Projects, diagrams, drawings
Granilshchikov’s exhibition “The Last Song of the Evening. Evgeniy Granilshchikov: “It is useless to fight with us because we have already won. Is this easy for you? And Pussy Riot? War

Granilshchikov’s exhibition “The Last Song of the Evening. Evgeniy Granilshchikov: “It is useless to fight with us because we have already won. Is this easy for you? And Pussy Riot? War

Evgeny Granilshchikov works in different formats - from three-minute videos shot on a mobile phone to film and video installations, which are constantly updated with new materials, becoming potentially endless. In an effort to find a new cinematic vision, he poses questions about the nature of cinema and the coexistence of different cinematic situations. Granilshchikov's work is often autobiographical in nature and includes complex narratives that refer to the medium of film itself and gain additional depth through the specific use of cinematic imagery. The Triennial presents a selection of three films by Granilshchikov, shot by him in 2014–2016. An attentive viewer will be able to trace the change of seasons in them, unfolding as the narrative develops, and note the sequence of the artist’s methods. The earliest (and most famous) of these films, Courbet's Funeral (2014), was shot on a mobile phone - and elements of the same aesthetic are found in the later, more technically complex To Follow Her Advice (2016): a mixture of documentary and staged scenes , digital and analogue shooting, combining moving images on the screens of mobile phones and computers (a kind of movie within a movie) and so on. The shortest of these films, Untitled (Reenactment) (2015), features an actress who breaks out of her role by criticizing the director for the lack of political statements in his films. This plot twist makes us perceive the triptych as a whole differently.

Snezhana Krasteva

BIOGRAPHY

Evgeny Granilshchikov was born in 1985 in Moscow. In 2009 he graduated from the Institute of Journalism and Literary Creativity in Moscow, and in 2013 from the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. A. Rodchenko. Among his latest solo exhibitions: “Rehearsal Time” (Triumph Gallery, Moscow, 2013), “Untitled (after defeats)” (Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 2016). Participant in many group exhibitions: The Happy End (Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 2013), “11” (Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, 2014), IV Moscow International Biennale of Young Art (2014), Burning News: Recent Art from Russia (Hayward Gallery, London, 2014), Borderlands (GRAD Gallery, London, 2015), 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015), “One inside the other. The art of new and old media in the era of high-speed Internet" (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2016). Winner of the Kandinsky Prize in the Young Artist category. Project of the Year" (2013) and the Open Frame Award at the goEast Film Festival (Wiesbaden, 2016). Lives and works in Moscow.

Evgeny Granilshchikov: “This film is such an incredibly long performance”

At the Winzavod Center for Contemporary ArtThe anniversary cycle “Farewell to Eternal Youth” continues: recently, as part of it, an exhibition of video artist Evgeny Granilshchikov “The Last Song of the Evening” opened. The Blueprint asked the artist to select pieces of work featured in the exhibition and tell their stories.

Untitled ("Gravity")
2017

"Gravity" is a series of graphics that I painted in Paris this winter. It all started with me watching the video of the arrests on Bolotnaya Square on May 6 and sketching the poses of people at the moments when they were grabbed by the police. Therefore, the bodies look broken and deformed.

Untitled (“games”)
2017

In fact, when we started filming Games, we started with a rehearsal. I invited my friends to play chess with only white pieces. This was the starting point. It was necessary to look at how they would get out, negotiate and thereby change the rules of the game itself. After this rehearsal, I was going to do some text sketches and film it all again. I wanted them to improvise based on previous experience. As a result, I watched the rehearsal and decided to stop at this shooting.

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"Last Song of the Evening"
2017

About two years ago I wanted to make a film about a musician who lost his voice. Then a lot of time passed, the plot changed, and two more were added to my hero. I had script ideas, but I didn’t want to shoot exclusively feature films. That's why the idea of documenting the news came up. Constantly weave them into the story. This is why I say that the film “The Last Song of the Night” is such an incredibly long performance. And I don't remember anyone ever making a movie that way. It was risky. But by this point, a small part of the film already exists as a two-channel installation, and soon I will finish editing the full-length version for cinemas.

"Last Song of the Evening"
2017

About two years ago I wanted to make a film about a musician who lost his voice. Then a lot of time passed, the plot changed, and two more were added to my hero. I had screenwriting experience, but I didn’t want to shoot exclusively feature films. That's why the idea of documenting the news came up. Constantly weave them into the story. This is why I say that the film “The Last Song of the Night” is such an incredibly long performance. And I don't remember anyone ever making a movie that way. It was risky. But by this point, a small part of the film already exists as a two-channel installation, and soon I will finish editing the full-length version for cinemas.

