Gigantic multimedia installation "Unfinished Project" by Nikita Seleznev at The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center

Gigantic multimedia installation "Unfinished Project" by Nikita Seleznev completed the "Museum Night - 2021" on the 16th of May in Yeltsyn Center, Ekaterinburg. The project comprises three video pieces – at the media facade of The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, a projection in the atrium on an interior screen inside the Museum, and at The President Square.
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The title "Unfinished Project" refers to how they attempted in mere years to flip post-Soviet Russia into the world of the West with its high living standards and democratic concepts.
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Nikita Seleznev sees his age group through the prism of expectations of the previous generation, the one that could believe in Utopia. “Those people that made decisions in the early 1990s keenly desired some change. They idealized democracy and a bright future in a new country. New generations might seem to have no request for idealism, and yet that is not so. They aspire to it but have issues with taking in Utopian ideas. Every piece of the exposition at the Yeltsin Center is full of idealized liberalism that makes you want to put your faith in it,” the artist says.
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A today’s adult, zealous and vigorous, strives but is unable to dive into the idealistic fantasy – and the artist projects this with his video, demonstrating tattooed digital bodies followed by a virtual camera. Primitively ‘inked’ tattoos resemble kid drawings, and they showcase the plots from the Perestroyka and the early 1990s times. The fall of the Berlin Wall, a police car set on fire, protests in 1991 – all of these showcase hazy recollections of the history dating 30 years back. Fragments of garden sculptures and toys from the USSR represent the shatters of the Soviet Utopia, which they tried to abandon leaping to Utopia Popularis.

Video documentation is available on the MYTH Gallery YouTube channel.

More information about the "Unfinished Project" you can find here.