Three by Three: Guest Artists in Focus

QUESTION 2.    Being part of the Parazit community places your work inside an active, experimental ecosystem. How has working within that collective shaped your willingness to take risks or strip actions down to their bare minimum?

• ANSWER 2.  Yes, this definitely expands the horizon, and considering that the group’s practice consists of regular exhibitions (twice a month), it establishes a rhythm. At times, active engagement is required; at other times, one needs to withdraw and wait, shifting to a different level of interaction with the community — for instance, through discursive or verbal practices.

Moisei Antonov
Mixed-Media Artist, Performer

BIO:  Born in 1989 in Vyborg, a peninsula city on the Gulf of Finland, the artist lives and works in Saint Petersburg. He studied film directing at the Saint Petersburg University of Culture and Arts and multimedia in Narva. He has been engaged in visual practice since the age of twelve and is a professional video editor. In 2022, art returned as a central focus of his practice. Since then, he has been part of the Saint Petersburg art community and a member of the Parazit group. He has participated in local and regional exhibitions. His works are held in private collections in Russia.

INSTAGRAM:    @Moisei.Antonov

QUESTION 3.   In “The Spectator Is Present,” you chose stillness over action. What does doing almost nothing make visible—to you and to others—that movement might obscure?

• ANSWER 3.   This performance is my tribute to Marina Abramović, my emotional guide into the world of art. I chose to position myself here as a viewer rather than an artist, which lowers the intensity of the performance and shifts it into a more “human” register. The strategy lies in shedding the act of reading into the image: the eyes open gradually. As the gaze moves on, initial interest transforms first into boredom, then into a penetrating gaze, followed by an objective one, and finally returns to interest again.

QUESTION 1.  Your performances often position you as both subject and object of observation. What changes for you internally when the audience becomes part of the work simply by witnessing?

• ANSWER 1.  The artist, whether in the studio or in a gallery, in public view, performs a performance of presence. This does not imply putting on a mask — on the contrary, it is a form of exposure. The artist is always also a viewer, but never a silent one: a producer of material objects, situations, and/or meanings. Internally, a process of attunement takes place, allowing the artist to exist within a different continuum than the one perceived by the viewer from the outside. At this point, articulation becomes difficult, as the quality of presence may depend on any detail — a glance, a reaction.

8 Hours Wheel

The Spectator is Present

Vyborg, 2022 The essence of this video performance was to map the mental and territorial boundaries of the courtyards in my hometown.

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Artwork may not be reproduced in any form without the artist's express written permission.

VIDEO

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