Vitaly Bezpalov

Vitaly! You're the only one.
You are just the vitamin of life.

• Look cheerful! - ♪ You say ♪
  Vitaly, Vitaly, Vitaly, Vitaly, Vitaly, Vitaly
  And your car is flying away
  without wheels, without gasoline

open.spotify.com/playlist/6eXe5et5MQsd241MQVSnnt

Inside [the box] it is a colored picture of the Kremlin—one would think it would be as exotic to the West as the pyramids and sphinxes. But in fact, for the West, the Kremlin is not at all exotic, not at all a Cheops pyramid. The Kremlin is a real, driving political and moral force for the workers and oppressed nationalities of the world, a flame that lights up the world. <...> The Kremlin catches the eyes not only of Europe, but also of Asia, Australia, and America. Life is changing before our eyes, and I propose to organize a society for collecting the minutiae of a changing world.

Konst. Vaginov, ‘Bambochada’, 1929-1930

Photo by Victor Nikishov

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani? [Mark XV:34]. There is no answer. Merely the blank violence of the sun.

Photo by Vanya Venmer

Your plan is a mistake, he repeated
This world is a mistake, I replied [C93]

Photo by Kristina Matveeva

w/ Merzedes Šturm-Lie, Vika Begalskaya & Alexandr Vilkin, Alexey Bevza, Dasha Kuznetsova, Nuno Patricio, Nina Wiesnagrotzki

Curated by TZVETNIK

Photo by Kristina Matveeva

Merzedes Šturm-Lie, Reflector Games, 2019, video, 00:05:28 min

An unfinished game. And such a good one! Yet it's not clear when what we wanna finish is really over. Forget about it, you know, these things I saw, they were just asking to be joined together, so I put them together, and in the future I see myself doing what I'm doing now. It's like I can simply hear the moves in the most obvious and one of the oldest affairs. My salary and your salary, they both stem from the practice of paying soldiers in salt. Sal became solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word soldier. What a game, what a game. Combinations like melodies.

It all became clear to me when they blew up the Marseille Bridge, and still we had to make a shortcut to reach our company in time. Loaded with salt bags, crusty and dead tired I was crossing the stream with my squad, when I slipped. A great deal of salt got dissolved in the water and my load became oh so very light, so very, very light. (To uncomprehending man). Merchant du Sel, Marcel Du fucking champ, chess champignon and salt seller. (He picks up the salt shaker on the table). Salt cellar... Infinite possibilities. Great sandwiches and coffee.

— Ilya S. 1045PM Nov 4, Moscow

Curatorial work: Ilya Smirnov, Anna Teterkina
Photography: Ilya Smirnov, Janna Tatarova
SFX makeup: Anastasia Shabanova
Styling: Anna Teterkina
Salt Seller: Eric Wesemann
Special thanks to Alena Seletskaya

Salt Seller, 2019, single-channel video, Mercedes-Benz E-220

w/ Caro Eibl, Genevieve Goffman, Guillermo Ros, Julius Pristauz, Philipp Simon, Sarah Księska, Vitaly Bezpalov, Vladimir Kolesnikov, Yein Lee

Curated by TZVETNIK

Is it a mistake to say that a lemon slice in your teacup always tends to float towards your lips as if to deliberately ruin your tea drinking experience? Sometimes we may even rapidly rotate the cup 180 degrees assuming the slice’s gonna stay where it was. However, no matter how fast we are, the lemon is always faster to turn up on that exact side of the cup we take a sip from. What is it? Is it some kind of lemon conspiracy? For this to pass as a conspiracy, there’s going to be a global communications network binding a swarm of lemons. I guess they all work together with an element of surprise on their side. Each as yellow as a minion, a team worker. A dog pack is working together in order to…

What are we talking about when we talk about group show? Is it a work done together? Bananas are as yellow as lemons, but do they also communicate? Even if they do, it sure doesn’t look like it. And there is no way for us to know. For the most part a banana split is made by a human, not a banana. A banana split is definitely not the same thing as a lemon slice position in your tea cup, these things can not be compared. Are lemons alive? Alive because of yellowness or because of their ability to act correspondingly? A communications network and being alive – these two things are interlinked.

