Swiss video installations on show at the Hermitage Museum’s education center.

The National Center for Contemporary Art has brought a little love from Alpine Switzerland to wintry St. Petersburg with a video installation project called Love.com.

The Russian organizer of the event, Maria Korosteleva, said that Love.com is probably the first attempt to show Swiss contemporary video art in St. Petersburg.

Swiss artists Katja Loher and Sylvie Rodriguez, taking part in the the project at the State Hermitage Musuem’s educational center, display two multimedia installations presenting contrary experiences of love.

Although Loher’s piece is based on a fairly commonplace sense of what love is — something that happens between two people — it is quite extravagantly realized. In “Floating Rendez-vous” Lohar presents three videos projected on three large suspended balloons.

The video part of the work, featuring a couple trying to live underwater, intensifies the balloon metaphor of love as something “suspended” and in which it is difficult to stay balanced and rational.

In the opposite hall, Rodriguez comes back down to earth with an installation called “Where about?” In concrete terms the work adressess the price of love through the theme of hostage-taking and ransoms. Love demands small everyday verifications, but here it becomes the subject of a rigid external test.

Since there are different types of hostage-taking situations, there are different types of love — that of relatives, of friends and of the state.

The latter is the most topical and, unfortunately, the most elusive and unreliable.

In the work, monologues spoken by hostages burst through big wooden sheets covered by photographic images of trees, clouds and deserted localities, expressing a feeling of total futility and indifference.

As well as presenting their own works, Loher and Rodriguez have prepared a video art program by other artists. It consists of 10 love-themed pieces produced during the last five years by Swiss artists of different generations.

“Love.com” runs through Dec. 29 at

the The State Hermitage Educational

Center, 45 Moika.

www.ncca-spb.ru

News source: times.spb.ru
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