2020
SUMMIT
VII MOSCOW INTERNATIONAL BIENNALE FOR YOUNG ART
VII MOSCOW INTERNATIONAL BIENNALE FOR YOUNG ART
2020
Dagninis digital project Summit was presented as part of the curatorial project by Liza Matveeva and Francesca Altamura I don't know whether the Earth was spinning or not…, the main program of the VII International Moscow Biennale for Young Art in 2020.
In a radical response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biennale's Main Project was launched as a bespoke digital platform that included twenty one international artists from Bahrain, Canada, Iran, Poland, the Philippines, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and featured a variety of existing and newly commissioned digital works ranging from fictional short films, to stop motion animations, audioscapes, creative coding and digital zines. Alongside the project was presented IRL as an installation highlighting the digital platform at the Museum of Moscow. In revising the Biennale format, the project's digital platform has provided access to thousands more online visitors than the in-gallery presentation alone.
2020
Dagninis digital project Summit was presented as part of the curatorial project by Liza Matveeva and Francesca Altamura I don't know whether the Earth was spinning or not…, the main program of the VII International Moscow Biennale for Young Art in 2020.
In a radical response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biennale's Main Project was launched as a bespoke digital platform that included twenty one international artists from Bahrain, Canada, Iran, Poland, the Philippines, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and featured a variety of existing and newly commissioned digital works ranging from fictional short films, to stop motion animations, audioscapes, creative coding and digital zines. Alongside the project was presented IRL as an installation highlighting the digital platform at the Museum of Moscow. In revising the Biennale format, the project's digital platform has provided access to thousands more online visitors than the in-gallery presentation alone.
SUMMIT
Performance loop, video, sound, interactive digital page 2020
Written by Yulia Yousma
Translated by Elias Seidel
The well-known fabulator and artist Dagnini is an heiress to a country that consistently fails to keep up with democracy while navigating the free market and the global merging of the internet with the physical world. Online and offline realms twine together, generating masses of sedating content, errors, glitches, meaningless and self-defeating scenarios, and social inequality — but also great care for ethics and morality. Dagnini's work channels the whole mess, all these carnivalesque stirrings of life. She has created a bestiary's worth of performance characters drawn from memes, games, the innocent early days of the internet, images of bewildered inhabitants of Russia from the 1990s, Hollywood melodramas, and her own phobias and projections.
Dagnini works in performance, installation, painting, drawing, embroidery, and video. But Dagnini is her own greatest work, an ongoing document of all that goes on. A four-legged stripper without a head, a comedic stairwell-dwelling gopnik 1 with gargoyle wings made out of rubber gloves, the Lion of Venice sewn from knock-off Versace fabric, an uncomely rainbow growing out of training potties — her incarnations always appear when the viewer least expects them, sabotaging a reality sterilized by common sense. All her creatures possess a distinctive fluidness. They swap attributes with one another; their identities are often hard to pin down, if they resemble humans at all. They exist in multiple environments at once, circulating between the digital veil and physical reality. Lodging themselves in our consciousness as forms both impossible and unnatural, funny and frightening, these offspring of synthetic reality become the tools of Dagnini's artistic shock therapy. Her performances' visual dissonance and trenchant vitality allow them to push buttons and subvert social norms. The deceitfully decorative appearance of her projects works as bait, pulling viewers into a zone in which our universal defenselessness before the onslaught of worldwide madness is fully apparent. With Summit (2020), all the artist's hypostases now have the chance to meet face-to-face. Dagnini's incarnations will ride for eternity — or until the domain turns to dust — on a digital carousel, raising a ruckus and playing tricks, compressing, expanding, and parodying themselves. In their journey around this vicious circle, they obsessively relive collective traumas and triumphs without end. Indeed, the process can never be completed: reality constantly dissolves and reassembles before our eyes; the future will never arrive. As contemporary philosophy suggests, any future is impossible outside of the capitalist system in which we are entrenched and its incessant overproduction of images, commodities, and meanings.
Squeal!
