All the works were specially created for Moscow exhibition. The project portrays the reconsideration of modern civilization paradoxes, described in an immortal work “The Consumer Society” by Jean Baudrillard. Assuming the process of meal as a basis, literally – ingestion, which is one of the most important factors of human existence, the artists expand the limits of this concept into the process of consumption in a global, metaphysical sense, including cultural values as well as natural resources and mass-media. In fact, all these things are a simulacrum, which camouflages a hidden deficit. One has turned into a consumption machine, earning money to spend it again on consumption – and that goes round as a looping process.
The manipulation of consumption explains the paradoxes of modern civilization, where poverty, war and aesthetic medicine are essential in order to pursue the same goal – to increase production. Ritualizing of meaningless signs came up to replace a vivid culture and individuality. Who else but the artists will focus on it? Each participant of the project “The Feast of Being” is giving way to his own reflection in a peculiar and symbolic artistic manner, trying to discover an acute problem of misplacing ideas, duality and bipolarity of contemporary existence.
Irina Drozd in her large canvas “The White Matinee” portrays innocent children in white clothes eating something blood red with great relish. These children enter and become familiar with the frightening world of adults. Ivan Plush is creating something like “sanctuary” out of IKEA tables – hosanna for the meal. Calling the ghosts from the abandoned town, “The Frontier Island” by Tatyana Podmarkova demonstrates a devastating effect that human population makes on the Earth. In the video “Function?” Veronika Rudyeva-Ryazantseva shows feminine and masculine topless bodies, where the female breast filled with milk embodies natural phenomena, and the male body is associated with the constructive and in the same time destructive power of human beings. The relevance of the exhibition lies in the fact that the artists reconsidered the theory of consumption society, having expressed their attitude towards the problem in their works of art.
Alyona Lapina