David Ter-Oganyan

Speed of light

David Ter-Oganyan is a prominent artist of Russian Conceptualism. In 2004 he was awarded the first Black Square prize, a Russian national contemporary art award. In 2005 his project titled This is not a Bomb was a rage in Paris at FIAC, the 32nd Fair of Contemporary Art. Recently his main themes were based on the resistance aesthetics, on real and imagined fears and the overcoming of these fears through art, and relations between the individual and power. In 2011 Ter-Oganyan won the Henkel Art award, an international art competition held by the Henkel Company in the Central and Eastern Europe. He was the first artist from Russia to win this award during a decade of its history.

The Speed of Light show at MAMM is a project where Ter-Oganyan functions not only as an artist, but also as a curator, offering his viewers an opportunity to ponder the functions of museum space, relations between the visitors of a museum and of the artworks they view.

The project comprises several parts:

— Three interactive shadow projections represent people moving over the museum. MAMM visitors enter the hall, see «other» visitors on its walls and, crossing the rays of searchlights, join them, and are lost in the moving shadows, creating some other museum space where the real and the virtual combine.

— An installation based on Signal Systems (1950s—1960s), a famous series by Abstractionist Yuri Zlotnikov. Ter-Oganyayn invented an interactive game of Zlotnikov Unreal, resembling popular Balls or Bubbles. Colored geometrical figures from paintings turn into «shooting» targets, and the viewers become co-authors of an artwork. Similarly, Ter-Oganyan revised non-figurative and abstract art. Speaking ironically of the «high, elite» culture, he invites the viewer to enjoy the seemingly abstract images of light spots, which are in fact just after the mark from the camera, closed to the surface of colored paper during shooting. Purely formal, technical progress is the basis of the other «abstract» series «Black geometry». He cut a map of Africa into individual countries to outline the boundaries and moved on white canvas black «almost square» spots, reminiscent of almost the «artistic» gesture of European colonialists who divided the whole continent by the cells of latitude and longitude, ignoring all the local and national identity.

— Paintings by Ter-Oganyan made in the most primitive graphic editors, like Paint, will be presented in various media formats ranging from display screens of smart phones to paper and canvas. In this sense Ter-Oganyan is remarkably universal, he works with almost all artistic media, from quite traditional canvas and paper to new media, a special chapter of his biography is devoted to actionism and performance.