Canvas, Digital Printing
0.7 x 0.5 m
2015
The artwork was created in collaboration with
Julia Vergazova
Alexey Boriskin: conceptual development
Julia Vergazova: conceptual development, printing
Text in Russian reads: "We cannot show your this image because of insistent request of Roskomnadzor".
12 people, journalists and policemen, were killed as a result of terrorist attack on the office of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris at January 7th, 2015. Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal agency responsible for media oversight and censorship, demanded the Saint-Petersburg based internet-media Business News Agency to remove an image of Charlie Hebdo's new issue cover from its website. In response, the editorial team of Business News Agency replaced the illustration with a caption stating, We cannot show your this image because of insistent request of Roskomnadzor.
The canvas carries this exact phrase.
The work is a splash screen of internet censorship materialized inside the exhibition space.
It can also be interpreted as an act of self-censorship of the author who refuses to implement their idea out of fear of conflict with supervising authorities.
A contemporary artist exists within the media space which defines surrounding context.
Today, this context is dominated by prohibition and control.
In the era of postmodernism, when irony and quotation are central to culture, we witness a clash between two ideologies: modernism and postmodernism. Modernist reactions to postmodernist gestures and statements reveal this tension.
A reality in which a book, opera, painting, or dance can lead to imprisonment or even the artist’s death is undoubtedly pathological.
Art immanently exists in the sphere of mental (or virtual), and we see numerous attempts to fit it into a Procrustean bed of physical, aiming to limit freedom of expression. The absurdity such attempts becomes evident when preventive punishment imposed on canvas itself.
