ANDREY BOGUSH: DREAM DEVICES AND THE DESIRE FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE

Andrey Bogush is a resident at HIAP’s Suomenlinna studios from February until December 2019. Their work consists of photography, often manipulated digitally, as well as sculpture, installation and performance. During HIAP’s Open Studios event in May 2019, Andrey arranged drawings created during the past two years into a big boat-like installation inside Gallery Augusta and combined it with a performance that took place in the football yard outside the gallery, thus blurring the lines between the indoors and the outdoors.

Proposal for face, black and gradient (posture), 2016 Andrey Bogush: When Everything Is Over So We Can Discuss, The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki

AA: You work in the hybridisation of physical and digital media, often creating sculptures out of your own photographs. How would you describe your work from a formalist standpoint?

AB: Actually, you described it so nicely. Take the curtains. I want them to be almost theatrical not covering anything but producing a space.

Proposal for image placement (stretched, curtain), 2017 ARS17, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki

AA: You utilise photography, archival images, film, and text in your work. How do the contexts of the objects and materials you use affect the works that you create?

AB: I’m looking for situations of discontent or detachment in them. For example, the haptic capacity of the surface of PVC and digital matter of the file, photographic and not photographic areas.

AA: Your work really embraces the digital influence on photography, what inspired you to explore the use of computer-generated imagery?

AB: Possibly its own condition – with images shared and consumed online through social media or publishing platforms. I wonder if self-alienation could be an analogy to the life of images online.

we will have only a future tense (8), 2018

AA: Did you start out studying ‘traditional’ photography?

AB: Not really studying but a self-taught experience of trying out lots of different things and approaches.

AA: Can you talk a little about the concepts behind your most recent projects, I DONT NEED YOU I NEED A BOAT and we will have only a future tense?

AB: These are two traps to fall into. Or two inscriptions. Something to devote to, something to follow. They do have some practical implementations as well. I work randomly. Maybe these two sentences are reminders for me of what I’m doing at the moment. I think about a safe place: in the residency, on the island, in my head. What can be done here? To take a boat trip, a journey, to sail away, to leave. Playing the escapism. I think about Godard ’s Film Socialisme and Hervé Guibert ’s novel Traveling with two children. A boat as a medium or a state – the boat as a refuge, it’s moving, it’s sinking, it’s in transition. It has all these capacities of a dream device.

Installation view, Open Studios, HIAP, Helsinki

Installation view, Open Studios, HIAP, Helsinki

AA: Where do you see yourself going from here?

AB: For the open studios, I’ve shown a selection of drawings that I’ve been doing for the last 2 years. These are mainly works done while travelling. There are few recognizable elements but otherwise, they are based on movements of my hands and basic gestures. They are facilitated by boredom and the desire to repeat. Drawings could be grouped in the following way: anthropomorphic elements (faces), curving tubes, legged vases and pots, flows of liquids and splashes, filled shapes, explosions. I also re-enacted movements of the guy who delivers messages in Pasolini’s Teorema movie. I performed it on the football field in front of the studios. In August I want to make sorcery with lizards and a few jugs.

AA: You have said that what interests you at the moment is the experience of the desire for the impossible. Do you at all link those desires and dreams with the struggle that they are not going to happen? Does with desire also come defeat?

AB: I’ve been always inclined to things not to be realised, or at least not finished. Things that have lacunas, gaps. It’s not a defeat but maybe a possibility for an infinite process. As when one drops into the sleeping abyss and then waking up, again and again. Semi-delirium states of producing the self and a dream. Recently I have been researching joyful repetitive movements and ecstatic choreographies. For example, with birds or insects. In his book Social behaviour in animals, Tinbergen describes starlings in the states out of their behaviour need. Many birds becoming one in ecstatic dance-movement. Here on the island I look at birds, they are dancing, singing, sitting on the branches or flying around, insects are still jumping and flowers are blooming. It all will vanish soon and I wonder if there is a place for a fiction or an urgency for acting together or to watch this decay.

Installation view, Open Studios, HIAP, Helsinki

Installation view, Open Studios, HIAP, Helsinki

Read more:

http://andreybogush.com/