Sergey Sonin and Elena Samorodova. Utopia and Uchronia

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art together with the a—s—t—r—a Gallery is proud to present Utopia and Uchronia, a personal show by Sergey Sonin and Elena Samorodova. The exhibition demonstrates the reality of a hypothetical story depicted by the artists in the form of a detailed material world.

The narrative created by the artists is a network of cultural and historical interconnections with numerous references to global art culture. The halls of the museum are turned into an imaginary museum-reserve and divided into seven autonomous, but at the same time connected by a common plot, sections-spaces. The viewer uses the layout of the museum halls to pass through these sections in the order set by the authors. One of the starting points of the artistic statement is the comprehension and interpretation of antiquity as a constant of eternity, Orientalism as a projection of the West into the East, and the spirit of Enlightenment freely hovering over time and space. The key to the project is the book Lexicon - a visual dictionary that reveals the meanings and concepts of the authors' universe, integrating all the exhibition sections.

The project presented at MMOMA is today one of the most ambitious statements of visionary artists. The display includes about 100 works: ceramics, painting, graphics, photography, fabrics, bas-reliefs, etchings and other works. A special place in the project is occupied by the video hall, where unique video frescoes are shown and a full-scale ballet is performed as a ‘choreographic prayer’.

About the artists

Sergey Sonin is an artist, director, screenwriter and producer, born in 1968 in Smolensk. He studied at the St. Petersburg State University of Cinema and Television. Elena Samorodova is an architect, production designer and photographer, born in 1973 in Moscow. She studied at the Moscow Art School and graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute, Experimental Training Design Group (1998). The Lead and Cobalt partnership is the union of Sergey Sonin and Elena Samorodova, multimedia artists working in two capitals: Moscow and St. Petersburg. The artists’ works are in the collections of the Museum of Moscow, Krasnoyarsk Museum Centre, Multimedia Art Museum and in private collections. Over the last decade and a half, the artists have continued their continuous experiments, playing with imaginary reconstructions of the cultural and historical present, past and future of the world in their works, filling them with new content. In their mystifications they also turn to time, shortening or prolonging its course, establishing ‘their’ perceptions and frameworks. The main thing in the projects of Elena Samorodova and Sergey Sonin is the concept of time. The aesthetics of their stylisations is lost between the past and the future, as if the present were absent. Time there has stopped so much that it can be cut with a knife, reshaped, stretched and accelerated. Artists freely manoeuvre between historical epochs, refracting space and time.