sans (t)rêve et sans merci

Curator Ivan Novikov about the project:

In his unfinished text "Capitalism as a religion", Walter Benjamin described the current state of society as "the practice of a certain cult sans (t)rêve et sans merci", which can be translated as "without respite and forgiveness". An endless holiday in which there is no place for a weekday is one of the key characteristics of today, according to Benjamin. Interestingly, the above-mentioned French-language passage was a free quote from the poem "Evening Twilight" by Charles Baudelaire from the collection "Flowers of Evil". In this elegy, the great poet described a dark picture of the nightlife of the Parisian lower classes, whose existence is looped in the cycle of bodily sensations. But isn't our current existence also permeated with this nerve?

A new generation of artists, trying to find the flesh of a new post-digital reality, are looking for a material counterweight to the dominance of the network mirage. Unable to resist the temptation of new technologies, traditional mediums acquire a corpuscular-digital appearance. The fluid structures of contemporary works play with textures and surfaces, exposing the current state of society in them. The material of the work becomes both the author's emanation in social networks and his everyday environment. But the key motive regularly turns out to be an acutely experienced touch of the Real. The wall between the digital surface and the material world is gradually thinning, and what will happen next is up to us.