From 30 January to 10 February 2008 Zlata Ponirovskaya’s Clinic will be on display at the State Hermitage Museum Youth Centre as part of the educational programme Class: Contemporary Art.

One of the most promising and popular Moscow artists of the new generation, Ponirovskaya creates cybernetic toys, robot-chimeras, preprogrammed, charming freaks, in which you might be able to recognize yourself, should you desire. Based on the principle of ‘like healing like’, the artist has placed them in a ‘clinic’ – a special artificial environment where humane ‘doctors’ and viewers carry out various manipulations on the sufferers, possibly, curative manipulations. The essence of the project is to uncover the eternal question, throughout time and circumstances we ask the question, who am I? Am I this? And what will happen to me? There is no answer.

A graduate of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Zlata Ponirovskaya has long indulged in creation of dynamic art-objects which are simply defined as robots, to avoid unnecessary complication. The creatures are basically like weird mechanically moving animals. But why remove the differentiation between mechanism and organism?

The project is aimed at creating a milieu of characters on the verge of art and play. As animals and machines, the Clinic characters state the anthropological difference, thus being indicative of the time to which they belong. As toys, the same characters assert the idea of their kinship through play thus becoming the focus for the projection of various emotions. Being initially and fundamentally a mass product (as well as man), the robot bears witness of civilization. Having lost its ability to evidence and having practically been destroyed as an industrial civilization product as a result of manipulations by Zlata Ponirovskaya, such a creature claims its right to be regarded as a cultural phenomenon, reminiscent of art being but a machine out of order. For her, robots are the instruments to exercise influence upon the unhurried reality, the same way as voodoo dummies are media to establish a mystic connection with the future.

On 31 January at 6:00 p.m. a master class with Zlata Ponirovskaya will be held at the Youth Centre.

State Hermitage Museum Youth Educational Centre
General Staff Building
45 Moika River Embankment
Tel.: 710-95-30, 710-95-91
The exhibition hall is open from midday to 5:30 p.m. except:
Sunday - from 12 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Monday – it is closed.

The artist being interviewed

At the Youth Centre exhibition hall

Charming freaks created by Zlata Ponirovskaya

At the exhibition

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