Nailya Alexander Gallery is proud to announce the US premier of ODE: Video by Victor Alimpiev and Marian Zhunin, curated by Dr. Nina Zaretskaya, founder of TV Gallery. Nailya Alexander Gallery is located at 24 W 57 St., #501, New York. Gallery hours are Tues.‐Sat, 11am ‐6pm.
Art Media Center TV Gallery is a nonprofit institution based in Moscow. Its purpose is to produce a wide range of projects using video and computer technology in the field of contemporary visual art. Founded in 1990 as a TV program, it was the first to present contemporary artists and cutting‐edge art events on Russian television. Today, TV Gallery organizes multimedia exhibitions, collects archives, produces TV programs and video films, and participates in international and local video, film, and media festivals (www.tvgallery.ru).
In 2002, TV Gallery premiered ODE in Moscow. The project by young artists, Victor Alimpiev and Marian Zhunin, included an interactive installation and a 35‐minute film with the same title. In 2003, ODE was a part of the exhibition Individual Systems at the 50th Biennale di Venezia.
The essence of the lyrics in an ode lies most of all in the experience of something missing or unattainable. Media are able to actualize what is missing and what is distant. Once the ode – the text creating the scale of its subject by “placing it on some high and visible point,” was one of the media forms. The ode used to make its “remote” addressee “real” and at the same time “odious.” The success or failure of the “odious” (as an adjective to “ode”) work was its ability to delight. It was delight that endowed the hero (and the requester) with the feature of authenticity. Today, when “the revealed body of the world population” (J.L. Nancy) declares the abundance of indivisible and indiscernible reality, authenticity becomes imperceptible; it turns into a habit – a soft spot of reality, invisible to itself. Identification with “a sort of habitualness” is a well‐known advertising strategy, which is adapted in this project. Having invented a number of “substitute habits” to be used, say, like some medical procedures (giving flowers, crumpling your skirt in critical days, being afraid of threatening shouts, being happy, missing the essence), the artists seek to make them “visible enough,” and “authentic,” i.e. to give them the value of media or the character of an elevated “TV set.” In creating a “new media” experience, ODE actualizes the very remoteness of an ecstatic song.