On 26 May 2016, for two hours the halls of the Youth Centre in the General Staff were filled with the “attacking” art of performance, video-art and installation.
The festival was devoted to the 100th anniversary of the Cabaret Voltaire, the place that became the cradle of the well-known art movement called Dadaism, which heralded a shift in art from classical forms to experimental ones, ephemeral ones and ones involving performance. The name INVAZIYa can also be deciphered letter by letter, with each of them standing for a Russian word revealing key elements of the project:
I is for igra (game, play) – play as the main form activity at the event;
N is for nasledie (heritage) – criticizing the excessive deliberateness and at times emptiness of modern commercial art; the objects and actions in INVAZIYa is the study of the legacy of 20th-century art;
V is for vizual’nost’ (visualization) – besides installations, the project includes video-art and live performance, graphically demonstrating the “principle of innovation” proclaimed by Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists;
A is for apropiatsiya (appropriation) – in artistic terms, appropriation is quotation from existing works of art;
Z is for zritel’ (viewer) – the greater part of the content of the festival consisted of actions that the visitors created in the course of the evening. In the tradition of the happening, viewers were given cards specifying the actions that they should perform so as to experience INVAZIYa for themselves;
I is for internatsional (international) – at one and the same time an allusion to the philosophical movement of Situationism and a declaration that the students’ activities are not a criticism of present-day Russia or political regimes; the INVAZIYa concept and its content are international;
Ya is for yarmarka (fair) – a format that points us to the Dadaist exhibitions and also to the modern format for presenting contemporary art (Frieze, Art Basel, The Armory Show).
The Current Artistic Processes section (headed by Ladomir Zelinsky) brings together students from a wide range of higher education establishments in St Petersburg who have an interest in contemporary art. The programme includes practical experiments as well as theoretical lectures.
