Observation of the Object of Observation

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What kind of project was total installation created by Marina Fomenko? Her project, called "Observation Station", was spread over five halls of the  State Museum of Contemporary Art ofRussian Academy of Arts on Gogol Boulevard. And the word "total" was here in both literal and metaphorical sense. In first case we saw the installation, which occupied several rooms, and in second case, we spoke about a title which implies a system of "total survaillance" of a modern society, where every person is in the observation field of another person. Provoking a certain situation - in this case "relocatuion of the Observation Station" - the artist determined the certain "rout" within the installation space: from the @Accumulator@ through the "Isolation Ward", "Observation Point" and "Translator" to "Destruction Point". Here one could find yuorself in the middle of vicious cucle of getting information, its storage, transmission and destruction. The semantic space of the installation was so tense that you felt it phisically as an invisible presence of a hazard.  "Big brother" is watching you  - from video-windows, from screens, through the eyes of survaillance cameras, through the lenses of video-cameras. With all the lexical adequacy of the project, and its fairly modern way of expression, its concept and form of its representation were fairly unusial, and genre of total installation is still an exceptional phenomenon on the Russian art scene. Therefore, we wanted to clarify some interesting issues in personal interview with the author.

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Vera Dazhina"Observation of the Object of Observation",

"Dialogue of Arts", №5, 2010