Katya Inozemtseva on «Magic Rustle» by Victor Alimpiev
Victor Alimpiev works equally with two media: video and painting. Although they may seem to exist in different contexts, on closer analysis it is clear that both allow the artist to study the texture of time or, more precisely, a strange chronotope whose structure is just as layered as the fine glazes in Alimpiev’s paintings, with their occasional recesses, folds, depressions, and patches. His work cannot be reduced to a narrative or a description of what takes place on the screen or on the surface of the painting. As Alimpiev himself noted in an interview, “there is something base about understandability.” All of his works involve complex visual systems and fragments of codes and semiotic structures. They create a kind of meta-poetry that is deployed as part Alimpiev’s characteristic handling of time and space. The two- channel video Magic Rustle (2011) which is presented at the Triennial shows the movements and speech acts of a woman. There is a short time lag between the first and second screens—which project the same image— and this creates a complex spatial glitch. Like most of Alimpiev’s videos, Magic Rustle is a loop without beginning or end: nothing happens in time, as there is no past, present, or future. The video is about the instantaneity of sensation and the complexity of quasi-neuronal reactions, something like what happens when reads one poetry in a concentrated fashion, perhaps the poetry of Alimpiev’s beloved Paul Celan.