UNTITLED (“WATCH”)
2012

Almost the entire installation (“The Last Song of the Evening”) is assembled from new works made over the past year. "Clock" is an exception. I made this video while still studying at the Rodchenko School, it seems, in the summer after my first year. In the video we see two clocks, one hanging on the wall, and the other I hold in my hands. The ones I hold in my hands don't work. I'm trying to synchronize the hands of my clock with the wall clock. There is simplicity and precision in this work. In general, there is something about her.

Exhibition curator: Anna Zaitseva

On June 7, 2017, the third exhibition of the anniversary series “Farewell to Eternal Youth” will open in the Workshop of the White Center for Contemporary Art WINZAVOD. Evgeny Granilshchikov, one of the most prominent Russian video artists, will present a multimedia installation “The Last Song of the Evening” about his generation, love and politics. At this exhibition, the artist, a graduate of the Rodchenko School, winner of the Kandinsky Prize, will for the first time show a two-channel video installation of the same name “The Last Song of the Evening” and other works, including the short film “In the predawn hour our dreams become brighter,” photographs and graphics made over the past year .

The key work of the exhibition is the two-channel film “The Last Song of the Evening”, originally conceived as an experimental series. The author himself defines the genre of the film as “documentation of a performance that lasted for a year and a half.” To implement this project, the artist and director invited his close friends. Every day the characters start by watching the news and discussing what is happening live.

Another film that viewers will see at the exhibition is “In the predawn hour our dreams become brighter”; it was filmed entirely on a mobile phone. The action takes place in Paris and is built around the daily life of two main characters, who, despite their happy Parisian everyday life, still feel cut off from home. Video sculptures, abstract photographs and a series of graphics will also be presented.

Artist and independent director Evgeny Granilshchikov: “I still haven’t realized what I don’t like more - watching films or making them. Now I’m thinking of giving it all up and opening a money-losing popcorn shop like Scarlett Johansson.”

Evgeniy Granilshchikov born in 1985 in Moscow. In 2009 he graduated from the Institute of Journalism and Literary Creativity in Moscow, and in 2013 from the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. A. Rodchenko. Among the personal exhibitions: “Something will be lost” (Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Moscow, 2014), “Untitled (after defeats)” (Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 2016). Participant of group exhibitions: Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2017) IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2014), Burning News: Recent Art from Russia (Hayward Gallery, London, 2014), Borderlands (GRAD Gallery , London, 2015), 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015), “One inside the other. The art of new and old media in the era of high-speed Internet" (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2016). Winner of the Kandinsky Prize in the Young Artist category. Project of the Year (2013), Open Frame Award at the goEast Film Festival (Wiesbaden, 2016), finalist for the Innovation Award (2014, 2015).

04/04/2014
Interviewed by Elizaveta Borovikova

It seems that for the artist Evgeny Granilshchikov there are no boundaries of real time: having barely graduated from the Rodchenko School, in the same 2013 he received the Kandinsky Prize, for which he had been on the long list the year before. Coming on stage, he then said: “I forgot all the words from excitement, but I didn’t prepare them anyway, so you haven’t lost anything.” Since then, Evgeniy has managed to take part in many exhibition projects, and in winter his personal exhibition “Something Will Be Lost” was held at the prestigious Moscow Manege. Today he is one of the most promising and successful young Moscow artists in the field of video art. Granilshchikov is one of those who treat their creativity as simultaneously their main profession, way of life and meaning of life. At the same time, he does not have his head in the clouds at all and creates very relevant and topical works, acutely reacting to the modern context. In his interview Arterritory Evgeniy spoke about his past projects and what he has to do in the near future.

ABOUT COMPULSORY AND VOLUNTARY EDUCATION

I didn’t have much of a choice of profession, as a person who doesn’t want to do anything other than art. I am sure that artists can do everything, they just don’t want to do something. But I became an artist quite by accident. At first I thought about becoming an architect. I was lucky and did not enter the Moscow Architectural Institute, thanks to which I received another profession - animator. Then I became interested in photography, studied to be a journalist and later ended up at the Rodchenko School. Already in my first year, I realized that I didn’t want to do only photography, perhaps I didn’t even want to do it at all. And since by that time I had some experience in animation, I switched to video. At the moment I have three diplomas, but I am constantly educating myself. The education I received became a good basis for pursuing art. For example, at the age of seventeen I studied classical music and recording, and now these skills suddenly turned out to be necessary.

