The Taïss Gallery has had the pleasure of offering to the public, on three levels, recent work by an artist who represented Ukraine in the 2003 edition of the Venice Biennial. On the ground floor, the installation « Authentification » by Victor Sydorenko submits the viewer to a brutal but salutary confrontation with a literally expurgated human presence. Identical bodies arranged in the exhibition space are plunged into a clinical semi-obscurity. The temperature of the light is freezing.
All of the « subjects » represented are the same, frozen in a servile posture, slightly leaning forward in a simulacrum of communication. Upon contact with them, the visitor feels the paradoxical privilege of the survivor, and leaves them with an insight into the egalitarian utopia pushed to its utilitarian entrenchments. Freed from the emotional and morphological details that make the individual, the human envelope occupies the space without animating it. On the contrary- it accuses the encumbering emptiness. If one is to believe Danté, the heart of Hell is cold.
By giving us the opportunity to physically feel this hypothesis, Victor Sydorenko deeply exacerbates this specifically human desire for difference and engagement with the other. On the first floor, the spectator is plunged into obscurity and trapped by a serious regard. A man, recorded on video faces and observes him...
All of the « subjects » represented are the same, frozen in a servile posture, slightly leaning forward in a simulacrum of communication. Upon contact with them, the visitor feels the paradoxical privilege of the survivor, and leaves them with an insight into the egalitarian utopia pushed to its utilitarian entrenchments. Freed from the emotional and morphological details that make the individual, the human envelope occupies the space without animating it. On the contrary- it accuses the encumbering emptiness. If one is to believe Danté, the heart of Hell is cold.
By giving us the opportunity to physically feel this hypothesis, Victor Sydorenko deeply exacerbates this specifically human desire for difference and engagement with the other. On the first floor, the spectator is plunged into obscurity and trapped by a serious regard. A man, recorded on video faces and observes him...
