Saturday, June 5, 2021, the opening of the group exhibition of the independent curatorial project ‘Hidden Garden’ - ‘Hidden Garden Games’ took place.
‘Hidden Garden Games’ is an experimental exhibition. It investigates the boundaries of real and virtual spaces and the human relation to those spaces.
When going from the physical space into online, it frequently seems to us that we can leave behind all usual limitations imposed by circumstances. But, it isn’t easy to imagine a world without boundaries, and we tend to construct them anew. In our case, these boundaries were the space, garden, where we set an exposition and the exhibition’s theme. This time we decided to experiment and investigate the limits of virtuality. In the project ‘Hidden Garden Games’, the artists were given the freedom to define their limitations of space and of the theme.
Quite often, setting up an exposition in the imposed space (be it a ‘white cube’ or a place not designated for art display) condemns the exhibition as a whole and each artwork individually to a compromise.
To avoid compromise and focus on the artworks and spaces where they can exist most naturally and organically, we abandoned the idea of bringing them and exposition into one location. Instead, we decided to present the artworks in the natural context for which artists created them. Space and its relationship with art are the crucial aspects of the Hidden Garden project. And, in our opinion, such an approach most honestly and accurately contributed to the visualization of the art-space relationship.
Most of the works included in the ‘Hidden Garden Games’ are site-specific. The primary artist’s task in such projects is to interact with a specific place and its context: geographical, social, historical or personal. Some artists based their projects on interaction with the natural environment in a broader sense. Still, in this case, the artist’s unique relationship with the place, conditioned by either the visual aspects, or the inner feelings, becomes an important aspect.
We should admit that the exhibition’ Hidden Garden Games’ does not reflect upon anything precisely and does not seek to identify any urgent problems. It investigates and probes the boundaries of real and virtual spaces and the human relationship with those spaces. However, we can say that the dialogues with artists created within this exhibition become more personal and frank than usual, even in non-institutional projects. In this experiment, we decided to trust the artists literally in everything, allowing them to decide for themselves what and where they will exhibit. This approach also significantly expands the project’s geography, embedding the exposition in entirely new and, often, hard-to-reach locations.
Participants: Maria Belén Robeda (Argentina), Marie Muller Priqueler (France), Felix Klee (Germany), Yana Vasilyeva (Russia), Fedor Dubrovin (Russia), Vilgeny Melnikov (Russia), Dani Lamorte (USA).
Curators: Ksenia Kasko, Anastasia Senozatskaya, Kristina Syrchikova.
If you have any questions, please contact us: hidethegarden@gmail.com
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