ABOUT POLITICS AND GUSTAVE COURBET

I understand the definition of “political” quite broadly; art is undoubtedly a political activity. It is not necessary to speak directly about politics in your films. But the artist is initially a public figure, a media character who constantly operates with meanings, extracting some of them and plunging others into the darkness of time. For example, if I now start making a film about Mandelstam, it will be an absolutely political work, since I am updating a certain field of meaning that will begin to interact with the modern context. Now I'm shooting a film on my phone. It's quite a poetic and political film, a short experimental piece. This is not a movie in the sense in which we are accustomed to perceive it: it does not, for example, have a script. This film is on the borders of documentary and fiction cinema and develops spontaneously, changing according to the trajectory of life, it consists of images that are layered on top of each other, as in baroque music. There are direct conversations about politics, but this is not the main thing. I approach the footage as an anthropologist who is interested in people's gestures, actions, movement, speech. I'm trying to capture the changes that happen to a person today and convey a sense of time. And here a lot has to do with the language of the video itself, which is also constantly changing. After all, I’m shooting a film on my phone, which is also a gesture. But all this should not slide into diary notes. The film had a working title, which I may return to later: “The Funeral of Courbet.” Gustav Courbet was, as we know, the harbinger of modernism and the first realist. He has a painting called "Funeral in Ornans", which is the city in which he was born. That is, the title simultaneously refers to both the painting and his own death. Courbet is a political artist, a figure that has always been interesting to me. But most likely, the film will be called something else.

ABOUT "MANEGE" AND FIRE SAFETY

Manege was undoubtedly a challenge in terms of exhibition space. My task as an artist was to combine it as much as possible and make the exhibition as a kind of quest. It is important that there are rhymes between the works, so that viewers, while watching one work, can think about another, and sometimes even, while in the same video installation, hear another. I solved the problem, but the Manege space was one of the most difficult I have worked with. “Media ArtLab” is a progressive institution inside the not very progressive “Manege”. They themselves suffer from this, it takes a lot of energy. On the opening day of the manege exhibition, firefighters came and said that the light bulbs in the Fugue installation were hanging too close to the wall. We asked them to stay at least on opening day, and they left. But in the following days, the lights no longer hung, and viewers ended up not seeing the work as it was intended. There are fire safety rules that I would actually like to know. But the problem is that these lamps were hanging from the first day of installation. And the firefighters asked to remove them two hours before the opening of the exhibition.

A still from the video work “Positions”, for which Evgeny Granilshchikov received the Kandinsky Prize

ABOUT THE GARAGE, PERMAFROST AND HOUSE PLANTS

Now I receive a Garage scholarship and work with them often. A year ago they held a large exhibition “Enchanted Wanderer” in the city of Anadyr, which was curated by Andrei Misiano. When Andrey invited me to take part in the exhibition, I was immediately interested in the local context. I had never been to Chukotka and had absolutely no idea what its capital looked like. Andrey told me in detail about the landscape, the museum and the social situation. At that moment, he did not demand that I create any work, he simply asked me to think about everything. Around the third meeting, I proposed a few ideas. Ultimately we settled on one of them. My work for the exhibition was my indoor flower - dracaena. I sent it to the museum with instructions for watering and spraying. It was assumed that local residents, museum visitors, would look after her. And in a month the dracaena will return home. The audience perceived this symbolic gesture correctly and approached the matter responsibly. The delivery history is also important for this work: after all, transporting a living plant in winter, across the entire country, is not the easiest task. When I think about the meaning of this work, I imagine this whole path from my home to the museum in Anadyr. Andrey had to carry the flower on the plane as hand luggage and this also became part of the job. As a result, this work turned out to be completely understandable to those people who came to the exhibition.

"Escape" is a sound installation reproducing an auditory non-existent 1946 film. The script was written by the author in the logic of Hollywood post-war cinema. It tells the story of two main characters who come to Rio. The story is built on sounds, dialogues, as well as music characteristic of cinema of this time. Each scene has its own acoustic sound, making it clear where certain events take place. The installation relies on the ambiguous nature of sound, making it impossible, or at least difficult, to interpret certain scenes unambiguously. The installation itself is a small cinema hall. In the dim lighting we see rows of red chairs, but there is no video image, screen or projector. The acoustic system is positioned in such a way that we find ourselves inside the unfolding plot, and all the sounds - voices, the noise of cars, the hum of the street - affect our imagination. The full audio recording of the installation can be heard.

A LITTLE MORE ABOUT GARAGE, CURATORS AND GRANTS

I applied for the Garage scholarship without much hope. This is a grant to support young Russian art. It is given for a year, and under good circumstances, that is, the artist’s creative activity is successful, it can be extended for the next year.