Things that work together qualify as living things. What about the non-living? Can non-living things work together? I don’t know. Can something work together just because it’s yellow? To be yellow—is it a reason enough to be alive? Wait. It is us who see the color yellow. A lemon will give it to you straight: it is you who sees things living. So who’s right? Work together? Stay alive?

w/ Vitaly Bezpalov, Maria Bogoraz, Cédric Fargues, Yannick Val Gesto, Julian-Jakob Kneer, David Linchen, Haydée Marin Lopez, Wieland Schönfelder, Ilya Smirnov, TOY

Curated by TZVETNIK

Within the frames of When The Hunger Starts - Project Space Festival Berlin 2019

BDSM Lounge, Kirchhofstr. 44, 12055 Berlin / Neukölln

According to its title, 'L'amour', the project is aimed to reflect on the phenomenon of love, how it may exist nowadays and how it may be currently understood. The project will be hosted in BDSM lounge in order to have a certain aesthetical background which is usually associated with strong physical sensations, emotional tensions, something marginal and even obscene. Along with this, BDSM may also be connected with romance, sensitive dialogue and even love. So what is love? Is it just simply "Baby don't hurt me" or maybe just the opposite?.. What if this sense may only exist in the old-fashioned bourgeois world, and what we all feel to each other is something completely different? Or maybe it is up to us that love is rediscovered and starts being open towards the ones seeking it?

Photo by Paul Barsch

“I’m dying!” You remember what happens when I die. We saw this because this good news brought us joy. We saw this at the very beginning: what a scandal, I am dying! Our intelligent soul comes down to the soul of the sensuous or the animal, but it abides. It abides. And all these wonderful creases and folds... And the soul will again be dispersed when God calls her to the Last Judgment. You remember this very bizarre idea [lol] that B. had: the souls that were meant to be intelligent were not like that from the beginning of the world—in fact, it can be perceived as idiocy. Here I am, my sensible soul, and yours too: It was necessary to wait for it to be born in order of time, in sequence, on the first floor. It took God to call us, that is, to unbend our own parts so that we could begin to express the world. But before that we existed—however, in what capacity? As a sensual living soul, like the soul of a worm. And yet: what has distinguished us from the worm? In that era, it was impossible to know. D. said: it looks as if God has embodied in some sensual souls the action by which they were destined to reach the reason, etc. When we die, we will again become the sensual soul that forms part of the second matter. Now we have to make one small effort... ;B :D

w/ Bora Akinciturk, Pasha Bezor, Vitaly Bezpalov, Theodore Darst, Arthur Golyakov, Bernhard Holaschke, Tea D. Stražičić, Stas Tocka, Vanya Venmer

Curated by TZVETNIK х PLAGUE

Tonight, while I was getting ready to wrap the little girl in a plastic bag so I could throw her in to the river, as I am used to doing in such a case, she suddenly emitted a desperate sigh. Pained, prolonged, the S in Sèvres whistled between her teeth as if she had already suffered some sort of intolerable sorrow over her next abandonment. An immense pity squeezed at my heart. I hadn’t done justice to the humble, harsh charm of this child. I threw myself on her, covered her with kisses, repentant as an unfaithful lover. I went to look for a brush in the bathroom and began styling her hair, which had become flat and broken; I rubbed her body with oils, perfumes...

https://soundcloud.com/tzvetnik/mikhail-kurilov-exe

„We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.“ 1

Кровь бедняка ("Blood of the Poor"2) by Vitaly Bezpalov (born 1985) is neither an homage to the lower classes nor a plea to the high society. In his first institutional exhibition in Germany the young artist from Moscow presents his personal take on the state of contemporary poverty. The main character of his story is an average citizen. In contrast to the needs of "Otto Normalverbraucher" (a term that came up after 1945,
meaning "everyman") today‘s standards and demands are based on loan and lease. The motto is: don‘t buy it, lease it.

Max Mustermann leads a consumption oriented life and catches himself constantly spending more money than he earns. The sociological observation by Bezpalov is an interdisciplinary transformation of everyday alchemy into artistic practice. In his context- based works the artist primarily uses material from everyday life, especially familiar objects from around the office. Archaeological, amorphous creations allude to a non-linear timeline and are representative of his recent work. 'always coca_cola II', 'Rameses II’, 'urasia circ', 'open in obscurity', ‚roses are red, that‘s how i became a songwriter', 'Rhythm of the Night' or 'Never was happiness so unattainable and freedom so dead II' sound like common poetic notes.

