"Bluebox: Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansk -- Fog"
2002-02-03 until 2002-02-30
Sprengel Museum
Hannover, , DE

In 2002 the Sprengel Museum Hannover will be presenting four artistic positions, one after the other, which, in different ways, make use of the medium of video. They will take place in the former Audio Room. Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky (born in Lvov and Voronez respectively) are among the artists who, since the early seventies, have addressed the conditions of the construction of meaning in the visual arts. Among the Moscow Conceptualists they worked with photography and text, developed experimental representational arrangements in performances and devoted themselves to questions of the contextual nature of artistic and art-receptive values.

Since the end of the eighties, they have been living in New York and Berlin and have shown their work at numerous international exhibitions, such as the Biennial shows in Sydney (1992), São Paulo (1994), Istanbul (1995), Johannesburg and Lyons (1997) and Liverpool (1999).

Fog, the work presented here, dates from 1999-2000. Like Incidents and The Day before Tomorrow it was produced in the urban situation of New York without any special arrangement of the surrounding visual conditions. It is realised by means of two real-time shots, each lasting about 11 minutes, two views of the Hudson River: one by Igor and one by Svetlana Kopystiansky. Both tapes are shown either simultaneously or, as in the Sprengel Museum, consecutively.

As is often the case in co-operations between two artists, the simultaneity of the two different perceptions is an essential aspect of Fog. At the same time the work harks back to the perceptual background of such graphic positions as those of Claude Monet. The video is realised as a serial succession of pictures, as a mobile field of optical differentiation, which - in accordance with the thickness of the mist over the river - are perceived as more or less important.

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