WHITE NOISE project by NOT A FUNNEL (Alina Khalitova and Ekaterine Predko)
Visualization/pseudo/inviolability
Or voicelessness as the ability for artistic expression
“My mom said: those who speak it openly,
they are put in jail…”
from an article by Anna Starobinets
"Darth Vader and Leo vs. Putin" (1)
St. Petersburg. City libraries. Contemporary Art.
What may unite city-place-statement? Silence? Or its exaggerated and frozen outlines?
"Silence is golden" - this folk wisdom, well known to all of us us from childhood, today is meaningful and clearly tangible. And it is more often applicable when there is nothing left but silence, or there is nothing to replace it with, or it is a way of conducting a dialogue.
The beginning of the 2022 season for contemporary art in St. Petersburg is marked by an event associated with the name of the famous Russian conceptual artist Alina Khalitova (NOT A FUNNEL group (2). On September 6, her art project "White Noise", consisting of three exhibitions, was presented to the creative audience as significant artistic embodiment of the current agenda (no matter how plainly it may sound).
Ms. Khalitova, preferring to work with abstract forms and materials of different textures, at this time, which is difficult and contradictory for all artists who continue their work in Russia, takes the liberty of speaking out on the theme of the military actions of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. She says that about which people keep silence now (especially in public). Ms. Khalitova visualizes a ban on expressing private opinion, which is not welcome to be expressed. It is the prohibition that people of art (and not only art) who do not accept the actions of the Russian government in relation to the neighboring country should /obliged to follow. She chooses not just the form of photography and video, but combines the mirror reality in her projects, its distortion, its tightness and incommensurability with what is happening outside, what remains behind the scenes and what is happening inside, as of a single person capable of empathy, so as of a Russian city (meaning places) where every person thinking in different way, whose anti-war position does not coincide with the " generally accepted idea" – is considered an enemy.
Ms. Khalitova transforms and frames every unspoken word, each contradictory thought and gives them a form, transforms them into a reflection/glare/incompleteness - into emptiness: pre-thinking, pre-feeling.
Ms. Khalitova places her works in non-standard atmosphere for an artist - the atmosphere of bookshelves filled with words / texts / books, and voices each of the three exhibitions with one voice, thus creating the artistic concept a single, indivisible message - not to keep silence about most of people keep silence and feel pain.
Ms. Khalitova contrasts the selected St. Petersburg’s libraries with elite commercial galleries. And this is not a whim - this is already an unwillingly accepted reality. Pushing out of the public information field, an embargo on any manifestations of “dissimilarity”, knocking out / scraping out at least of the word (“war”), and as the maximum expression of a punishable thought, “turning off” the open manifestation of the anti-war position from the resource led Ms. Khalitova to mask the exhibition as the areas of "frozen" non-moving images or “kingdoms of distorting mirrors”. She allows herself, the artist, and the spectator, the witness, to observe, moving from a point of focus and stillness to a point of variation, fluidity, and awareness. But what is about acceptance?
“The unusual spot for hosting exhibition is mostly due to the pressure from the government on all public exhibition premises in Russia. Such stories, unfortunately, are already familiar and concern absolutely all public institutions, including museums, various exhibition venues, as well as most commercial galleries,” Alina comments.
Technically, the idea is implemented through simple and clear actions. In the first premises called “Blinks” in the library after Frunze Ms. Khalitova (together with the second member of the art duet NOT A FUNNEL group, Ekaterina Predko) takes photographs of what is depicted in the windows of the library (summer Petersburg courtyard), prints the images and sticks them to the isolated glass panels which are of the same size as the windows (to be precise, with window glass) so that these images replace the street view.
“Not a XVII century tromp l'oeil” is the second space for the “White Noise” project in the Sovremennik library, where Ms. Khalitova tightly seals the window with a photograph of “yesterday” taken the day before, thereby again depriving the viewer of the right to observe what is happening outside the premises. The viewer can only see his own reflection (like on the first spot). Exactly there, on the opposite wall in the center, there is a picture-photograph of the very wall on which the photograph is placed, but in smaller size.
For the third spot, “The Black Screen of Malevich,” Ms. Khalitova and Ms. Predko shoot a video of what is reflected on each of the four black screens which are turned off, and then, after editing, they launch a video sequence for each screen.
What is shown to the viewer? What was happening outside the window and what was reflected on the screens in the walls of the library a few days earlier. There are no and there will be no clear images on the screens: only highlights, semi-silhouettes, semi-movements and semi-gestures.
“Like Malevich's Black Square, which symbolizes the end of painting, these black screens are the end of freedom of speech in Russia,” Ms. Khalitova adds.
All the photographs - first recorded on film, then on paper - a moment. Ms. Khalitova frames the moment of the past into the moment of the present (both ins photographs and video sequence on the screens). Isn't this the absence of both the present and the future?
The mechanism of absorption and reincarnation, peering and discovery describes a distinctive feature of Ms. Khalitova's art approach as a conceptualist. Meanwhile here, this mechanism functions as fear of speaking out, as vulnerability of presence and fragility, but also as not a denial of the “here and now” moment. This is the same white noise - an artificially created sound, when waves of different frequencies are evenly distributed and sound at the same volume. This is our everyday noise, comfortable for hearing, which is perceived as something between unpleasant sounds and absolute silence. But do we perceive it in the same way? What is hidden in this noise? How destructive is it or, on the contrary, is it healing? It may calm one down, other may get annoyed. And then our perception of external stimuli becomes obvious. After all, if internal and external fluctuations do not coincide, we lose balance, and the desired relaxation is replaced by tension / irritation / anger.
So, what is Ms. Khalitova trying to achieve by placing the partner-viewer inside her idea, in that part of it where everyone will be reflected in himself, from himself, having no chance to leave the zone of voicelessness?
She demonstrates us our degree of dependence on silence, more precisely, on its overabundance, reveals our imperfections in interaction with the outside world. When this world is set against each and every one, when it is static in this hostility and does not respond to our emotional involvement in what is currently happening, what do we become? How do we cope with the absence of sounds and the inevitability/weakness/meekness and acceptance of the lull? Do we give in to circumstances or, on the contrary, are we ready to resist?
Through the created spots, in which Ms. Khalitova puts together spot/ thought/word, the answers to the questions asked will be given.
“My exhibitions talk about forced silence as a scourge of today, when the inevitable quiet confrontation is the ability to notice silence and comprehend it without avoiding conversation, daring to plunge into this conversation and fix it visually,” Alina comments.
The capacity and integrity of Ms. Khalitova's tactics is the ability to express the emptiness in which depersonalization / de-energization of any sound/recognition of an artistic image takes place: the image of “nothing”.
When any form of narrative that is opposed to propaganda is prohibited, when the artfully and artificially created illusion of authenticity is the truth, then invisible (not obvious) art becomes the only permitted ability to selflessly immerse yourself in reality and create a reactionary dialogue with a quarrelling, but not hostile world.
Y. Safronova /16 September 2022 /St. Petersburg
1. https://truerussia.org/journal/starobinec
2. Art duet NOT A FUNNEL group: artists A. Khalitova and E. Predko, who created the White Noise project, which included three exhibitions in the libraries of St. Petersburg.