work of rocking furniture called ":-))." "There has been some controversy about her entry because, at 30, she doesn't seem young, and she is an established artist. But her work is fresh, and we are happy to have her as part of the competition," said Gorlova, explaining that a criterion for the New Generation award is that participants be under 35.

From a viewer's perspective, the nominees for the Best Curatorial Project were difficult to understand because they displayed just a sample of the exhibition that the curators were nominated for. A dozen stacked television screens were a small slice of Antonio Geusa's "History of Russian Video Art Volume I" that was at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art late last year. A sculpture of pasta and a photo of a cake in the shape of Lenin formed some of the display of Olga Lopukhova's "This is not food."

The winner was performance artist Oleg Kulik, with his evocative exhibition "I Believe," held at Vinzavod Center of Contemporary Art last year. "When walking through the exhibition, it was cold in winter and illuminated with fire. Audiences were given blankets, and they felt like real pilgrims," Gorlova said. The exhibition signaled a return to curating by Kulik, who is notorious for barking naked, like a dog, and biting audiences outside galleries.

The most exciting award of the evening was for the Best Work of Visual Art. The prize of 250,000 rubles ($10,600) went to a Moscow-based group called Blue Soup for their piece "Lake," a haunting video installation of an artificial landscape with a lake at sunset. The video is still, before apocalyptic snow fills the screen and calmly empties out the lake.

The winners received their award graciously to the soundtrack of the drunken crowd yelling that "Andrei Monastyrsky should have won." Drubich interrupted their speech to warn them to ignore those at the bar, and by then the show had lost its momentum.

Music blared, camera cranes hovered, and the audience was shuffling to get out of their seats as, to their relief, the perpetually awkward Drubich announced, "I think it's time I get off the stage."

The exhibition of nominations for the Innovations Awards runs to Mar. 30 at the National Center for Contemporary Art, located at 13 Zoologicheskaya Ul. M. Barrikadnaya. Tel. 252-1882.

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