INSTALLATIONS
Elena Gubanova, Ivan Govorkov, “ECLIPSE”, 2014 Exhibition: “THE OTHER HOME”,CYBERFEST 2014 ,visual art program, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin. With the support from the CYLAND media art lab Multimedia Installation, video projection, fans, speakers Dimensions Variable «…All men, lions, eagles, and quails, horned stags, geese, spiders, silent fish that inhabit the waves, starfish from the sea, and creatures invisible to the eye—in one word, all the lives, all the lives, all the lives, completing the dreary round imposed upon them, have died out at last. Thousands of centuries have passed since the earth last bore a living creature on her breast, and the unhappy moon now lights her lamp in vain. No longer are the cries of storks heard in the meadows, or the drone of beetles in the groves of limes. All is cold, cold, cold. All is void, void, void…» — A.P. Chekov. «Seagull».
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Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov Danae 2014, multimedia object. Stainless steel, computer programming, photodiode spotlight, microcontrol units. With support of Media Art Lab CYLAND
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"Federation", the old Soviet furniture, speakers.2014.parallel programs "Manifesta 10", Exhibition "Signal";
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2012,videoinstallation, KIBERFEST2012, St.Petersburg.
7th Floor, Walk-Up
Stairs is a functional item, providing vertical connections. It is often used as a symbol, emphasising the importance of climbing, and a part of a religious ritual.
In this installation artist depict a 'box' with the projections of stairs going indefinitely up and coming down. They are reflected in the mirrors of the ceiling and the floor, so movements on them change their direction. The audience appears to be in perpetual movements, remaining still just for a few moments. And that is important for the artists, as a person can experience that moment of quiescence in the process, that could be the gateway from the known and weekdays boredoms.
www.cyland.ru
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2012,"Art re Flex" gallery.St.Petersburg
Science and Life 1
Science and Life 2
“Science and life” is a product of understanding and logical sequel of two important projects: first was presented within the frame of “Observatory” exhibition and acknowledged as best project at ProArte festival “Contemporary art in traditional museum” 2007, and second – “Red shift”, which audience saw during Venice Biennale 2011 in Ca’Foscari University. In new project, artists, who connected to astronomy by family bonds (Elena Gubanova is a daughter of a famous russian astronomer Vadim Gubanov), return to the subject of cosmos, time and personal history, creating capacious metaphors, allowing the transfer from scientific to artistic field.
“Science and life” project is a homage to astronomy, which conceptualized beliefs about time, transforming it from theoretical to visible form. This project is about personal time, which has distortions, measured not by the rotation of celestial bodies, but by the memory of artists, one of which was raised in the most utopian places of planet Earth – scientific area of Main Astronomic Observatory in Pulkovo. This project devoted to the memory of our expanding Universe, delivering to us decelerated light of stars.” (Olesya Turkina).
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2011, KIBERFEST2011, St.Petersburg, The State Hermitage Muzeum.
Filtration of White Noise
Video: Elena Gubanova.
Video: Engineer Viktor Ryukhin.
CYLAND MediaLab .
Computer Programming, Assembly: Sergey Komarov, Aleksey Grachev.
St. Petersburg, Russia. 2011
In this video installation, the image is interactively connected with the viewer’s movements. By entering the room, a person “startles” the peace and emptiness of the space by filling it with the movement. He brings reality and the reflection of reality “to life” and turns “nothing” into “something”. As the viewer moves, the space fills with fluorescent flying white images-birds – with the troubled movement of black and white that, ultimately, “pulverizes” into the “white noise”. The artists use video not as a finished artistic image, but rather as an artistic material. Most likely, the only important thing here is the light that, forcing its way through darkness, assumes the shape of soaring birds, fills the space with itself and disappears when the viewer leaves. The beholder is gone – light is gone – shadow is gone – the world is gone.
www.cyland.ru
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Redshift,
site specific installation,
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When [the Laputians] meet an acquaintance in the morning, the first question is about the sun’s health, how he looked at his setting and rising, and what hopes they have to avoid the stroke of the approaching comet. This conversation they are apt to run into with the same temper that boys discover in delighting to hear terrible stories of spirits and hobgoblins, which they greedily listen to, and dare not go to bed for fear.
– Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Redshift – the displacement of spectral lines towards longer wavelengths – is a concept well established in astronomy. Due to the Doppler effect, redshift occurs when a light source moves away from an observer. Cosmological redshift is attributable the expansion of the universe. The length of a light wave increases as space expands. It is said that the light emitted by galaxies undergoes a redshift.
Redshift is also the title of a project by artists Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov. Despite the fact that the artists are linked to astronomy by family ties (Gubanova is the daughter of prominent Russian astronomer Vadim Gubanov), they handle this concept more as a metaphor that enables them to effect its shift from one field of human endeavor (science) to another (art). But are these fields as distant from one another as might appear at first glance? Many artists have been interested in astronomy. Blueprints for a lens telescope were discovered in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. On the other hand, astronomers have long been fascinated with optical effects. What, then, is the significance of the metaphorical shift that Gubanova and Govorkov implement in their project?
