The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents the solo exhibition of Alexandra Dementieva «10 Installations» which includes Dementieva’s key works in the genre of interactive installation. The exhibition aims to draw the attention of both the general public and young artists to this genre and to showcase the best works produced by Dementieva throughout her artistic career.

Dementieva’s main interest lies in perceptual psychology. Her works are built around the idea of interaction between the viewer and an artwork, mediated by technologically progressive visualization methods. However, technology along with cinema, performance, and painting is only an instrument by means of which the artist offers viewers to reflect on acute issues of the information society such as new behavioural patterns and cultural mechanisms, the boundary between the real and the virtual, the use of the latest technologies and mass media as instruments of manipulation and control. Unfolding in the increasingly technologized present Dementieva’s stories are built around the artist’s cultural experience usually connected with a certain cultural phenomenon — a book, a film or a philosophical concept. Her interests range from iconic authors such as F. M. Dostoyevsky, Andrei Tarkovsky and Alfred Hitchock to more specific genres like film noir and horror films.

Taking one of these source works as her starting point, she goes on to develop from it «perennial» issues such as the nature of fear, both individual and social («Monolith», 2010), a person’s awareness of his or her desires and possible consequences of these desires («Stalker», 2006), the boundaries of our influence on the course of events and our responsibility for them (Drama House, 2009) in order to later visualize them in her own work. For each installation Dementieva invents an ingenious gimmick — a false mirror, an apparatus for scanning the human brain, spiral-shaped constructions with anemometers inside, or digital tapestries — as a means to engage the viewer in communication. As a matter of principle the artist refrains from committing herself to certain formal instruments. This gives her freedom in the choice of means of communication with the viewer who, as a rule, is both the object of the artist’s research and the «creator» of her works. It is the viewer who by his or her actions and responses enlivens the installations unintentionally answering the questions embedded in them.

Alexandra Dementieva’s exhibition «10 Installations» in MMOMA includes only interactive works which invite viewers to engage with them and become their co-author. It endeavours to bring this fascinating genre, rarely shown in Moscow, in the most succinct way to a wide audience.

Alexandra Dementieva, an artist, professor at the Royal Academy of Arts (Brussels, Belgium), one of the co-founders of iMAL (interactive Media Art Laboratory, Brussels). Dementieva was born in 1960 in Moscow, lives and works in Brussels (Belgium). Since 1993, Dementieva has been working in the field of video-art and interactive installation. Since 2008, Alexandra Dementieva has been an active participant of the CYLAND Media Art Lab media laboratory. Works by Alexandra Dementieva were exhibited in major museums and cultural institutions both in Russia and abroad including the State Hermitage Museum (St Petersburg, Russia), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Russia), Centro de la Imagen (Mexico City, Mexico), FILE festival (Sao Paulo, Brazil), and Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, New York, the United States).