PREMIERE OF THE "LIMITS OF VISIBILITY" CATALOG BOOK

The Vinzavod Center for Contemporary Art presents a catalog book for the exhibition "Limits of Visibility". The new edition contains texts by Sergei Khachaturov, Elizaveta Likhacheva, Eleazar Delagrange and other authors in the new edition. The book combines texts on modern vision, architectural optics, digital vision, philosophy of perception and bodily practices, and a special ins ert with a graphic novel by Georgy Litichevsky. The publication is divided in to a catalog and a reflection, which becomes an intellectual continuation of the exhibition with articles by philosophers, architects, curators and artists exploring the structure of visual perception in artistic, historical and digital contexts. The catalog was presented in a performative format: the actors, graduates of Sergei Zhenovach's Workshop, continuously introduce the guests to selected excerpts fr om reflection articles and interview fragments included in the book. The texts were read by Vasily Seregin, Victoria Khomchenko, Arseniy Kochedykov, Sofia Arzhanova. "The catalog does not record the result, but continues the exhibition in the text space — with its accents, shadows and distortions. Blindness and vision are not opposed here, but are linked in one field of tension. It was important for us to preserve the polyphony and allow the texts to conflict, complement each other and slip away," curator Sergey Khachaturov. Goethe's text "The Doctrine of Color" opens the "Reflection" section as a reference document for further reflection. Architectural historian Elizaveta Likhacheva talks in an interview about how peripheral vision shapes the perception of architecture, art, and visual space in general. "Modern artists like when their works are hung in white modernist cubes that have no context, so they try to include only frontal vision. But there were other modernists who worked more complexly, not focusing on the white cube. When you stand in front of a huge Jackson Pollock canvas, all methods of optical contact are important, including peripheral vision. You're seeing multiple projections of spots and dots on a plane at once. They turn into a relief. Even if you have nearsightedness, you literally fall into Pollock's picture," Likhacheva says. Philosopher Eleazar Delagrange offers a parallel interpretation of two cultural regimes — punk and Gothic — as forms of spiritual and bodily experience. He analyzes how architecture, sound, collective physicality and the desire for something different form special states of perception and self-determination. A special element of the catalog is the insertion of Georgy Litichevsky's graphic novel "Ola Vita". The comic combines fragments of ethnographic imagination, elements of shamanic narrative and visual quotations fr om the Russian avant-garde. "This is a shamanic story without a hero. It develops not along the lines of action, but along the lines of color and shape. Wh ere logic ends, drawing begins. Wh ere the focus disappears, an image appears," notes Litichevsky.