A tired man.
Annual exhibition of students ' and teachers ' work at the National School of Design. Project curators: Alexandra Kuznetsov, Diana Machulina, Julia Yousma. 8 October-14 November 2021
According to the project’s curator, «man’s tired» is almost synonymous with a modern urban resident, and his fatigue is not so much a psychophysical state as a forced way of dealing with reality.
The tired hero of consumption, described by Jean Bodriyar more than 50 years ago, has since turned from a protagonist ready for resistance and rebellion to a passive species — homo lassus, a tired, disillusioned and confused man. The challenge for the participants was to answer the question: what is this state of fatigue, what are its causes, what forms it takes, and how can it emerge from it?
All the projects are conditionally divided into two types: the former examine the state of fatigue itself, look at its causes, and analyse its own properties. The second is to determine the effects of fatigue on our consciousness and to find ways to deal with them. Authors who reflect on the causes of the phenomenon find urban loneliness and forced isolation among the obvious and pressing causes.
A number of artists attribute fatigue to the abundance of things, from the goods on the shelves of shops to information, the surrounding us, stereotypes and endless attempts by external structures to impose rules on the functioning of society. Others, on the other hand, are looking for the causes of fatigue in scarcity and uniformity — welfare, social roles, and poverty.
As artists and designers examine the effects of fatigue on human beings, they note the full spectrum of negative and depressed reactions: anxiety, indifference, the desire to hide. And it’s only in rare cases that we try to break things.
Most of the exhibition consisted of the work of students and teachers in contemporary arts. It’s done in different mediums, from installation to video, from painting and photography to performances.
The Design Environment students have created a series of chairs on which a tired visitor to the exhibition can sit. Mode showed a number of projects inspired by fatigue — clothing for work and recreation.
The students of Communication Design reflected on the proposed topic through a packaging format for tired people, as well as a series of posters.
The exhibition included a congress of tired people, which brought together experts in the fields of art and design, philosophy, sociology, psychology and other sciences on the contemporary state of man and society. Programme curators: Alexandra Pershev, Anna Krasnoslobodtsev, Victoria Nesterova, Tatiana Fadeev.
More than 140 artists and designers participated in the exhibition