With great sensitivity Vitaly Bezpalov manages to create cultural-political connections and to refer to current global topics. The consumption obsessed, common mortal in Кровь бедняка is waiting in vain for a meeting with Tyler Durden3. The Capitalist value system successfully creates the illusion of being in control of yourself - and of not being controlled by your own credit card debt. According to Bezpalov, human blood
is the new petroleum, "extracted" from 7 billion people.

Roman Zheleznyak (Curator)
Translated by Ann-Katrin Drews

1 Dave Ramsey: The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness. 1994
2 Léon Bloy, "Le Sang du Pauvre" ("Blood of the Poor"). 1909
3 Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club. 1996

The Blood of the Poor

“What you gonna do when you get crucified?” asked someone.
“I’m gonna see beautiful dreams,” replied another.
“I doubt so.”

Moonlight is flowing on the edge of my bed and remains there as if it is not light any longer but a radiant flat slab. I am lying in bed, neither asleep, nor fully awake. What I have been through, what I have read, what I have heard—all these impressions are blending inside my mind as I am lying there half-asleep, they are flowing down several oblique planes and into a single spot. Before bedtime I had been reading about the life of Gotama Buddha, so now the words from this book are going round and round inside my head: “As a crow that hopped around a fat- colored stone / Thinking 'we may find a tender delicacy' / Flies away in disappointment / In disgust I give up Gotama.” This phrase is going round and round in my head, reaches its end and immediately goes back to the start. A fat- colored stone that looks like a chunk of lard is growing inside my head.

I am walking down the dry river-bed, reach down and pick up smooth little pebble stones from the ground. These grayish-bluish pebbles have flakes of dust in them that sparkle in the sun. I am pondering these pebble stones, thinking what I should do about them. I am picking up black pebbles with blotches of yellow on them and I am thinking that they resemble little plastic figurines that had been made by some child trying to sculpture a lizard long time ago, and which have since then hard- ened into stones. I want to throw all these pebble stones as far away from myself as I possibly can but they all drop through my fingers and out of sight. All of the stones that I have played with now are rising from below, crowding around me. Some of them, large, pinkish crab-like stones, are emerging from the advancing tide, are coming crawling to the hillocks, are coming into sight from under the sand, seeking to catch my eye. They seem to have something important that they want to tell me. Others are weak and impotent, they are attempting to rise up and then are toppling on their stony backs straight away: they do not want to tell me anything whatsoever.

From time to time I emerge from my half-sleep and see the moonlight flowing to the edge of my bed where it is lying like shiny flat slab. This moonlight rests there radiating its glow in order to discover somewhere in the maze of my head a stone that tortures me, a fat-colored stone that looks like a chunk of lard. There is a rain-
pipe lying on the ground right by its side, bent at an obtuse angle, its edges eaten by rust. Without looking at the rain-pipe I am trying to stir up some thoughts in my head that could have chased away and lulled to sleep my thoughts about the stone. Again I hear a voice inside me, which claps like window shutters in the wind, and it repeats at regular intervals: “This is not the thing, this is not the fat-colored stone that looks like a chunk of lard.” It keeps flapping and I cannot get rid of it.

Gradually, I become overwhelmed by the feeling of helplessness. It is hard for me to bear it. Perhaps, my body is now lying in bed sleeping while my head, detached from the body, is flowing somewhere else. Perhaps, it can no longer hear the voice that keeps talking about the stone that does not look like a piece of lard. I feel like asking what is “my self” now, but I understand that I no longer have the body part that I used to ask questions with. It scares me. I am scared of how silly I have be- come, I am scared to think that the voice can wake up again and will start pestering me again about the stone and the lard. Suffice it for me to just think of the voice and it has come back to me again: “Follow your path and do not deviate from it! Our brothers that follow the path of death hold the key to the art of oblivion, but you have conceived from the spirit of life”. I have brushed off this voice and have fallen asleep. Almost immediately I saw the light that lay down on my bed as if it was no light but a glowing flat slab.