The exhibition of works by Leonid Tishkov entitled Looking homeward (2006-2007) which is on view from 9th of November to 30th of December, 2007 in Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw.
The show will feature fabric sculptures, installations, video and photographs, including such pieces as: Solvejga: landscape of my memory (installation), My mother's dresses (10 photographs), My Mother (crocheted object made from torn clothes of the artist's mother), She lost the needle (video work).
Leonid Tishkov was born in 1953 in the Ural mountains region. He currently lives and works in Moscow. Having graduated from medical school as general practitioner, he was a co-editor of a medical encyclopedia and worked as illustrator for a number of newspapers. From 1980s, when he became acquainted with the Moscow conceptualist circles, Tishkov has devoted himself to art.
He created a rich world of surrealist characters and symbols, that take part in his poetic narratives, including such creatures as walking stomachs, Newfoundlands, people living in elephants' trunks, and other equally curious personas. Tishkov's constantly evolving story is told with the use of objects, drawings, paintings, artist's books, drama plays and video works. Over the last five years Tishkov has been working chiefly with video. His films, set in the Russian countryside, combine the surreal air with ethnography, and private mythology with absurd humor.
The artist's works can be found in a number of renowned museums and galleries, including The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA, Norton & Nancy Dodge Collection at Zimmerii Art Museum in Rutgers University, New Jersey, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, British Library, London, the Biblioteque Nationale and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
"Leonid Tishkov's works have come into being in our culture through nearly all fundamental artistic strategies - objects, paintings, installations, video art, performance, artist's books. There is no denying that this body of work could be examined as a matrix, a model of an 'autobiographical' phenomenon in contemporary integral art.
The organic ties of this monolith, stemming from non-aesthetic sources, such as: the Ural mountains - the artist's birthplace and the boundary between the East and the West; the topography of this very place - its mountain ranges and valleys; Tishkov's peasant roots, which reach far back and are connected with his rustic sense of culture, which was later reinforced by basic knowledge resulting form his contact with educational institutions; the profession of a teacher, practiced by his father, as well as his own, that of a medical doctor, which influenced the geophysical character of the artist's oeuvre. All of the above-mentioned factors shed only a little light on the determinability of the auto-biographical semantics of his, seemingly autonomous, artistic life. Cultural context transforms Tishkov's work, and his very existence, into an uniform text which reveals its meaning with reference to completely different traditions and categories that the artistic reality in its basic form. Tishkov breathes and sways in a borderline situation, between art and life, transforming into an 'opus' (the auto-bio-graphy described extensively by Valerij Podoroga's artistic group), converting himself into a condition of the work's existence, and refusing the contemporary 'here-and-now'.
In one of his video works Leonid Tishkov, slowly, as if in a child's dream, climbs the Kukan mountain - the mountain in the foot of which he spent his childhood. Waving his wings, like Yves Klein once did, he ascends into the Great Nothing. Where, as he often says himself, everything is 'upside down' and exists in the binary system: the up and the down, the color and its lack, sound and silence, myth and reality. Tishkov's love for the 'fabric', the 'matter', constantly drives him to the process of materializing issues from the sphere of ideas - towards the 'rag dolls from his childhood', towards the greater form of touch, when all human organs are able to feel the world, towards crating Cosmos as a refuge for all that is born. The connection between the matter, the mother, the womb and the continent (Russian 'matka' and 'matierika') in Tishkov's artistic system illustrates the real depth of his mythical-poetic consciousness. The artist reconstructs his birth 'place', conveys its matrix-like aspect, its predilection to divisions, to duplications, to dabloidation. The phenomenal aspect of this space is realized in objects, the holy amulets of the primeval, as in the case of Joseph Beuys's birth of prime-objects which accumulate the space around them and, as Martin Heidegger wrote 'make it possible for a man to live among objects'.
For Leonid Tishkov, descending into the 'underworld' is situated on the opposite pole of the tradition of journeys to the kingdom of death, described by Dante Alghieri in his Divine Comedy. In the sacred center of the 'underworld', the 'crystal stomach of an angel' opens before the artist - an image which is symmetrical to that of a stone flower found in Bazov's fairy tales from the Ural region. It is one of Tishkov's best video works, referring to complete good, communion and blessedness. The way from the 'underworld' becomes a way to heaven. It is - in the philosophy of Laozi - 'all-encompassing, fixed, clear and high'. Those features become visible in a Zen koan, in the flapping of wings, in the overcoming of time and space, in the evolutionary circle in which Leonid Tishkov's work is located."
Vitalij Paciukov
"Auto-bio-graphy. Mythology of Leonid Tishkov's everlasting returns". (fragments)
The exhibition is curated by Ewa Gorzadek
Co-organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
The exhibition is a part of the Russian Culture Season in Poland, organized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland and Federal Agency of Culture and Cinematography of the Russian Federation.
Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle
Gallery 2, Aleje Ujazdowskie 6, Warsaw