Mariya Avdanina, Anastasiya Elizareva, Maiia-Sofiia Zhumatina, Sveta Kerro, Aleksandra Kutsan, Milena Malova, Dayana Mangutova, Anastasiya Frolenkova
Curatorial Text
To look at a person and all his deeds philosophically means to see a huge river of thought and its diverse history, continuously flowing from the ancient past to our time; it means to see that everything that a person does and creates flows from and flows into this history of thought. Art is one of the most important participants in this process; artists are warriors of thought, building ideas in the material-medium of their arts. The history of philosophy is a dry substratum of the most important thoughts of mankind. To offer the history of philosophy to speak directly in art is the leitmotif of the exhibition project “Thought. Handmade”.
Each artwork of the exhibition “Thought. Handmade” is a fundamental philosophical view or problem, once expressed by one of the great philosophers, and now settled and grown by the artist in the form of contemporary art. In the works of artists, in front of the viewer live, develop and reveal themselves complex and meaning-bearing ideas if Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bergson, Heidegger and Baudrillard. Taken out of old books, in the space of the gallery-workshop they become interlocutors: the viewer can talk with them about the deepest problems of life and death, self-consciousness, external and internal, space and time, reason and intuition.
The conceptions of art objects of the exhibition project are a strict and clear text. Its role is to be a clear link between the history of thought and the material object made by the artist’s hand, which is in front of the viewer. This text does not hide anything, but on the contrary, makes the content of the present art as transparent as possible. Like Descartes, we are convinced that in this way we will have the opportunity to learn something new about the world, to see the place of artistic ideas within the general history of thought, and, most importantly, to clearly see ideas from the history of philosophy as part of our life.
The Cartesian testament of clarity is also implemented in the floor layout of the exposition. All exhibits of the exhibition are philosophical ideas that live in the material, and not illustrations of these ideas. Therefore, an objective model of the internal unity of all exhibits can literally be brought to the surface. The connections of the exhibited works are verbalized and appear crystal clear to the viewer, guiding her/him in the interweaving of ideas.
Artists of the exposition “Thought. Handmade” are humble workers in the field of the deepest ideas of Western civilization. The exhibits at the exhibition are intellectual microscopes and telescopes that provide an opportunity to analyze the most important ideas that underlie our worldview. The caring work of artists, thanks to which the entire exposition appeared, is a continuation of the work of philosophers. Artists make a philosophy close to the life itself, sensual and caring towards the world and human beings. Through their exhibits, philosophy ceases to be an act of pure thought. “Thought. Handmade” fulfills Marx’s testament that we have to change the world, and not just to think about it; our artists have tried to turn philosophy into action, into painstaking work that replenishes the integrity of the world and makes it more human.
