Man as Bird. Images of Journeys

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts debuts with the exhibition Man as Bird. Images of Journeys organized as part of the Collateral Events of the 57th Venice Biennale. 

Throughout history, we have expanded the boundaries of the visible and found new perspectives. The development of optics and the evolution of art have gone hand in hand, and artists were armed first with camera obscura, then with video cameras. These improvements in optics have always been aimed at improving our knowledge of the world. From expeditions to remote parts of the world, to changing the very way we see things, this process has unfolded in history, corresponding to the inner transformation one goes through in life.

The exhibition Man as Bird. Images of Journeys will present 14 Russian and foreign artists working with different media: sound and light installations, video, photography, and art objects. It is the first international project of the new direction of the Museum. The Pushkin XXI has been launched in order to create an exhibition platform for various forms of contemporary art—from painting and sculpture to experimental cinematography and virtual reality. The Pushkin XXI introduces the main historical phases of today’s artistic practices and takes on an educational function in the domain of the new contemporary art language.

The exhibition Man as Bird. Images of Journeys invites the viewer to travel across multiple dimensions—space, time and individual experience—all of which may alter their perception of the world and of the self. The initial morphology and structure of the images transforms throughout the journey as a result of the different viewpoints incorporated in the project. Like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver or Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the viewer will experience unusual proportions and perspectives: the world transforms, the point of view changes, the real and the imaginary intertwine and no longer correspond to our former beliefs.

The art journey turns out to be not just merely geographical—here the structure of space reflects the worldview. Travelers from different eras have interpreted this structure in various ways; it could become patchy and spotty because by describing just the stops, they might miss the distances between them. Along the journey, the angle of vision expands—from the familiar 120 degrees of human vision to the 360 degrees of a bird’s eye. Space built in accordance with the laws of linear perspective, familiar to the viewer since the Renaissance, seems right only at first glance. A viewer placed in the center of a panorama often loses his ability to see details. They merge within an overall undifferentiated flow.

Curators: Marina Loshak (Director of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), Olga Shishko (Head of the Cinema and Media Art Department, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts)

Participants: Semyon Alexandrovsky (Russia), Tanya Akhmetgalieva (Russia), Dmitry Bulnygin (Russia), Sofia Gavrilova (Russia), Marnix de Nijs (the Netherlands), Irina Zatulovskaja (Russia), Yurii Kalendarev (Russia/Italy), David Claerbout (Belgium), Martin Honert (Germany), Fabrizio Plessi (Italy), “Provmyza” art group (Russia), Mariano Sardón (Argentina), Leonid Tishkov (Russia), Masaki Fujihata (Japan).

Official partner of the exhibition: Mail.ru Group (My.com international brand)

Technical partner: Barco

With kind support of the Peganov family

With kind contribution of Center of Studies of Russian Art Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage Ca’ Foscari University of Venice