First of all, the artists transfer the concept of redshift – which is used to describe the expanding universe intuited by the general theory of relativity – several centuries into the past, to the age of Galileo and Kepler. It is Galileo, who not only produced the first refracting telescope but also pointed it towards the heavens, to whom we are obliged for the “expansion” of our universe that continues to this day thanks to the launching of satellites, space telescopes, and probes. The invention of the telescope made astronomy visible, thus opening up incredible prospects for exploring the galaxy. Later, the emergence of photography made it possible to record what the telescope saw without the intervention the human hand. It is no accident that the Latin word perspicillum (which is what Galileo dubbed his own telescope) was translated into Russian in the eighteenth century as “perspective” (perspektiva). Attained with the aid of optics, this visualization is presented by Gubanova and Govorkov in the project Redshift. Only for their own observations of the heavens, the artists use not a telescope, but the architecture of the building itself: an elongated space replaces the telescope’s tube, while windows covered with red filters act as lenses. Transfigured in this way, the building amounts to nothing less than a “zero-magnification” telescope that enables viewers to observe the sun.
Moreover, the filters that redden the exhibition space provide the artists with yet another metaphor. The sun cannot be observed directly through the lens of a telescope because it is far too bright for the human eye to bear. Astronomers either display an image of the sun on a screen or use special light filters to make their observations. When the image is displayed on a screen, the telescope is turned into a television that broadcasts live not only spots on the sun – faculae, prominences, and many other things – but also the heavenly body’s movement across the screen, a kind of natural animated film that visibly demonstrates the Earth’s rotation. As they travel over the walls, floor, and ceiling of the exhibition space, the vermilion patches of sunlight generate the same effect, rendering visible our earthly time, which is measured in daily, monthly, and yearly cycles.
The use of filters is likewise reminiscent of the simplest methods for observing solar eclipses with darkly smoked pieces of glass. One of the optical effects manifested during a solar eclipse are the crescent-shaped spots in the shade produced by tree leaves. These are multiple images of the solar disc that emerge in tiny openings in the foliage as in a camera obscura. The semi-circular and crescent-shaped bright-red patches of light moving about the exhibition space are a symbolic image of the sun that the artists have generated within their own gigantic camera obscura.
The project Redshift is dedicated to astronomy, a science that, among its other achievements, has made it possible to conceptualize the idea of time, to turn it from a speculative construct into a visual fact. This is a project about subjective time, which has its own wrinkles and is measured not so much by the revolutions of the heavenly bodies as by the memory of the artists, one of whom grew up in the most utopian place on planet Earth, the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, the principal observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This is a project dedicated to the memory of our expanding universe, which transmits to us the decelerating light of the stars.
Olesya Turkina
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PROARTE, S.Peterburg-NCCA,Moscow,2009
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AMERIKAN ACADEMY in ROME, Rome,2010
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The Redshift.
The shift of the spectral lines to the long-wave region of the spectrum when the radiant is receding from the observer.
The shift of the wave length is proportional to the speed of the receding of the radiant.
The Cosmological Redshift
The change in wave length caused by cosmological extension of the Universe (q.v. the Doppler effect)
Astrolabe
An instrument used for locating in space and time basing on location of stars.
The artist’s project is based on her own mythology.
Elena Gubanova, an astronomer’s daughter. “Scientific ground” of the Pulkovo observatory was a playground, and the talks with father about the cosmos are the part of the childhood memories.
Her father used to go to observe the sky every clear winter night. A round saucer with quicksilver and grains of light from the stars upon it – that is one of the first Lena’s memories about the observing the stars with the telescope.
Basing on astronomy terms, the author tries to broaden the boundaries of the phenomena they relate to, using the scientific notions as an illustration of the personal emotional experience.
Round light flashes on the ceiling and the walls (the reflection from the mirrors) are a reconstruction of the childhood memory. The round shape of the pictures that depict human silhouettes reminds of the planets with mysterious shadows, canals and seas that one may see in the telescope’s ocular.
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PRO ARTE Institute,Pulkovo Observatory, In program “Contemporary Art In Traditional Museum”, St.Petersburg, Russia
2007,
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“Vanya, Go Back Home”
Sound installation. 2007
In the 1960s discoveries in radio-astronomy initiated a new stage of space studies. Unique devices for picking-up radio signals from distant galaxies, stars and sun were developed.
One of these devices is The Big Pulkovo Radio Telescope that still impresses everyone with its size.
The installation is situated near the telescope antenna. There is a stool (the most common and well-known object) standing on the glade. A spectator sits down, puts on headphones that lie nearby. He hears a woman’s voice, saying over and over “Vanya, go back home”.
That is the voice of Ivan Govorkov’s mother . Her little son Ivan is playing outside and she is calling him home.
Despite the specifity of the phrase addressed to Vanya, every adult can remember a similar situation from his own childhood.
With the help of transformation of space, comparison of the big antenna and the small stool the artists reveal the differing scales of the cosmic and the casual. One may consider the sound in the headphones picked up with the antenna.
However, it is not the abstract cosmic noise, but an unexpectedly real human voice. It reflects the feeling of a lonely small human being in the enormous Universe and offers to return to the individual space, the only real and always inhabited one.
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Chelsea Art Museum, NY, USA
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«Malevich's Vegetable Garden", video installation. The Ethnography Museum - the Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. Russia 1993,Russian Museum 2008
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2003,"Rohto",St.Petersburg
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Anna Akhmatova Museum at Fountain House, St. Petersburg, Russia.
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