Hunting and Eluding

I. Hunting and Eluding

Hunting is the desire to reach something that tends to remain elusive. It is the instinct of pursuit, the search, the game between the one who is searching and that which is eluding. It is a movement through the forest, a pursuit of a dream, of truth, of something hidden in the shadow of possibilities. The elusive prey looms in the distance, dissolves in space, leaves only a trace or remains unnoticed.

Izmaylovo was once the country residence of the Russian tsars and a place for their hunts, for which wild animals were specially bred. Artistic intervention returns the forest — now the landscape of Izmaylovo Park — to its historical mode: the forest is filled with artifacts specially placed for the viewer, but at the same time eluding him. The viewer, in turn, is offered not just the role of a hunter who must catch art in the landscape. Going for a walk in the park, he himself eludes detection as a hunter, merging with the everyday landscape. Inconspicuous art objects allow their viewer-hunter to remain unnoticed: the hunt is conducted on the horizon of double elusion.

II. Protected Area

Initially focused on the idea of ​​finding shelter, preserving oneself and what is valuable, the artists’ projects are involved in the viewer’s practice of attentive observation and search for objects: the question of the relationship between the natural and the human is raised.

The forest acts as a protected area in both the literal and symbolic senses: on the one hand, it is an inviolable and protected place, and on the other, an environment in which the new can grow while preserving the old. The transfer of Izmaylovo Park, like many other specially protected natural areas of Moscow, to the status of “specially protected green areas” allows for construction, road construction and communications. This turns the “protected area” into a kind of prey that actually needs protection.

The placement of art objects in the forest becomes a form of dialogue about the loss of the park’s protected status. The artists’ works hidden in the forest try to find protection from the outside world, a safe space for themselves and their authors, both in artistic and human terms. However, there is a realization that even this space is no longer inviolable – it is impossible to hide in it. At the same time, human presence and artistic action themselves invade the natural environment of the forest. The use of forest resources and the integration of art objects into it violate the concept of conservation. This internal contradiction becomes the central theme of the project: the desire for protection comes into conflict with the act of intervention.

III. Just a Walk

Taking the form of a walk in the park, the exhibition-action turns to the traces of the history of unofficial art, to the search for places where the artist’s voice can sound without regard for the formal structures of art institutions.

Inspired by the legacy of Moscow conceptualists — from the suburban practices of Collective Actions to the country exhibitions of APTART — the project refers to the events of 1974, when after the dispersal of the “Bulldozer Exhibition” in Izmaylovo Park, a four-hour exposition of unofficial artists was allowed. Fifty years later, this place is once again becoming a space for the search for artistic autonomy.

The forest becomes a space of free gesture, a place where an attempt to hold on to or unravel the elusive turns into the very possibility of expression. In the landscape, the viewer is invited to find the works themselves along the designated path — to conduct a solitary meditation on what is hidden in the surrounding landscape or to follow the route following the artist’s excursion, someone’s story or a random thought. A simple walk is revealed as an experience of search and discovery, where each work of art, both found and unnoticed, becomes part of a dialogue between the artist, the viewer, place and time.

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