Lot 157: VADIM ZAKHAROV

RUSSIAN, B. 1959
APOCRYPHA

measurements
19 3/4 by 189 in.

alternate measurements
50 by 480 cm

signed in Cyrillic (on the reverse)

wood, paper, photographs

EXHIBITED

Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Pilgrimages with A Flying Video Camera, August 30th -- December 7th, 2002
CHILUFIM. Cat., Ausst.: Israel Museum, Jerusalem/Herzliya Museum of Art/ Kunstmuseum Bonn/Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld/Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund. - Kultursekretarieat NRW, Wupperthal, 2002

LITERATURE

Tretyakov State Gallery and Stella Art Gallery, Vadim Zakharov, 25 Years on One Page, Interros Bookpublishing Program, Moscow, 2006, pp. 89-103, pp.101-103, illustrated

NOTE

Practically all the works I did in my one-and-a-half month stay in Israel were based on searching for depth in material that was already familiar, trivial, and spent, in spaces that have long since been abandoned by the producers of contemporary culture. I addressed narratives and themes that are no longer of interest to contemporary commentary, as it were, places that no one pays attention to anymore because they have already been described so exhaustively. This is why I devoted my attention to a theme that everyone is sick of, namely the Bauhaus in Tel Aviv. With my video camera, I filmed around seventy Bauhaus buildings in "old style" mode. This material was then transformed into the Bauhaus Torah.

The Apocrypha series stems from the same technique. I visited places on which millions of volumes have already been written, where millions of people have already been and taken millions of photos and video films. At these places -- the Church of the Nativity, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Masada fortress, etc. -- I threw the switched-on video camera into the air, improvising (while it flew up and fell) a video report, in which everything that is already well-known was described in a completely different way. What was important to me was to relate the following things to one another: tradition and modern technology, absurdity and religious experience, humor and kitsch, the stupidity of actions and their clever results and, lastly, the joy in companionship and the felicity of solitude.

--Vadim Zakharov