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| The Black Hand |
| a performance by Arseni Sergeev |
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The Ekaterinburg based artist Arseni Sergeev performs for two nights in a row on the art ship Stubnitz, which has thrown down its anchor in Amsterdam.
On Saturday September 21, the CEO of the Black Hand Corporation will be present to welcome visitors to the Tactical Media Lab at Imagine IC in Amsterdam South East.
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Arseni Sergeev from Yekaterinburg, can be regarded as a representative of an important new generation of artists in Russia, who operate both inside and outside the traditional art system. His work was featured quite recently in the exhibition Davaj! during the Berliner Festspiele of 2002 ( http://www.davaj.de ). Beside his work as an artist, Sergeev is also connected to the Yekaterinburg branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art and he is one of the editors of the art magazine "Komod".
Earlier he executed an art project-action "Agitation for Art" with the Yekaterinburg center. For the project artists from various parts of Russia produced works in the form of mass-printed paper posters "agitating for art" that were distributed throughout the city space with various types of street actions. The content and range of artistic manifestations was defined by the "leaflet' genre. From advertising of contemporary art and artists as useful, attractive, prestigious "goods and services", to the popularisation and social advertising of contemporary art as a life-style, a new religious confession, a party, and contemporary artists as political and spiritual leaders.
Sergeev is interested in the appearance of collective subconscious complexes of fear in different discursive forms, starting with folklore horror stories and ending with their use in popular culture and political propaganda. He is going to produce an art action based on ironic exploitation of certain elements and motives found in popular black stories and sujets. While the content of the project is inspired by archetypical images of traditional and popular cultures, its formal realization will be based on the sophisticated use of contemporary strategies and technologies appropriated from the media industry. Thus, it will become an art parody on methods of exploitations of "basic instincts" by mass media.
For Debates & Credits he has proposed to develop a promotional campaign, drawing on the visual language and aesthetics of comics, to promote a fake corporation called the "Black hand". This corporation claims to take on responsibility for all fear on earth. |
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