The Wandering Kind by Alexey Vanushkin

Curated by Ana Iwataki, Marion Vasseur Raluy

March 20 – April 10, 2017

Alexey Vanushkin

The Wandering Kind, 2016

Duration: 2’15”

All images copyright and courtesy of the artist

The stage is a physical space – united by time, action and area – where everything or nothing can happen. It spans theater, exhibition, cinema and even specific public places such as the square. Art and theater have been always bound together, from Diderot who introduced a comparison of painting and theater, to Oskar Schlemmer who theorized the idea of complete work of art through theater and to the Wooster group, a New York City-based experimental theater company known for creating numerous original dramatic works.

The performance is acting and storytelling whereas the image is the decor: costumes, props and objects. The stage has long been torn between the two. Until the 18th century, performance took precedence over image. But at the end of the 19th century, the image and the performance were further tied together through the notion of staging. Through “mise-en-scène”, the stage becomes at once the most efficient artificial place and the most efficient reality. Whether it emphasizes its artificiality or uses what surrounds it, the stage can be the possibility to figuratively read the world and society.

In this specific time of action and space, spectators are included. They are guided to look in a specific direction and in a specific way. They are passive, sitting, standing, and looking at a moment. This passivity has been to some extent fought. Bertold Brecht, for example, forced viewers to smoke during the play. In these passive postures, on one hand there is a certain level of comfort but on the other hand as soon as viewers are watching, they are already thinking, swinging from reality to spirituality: a back and forth between two states. It is a bridge from body to mind.

Throughout 2017, Ana Iwataki and Marion Vasseur Raluy will unfold a program dedicated to the dramatic “mise-en-scene” in contemporary video art. These monthly video selections seek to develop questions on image and performance, body and mind, reality and spirituality.

–Marion Vasseur Raluy

Pussy has a long-distance lover, they are both the wandering kind.
Pussy has a wandering eye, a wandering heart, a wandering sense of gender identity.

Pussy is a romantic, and conducts a series of affairs of the heart from wherever Pussy happens to be.
Animated simulacra of human emotions, video chats, links to thoughtfully selected articles and screen captures, these are the things that allow Pussy to perform intimacy with Pussy’s lovers.

Pussy falls in love on the internet with some regularity – not through dating sites or apps, but through the social media presence of Others with whom Pussy has had brief, intense real life encounters. Pussy finds great satisfaction in the fantasy of one meeting and months of the back-and-forth of liking each others’ posts.

Pussy is grateful for this stage on which Pussy is able to explore what it truly means to be Pussy and not a pussy. Sometimes Pussy worries – yes, Pussy’s truth is being lived through images, this collection giving a style and form to what Pussy’s pussy cannot. But if Pussy is exploring the boundaries of the real for the sake of Pussy’s own self-realization, what else is being explored through these dematerialized avenues and to what ends?

Pussy isn’t sure if Pussy is building a fourth wall or breaking one, but sometimes it feels like the most tiring thing in the world to be bombarded with outward expressions of everyone’s sincerity. Posts and shares as props for some kind of performative empathy. The efficiency of images is frankly frightening, the theatrics of interactions often depressing.

The drama of their lives unfolds across screens.

–Ana Iwataki

Alexey Vanushkin, The Wandering Kind, 2016 (video still)