“Abort! Retry! Ignore” at the Youth Educational Centre of the State Hermitage Museum, CYFEST11, 2018
The project is at the junction of net art and found art. An archive of digital images was gathered in the internet by Sergey Komarov. Originally distinct and informative, they have become indistinct with time. The phenomenon’s nature has not been studied thoroughly, but it is known that users that owned the original files tried, in fact, to save them — and, possibly, for good. Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov transferred these images into an old media — the pictures painted with oil on canvas — thus subjecting to destruction the “digit” as a mythologized eternity. Their paintings talk about the problems of storing the digital information that, unlike artifacts of the antiquity, did not even last a single century.
Artist. Born in 1949 in Leningrad, USSR. Graduated from the Ilya Repin State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (Leningrad, USSR). Works in the fields of philosophy, psychology, painting, drawing, sculpture and installations. Professor of drawing at the Ilya Repin Institute. Recipient of Sergey Kuryokhin Award (Russia, 2012) as “Best Work of Visual Art” (together with Elena Gubanova). His works were exhibited at major Russian and foreign venues, including the Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), Museum of Moscow (Moscow, Russia), Chelsea Art Museum (New York, USA), Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, Germany), Sky Gallery 2 (Tokyo, Japan). Participant of the Manifesta 10 parallel program (St. Petersburg, Russia, 2014) and several exhibitions parallel to Venice Biennale (biannually since 2011). Since 1990, he has been working in collaboration with Elena Gubanova. Lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Elena Gubanova
Artist, curator. Born in 1960 in Ulyanovsk, USSR. Graduated from the Ilya Repin State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (Leningrad, USSR). Works in the fields of painting, sculpture, installations, and video. Recipient of Sergey Kuryokhin Award (Russia, 2012) as “Best Work of Visual Art” (together with Ivan Govorkov). Her works were exhibited at major Russian and foreign venues, including the Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), Museum of Moscow (Moscow, Russia), Chelsea Art Museum (New York, USA), Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, Germany). Participant of the Manifesta 10 parallel program (St. Petersburg, Russia, 2014) and several exhibitions parallel to Venice Biennale (biannually since 2011). Since 1990, she has been working in collaboration with Ivan Govorkov. Lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia.
www.elenagubanova.com
Sergey Komarov
Sound artist, curator, engineer, computer programmer. Born 1980 in USSR, currently lives in Yerevan, Armenia. Max/MSP programmer, Cyland Audio Archive curator. In 2007-2010 programmer for the Asymmetrique Answer contemporary dance interactive performance.