Arseny Zhilyaev

Yuri-1, fragmet of Cradle of Humankind

mixed media, 2015

The installation depicts an unsettling imaginary image of a far-off future in which humans have spread into outer space that changed the role of the Earth. The planet was abandoned and turning into a museum-reservation called ‘The Cradle of Humankind’, dedicated to the origins of life and civilization. The reservation is part of a network of museums commemorating historic figures and key events in the history of civilization. Museum presents artifacts from the imaginary past and weird merging the aesthetics of Russian Cosmim that inspired Soviet space program with the ultimate commodification of ultimate capitalism, a modernistic aspiration to radical innovation with a preservation impulse of Orthodox Christianity. And, it is an anti-utopian vision of museum based on entertainment and commercialisation even in a case of resurrecting of predecessors of Earth-born humans as a special offer in a museum shop. The artistic research uses the exhibition as its medium and opens up an ambivalent role of the museum institution resisting the destruction of the political and the economical condition under which it exists and at the same becoming its avant-garde.

Arsenij Žiljajev

Tsiolkovsky. Second Advent

mixed media, 2015-2016

“[T]he contemporary art of the future and the artists who create it will face the final and most important problem in overcoming the finiteness of the universe, which has been expanding since the Big Bang, but which will have its ultimate fate in the Big Crunch, or in heat death due to increasing entropy. The avant-garde cosmic museum will grow boundless along with its architects, who will have to make their last effort to accomplish the mission. The effort will consist of creating conditions required for museumification and the subsequent artistic resurrection of the whole universe, from the Big Bang until the end of time. Only then can the mission of contemporary art and the cosmic museum, as we see it today, be considered complete.”

Fragment from a text by Arseny Zhilzaev Second Advents: On the Issue of Planning in Contemporary Art.