1 A slang term for white, lower-class, provincial youths in Russia.
Performance loop, video, sound, interactive digital page 2020
Written by Yulia Yousma
Translated by Elias Seidel
The well-known fabulator and artist Dagnini is an heiress to a country that consistently fails to keep up with democracy while navigating the free market and the global merging of the internet with the physical world. Online and offline realms twine together, generating masses of sedating content, errors, glitches, meaningless and self-defeating scenarios, and social inequality — but also great care for ethics and morality. Dagnini's work channels the whole mess, all these carnivalesque stirrings of life. She has created a bestiary's worth of performance characters drawn from memes, games, the innocent early days of the internet, images of bewildered inhabitants of Russia from the 1990s, Hollywood melodramas, and her own phobias and projections.
Dagnini works in performance, installation, painting, drawing, embroidery, and video. But Dagnini is her own greatest work, an ongoing document of all that goes on. A four-legged stripper without a head, a comedic stairwell-dwelling gopnik 1 with gargoyle wings made out of rubber gloves, the Lion of Venice sewn from knock-off Versace fabric, an uncomely rainbow growing out of training potties — her incarnations always appear when the viewer least expects them, sabotaging a reality sterilized by common sense. All her creatures possess a distinctive fluidness. They swap attributes with one another; their identities are often hard to pin down, if they resemble humans at all. They exist in multiple environments at once, circulating between the digital veil and physical reality. Lodging themselves in our consciousness as forms both impossible and unnatural, funny and frightening, these offspring of synthetic reality become the tools of Dagnini's artistic shock therapy. Her performances' visual dissonance and trenchant vitality allow them to push buttons and subvert social norms. The deceitfully decorative appearance of her projects works as bait, pulling viewers into a zone in which our universal defenselessness before the onslaught of worldwide madness is fully apparent. With Summit (2020), all the artist's hypostases now have the chance to meet face-to-face. Dagnini's incarnations will ride for eternity — or until the domain turns to dust — on a digital carousel, raising a ruckus and playing tricks, compressing, expanding, and parodying themselves. In their journey around this vicious circle, they obsessively relive collective traumas and triumphs without end. Indeed, the process can never be completed: reality constantly dissolves and reassembles before our eyes; the future will never arrive. As contemporary philosophy suggests, any future is impossible outside of the capitalist system in which we are entrenched and its incessant overproduction of images, commodities, and meanings.
Squeal!
1 A slang term for white, lower-class, provincial youths in Russia.
Using programming, the separately captured performances of Dagnini during isolation were compiled into an interactive catalog accessible online.
The web page is an interactive catalog of performances – a carousel of Dagnini's characters rotating endlessly in a circle. The user can stop the rotation by selecting one of the characters by clicking on it. The open page with an individual character shows their solo performance: the character stops rotating, performs a short action, a kind of micro-performance, and then returns to the endless carousel.
The project was created during COVID-19, a time when performance in its usual form became impossible due to lockdown. On the one hand, quarantine took away the opportunity to practice performance in the presence of an audience, while on the other hand, it prompted reflection on how performance can exist without real contact with the audience and what opportunities the digital field offers for the future development of performance. One of the advantages of digital performance is the ability for self-multiplication. The simultaneous existence of the artist in different roles, their ability to be in the same space and interact. In the conditions of digital reality, the artist can be simultaneously in different roles without delegating to other actors. These and other digital advantages became the subject of the artist's reflection on the conditions of the new reality, which took several significant steps towards hybridization with the virtual field during the epidemic.
The web page is an interactive catalog of performances – a carousel of Dagnini's characters rotating endlessly in a circle. The user can stop the rotation by selecting one of the characters by clicking on it. The open page with an individual character shows their solo performance: the character stops rotating, performs a short action, a kind of micro-performance, and then returns to the endless carousel.
The project was created during COVID-19, a time when performance in its usual form became impossible due to lockdown. On the one hand, quarantine took away the opportunity to practice performance in the presence of an audience, while on the other hand, it prompted reflection on how performance can exist without real contact with the audience and what opportunities the digital field offers for the future development of performance. One of the advantages of digital performance is the ability for self-multiplication. The simultaneous existence of the artist in different roles, their ability to be in the same space and interact. In the conditions of digital reality, the artist can be simultaneously in different roles without delegating to other actors. These and other digital advantages became the subject of the artist's reflection on the conditions of the new reality, which took several significant steps towards hybridization with the virtual field during the epidemic.