EliKuka

Revolt of World Order Training Simulators

Curator: Anna Zaitseva

EliKuka collective, whose title is made up of two halves of the last names of its participants — Oleg Eliseev and Evgeny Kukoverov, — has declared itself on the Moscow art scene in 2007. Since then they have shown a number of solo projects in Moscow, London and Paris and participated in significant group projects such as «The Russian lettrism» (House of Artists, Moscow) and «Relative Links» (Etaji, St. Petersburg).

Exhibition at MAMM is the first solo exhibition of Elikuka in the museum space. In this new project, which is executed specifically for MAMM, the artists in their usual manner are testing existing world order, exposing and exacerbating its absurdity, throwing in a fair amount of chaos and inviting viewers to take an active part in this exciting process. The popular saying that the world is interconnected gets a literal embodiment in Elikuka’s project, as all of the objects in their interactive installation are linked with ropes, and the viewer is free to interfere as he wishes with the order established by the artists. According to the artists: «If you connect all of the objects and all of the people in the world with ropes, passing through a system of pulleys, then every individual and every insensitive oaf, even the president, will no longer feel so terribly lonely.» In this case, the viewer must keep in mind that the artists retain the world order’s right to strike back. It is no accident the epigraph to the exhibition is an excerpt from the announcement of the film «The Return of the Living Dead»: «An out-of-town medical storage facility is home to containers of zombies, sent there by mistake many years ago. On one not-so-beautiful day one of the seals is broken, poisonous gas has escaped. Already, the dead from a nearby cemetery have left their quiet haven and risen, to feast on the brains of the living ...»

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