Andrei Misiano and Yulia Aksyonova from Garage are people with whom I am interested in working, with whom I have an intense dialogue. I am quite skeptical about the situation when a curator simply takes your work to an exhibition to implement his concept. This, of course, happens, but I increasingly refuse such offers. It is fundamentally important for me that a special relationship develops with the curator, one that provokes me to work and even, perhaps, violates my usual logic. There was one good story on this topic with Masha Godovannaya, which to some extent made me reconsider my position. We were strangers, and I received a letter from Masha with an offer to participate in her project. Out of habit, I refused, writing a short polite letter. But after this refusal, we began to correspond. As a result, I agreed to participate and later came to St. Petersburg, where we met in person.

ABOUT FATIGUE AND FOREIGN ARTISTS

Often, when I come across foreign exhibitions, I get the strong feeling that I am looking at art that is experiencing a serious internal crisis. For some reason, I am inclined to associate this moment with a clearly formed education system in the field of contemporary art and the market.

ABOUT THE ART MARKET AND THE ARTIST’S SALARY

Triumph Gallery is a commercial gallery that has many non-commercial projects. They understand perfectly well that they will not sell any of my work in the near future. The exhibition at Manege would hardly have been possible without them. What I do does not bring me any profit, but for now it suits me. But what definitely doesn’t suit me anymore is when you don’t get paid a fee for participating in an exhibition. I have decided to no longer participate in projects that do not involve a fee. After all, this is my main job, my whole life is connected with this. The fee can be anything, but it is required as a sign of respect for my work.

Exhibition curator: Anna Zaitseva.
Author of the series: Nikolai Palazhchenko.

The exhibition is a single installation in which each work in one way or another touches on the theme of love and mutual understanding against the backdrop of tension created by the news flow. The works will feature a lot of improvisation, random conversations and true stories - observed and later recreated. The heroes of Evgeny Granilshchikov are generation Y, to which the artist himself belongs, and which became the central theme of the entire cycle “Farewell to Eternal Youth.”

The key work of the exhibition is the two-channel film “The Last Song of the Evening”, originally conceived as an experimental series. The author himself defines the genre of the film as “documentation of a performance that lasted for a year and a half.” To implement this project, the artist and director invited his close friends. Every day the characters start by watching the news and discussing what is happening live.

Another film that viewers will see at the exhibition is “In the predawn hour our dreams become brighter”; it was filmed entirely on a mobile phone. The action takes place in Paris and is built around the daily life of two main characters, who, despite their happy Parisian everyday life, still feel cut off from home. Video sculptures, abstract photographs and a series of graphics will also be presented.

Artist and independent director Evgeny Granilshchikov:“I still haven’t figured out what I don’t like more: watching films or making them. Now I’m thinking of giving it all up and opening a money-losing popcorn shop like Scarlett Johansson.”

In 2017, the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, one of the first private art centers in Russia, turns ten years old. During this time, together with WINZAVOD, a generation of artists has grown up, who today can already lay claim to the title of new heroes of the modern Russian art scene. The main event of the anniversary was the cycle “Farewell to Eternal Youth.” Throughout the year, 12 large personal exhibitions will be organized by representatives of the new generation in contemporary Russian art, for whom the time has come for transformation - a transition from the status of “young” artists to the status of established ones. As part of the cycle, exhibitions have already opened - “Palazzo Koshelev” by Egor Koshelev, “City Sauna” by Urban Fauna Lab (in the Krasny Workshop until June 25). Exhibitions by Dmitry Venkov, Arseny Zhilyaev, the ZIP group, Polina Kanis, Taus Makhacheva, Irina Korina, Vladimir Logutov, Misha Most and Recycle are planned. Participants in the cycle are diverse in the areas in which they work. Their personal statements will demonstrate various processes in contemporary Russian art. Together with the artists of the cycle, viewers will look into the future of Russian art: who will become the hero of our time?

Evgeniy Granilshchikov born in 1985 in Moscow. In 2009 he graduated from the Institute of Journalism and Literary Creativity in Moscow, and in 2013 from the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. A. Rodchenko. Among the personal exhibitions: “Something will be lost” (Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Moscow, 2014), “Untitled (after defeats)” (Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 2016). Participant of group exhibitions: Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2017) IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2014), Burning News: Recent Art from Russia (Hayward Gallery, London, 2014), Borderlands (GRAD Gallery , London, 2015), 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015), “One inside the other. The art of new and old media in the era of high-speed Internet" (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2016). Winner of the Kandinsky Prize in the Young Artist category. Project of the Year (2013), Open Frame Award at the goEast Film Festival (Wiesbaden, 2016), finalist for the Innovation Award (2014, 2015).