APXIV
Re:Beuys
About the Item
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Re:Beuys is an XR project by the APXIV research group. The project is dedicated to the famous German artist and one of the main theorists of postmodernism, Joseph Beuys, whose birthday in 2021 has marked 100 years. The XR-project of the APXIV group explores the Joseph Beuys legend about the fall on the Crimean field and magical healing by shamanic practices.
On March 16, 1944, a Luftwaffe military aircraft crashed near the village of Znamenka in the Crimea. The future world famous artist Joseph Beuys is on the plane. It is this moment that becomes the key in his myth of rebirth. Beuys himself recalled: "The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late to open the parachute ... The plane crashed into the ground, and that saved me, although I suffered bone injuries faces and skulls ... Then the tail turned over and I was completely buried in the snow. The Tatars found me a day later. I remember voices, they said "Water", felt from the tents, and the strong smell of melted fat and milk. They covered my body with fat to help it restore heat, and they wrapped me in felt to keep it warm."
On January 5, 2021, the APXIV research group set off for the Crimean Peninsula on an expedition to the site of the Beuys's plane crash, with the goal of investigating the “Beuys myth”. The APXIV group determined the exact crash point and found out that the history of Beuys's reincarnation, even as a legend, contains many dubious moments. During an expedition to Crimea, the artists studied and rethought the famous Beuys myth, examining it from different angles. The study took place in several stages: 4 rituals of co-adjustment, interviewing relatives of eyewitnesses to the fall, taking land and tactile analysis of soil and water, reconstruction of the fall using an unmanned aerial vehicle, bathing in low-radioactive sources of the village of "Novaya Zhizn" (New Life).
The project is created within the Digital AIR residence at the CСI Fabrika in Moscow (Russia) and is funded from the International Foundation for Cultural and Educational Organizations 2021 of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany, German Cultural Center (Goethe Institute) and other partners.
About the Artist
APXIV is a self-organized art group founded in 2016 by alumni of the Institute of Contemporary Art (Moscow), Baza Institute (Moscow) and Rodchenko Art School (Moscow). The group has included different members at different times. In 2021, APXIV residents are Katya Granova, Lika Gomiashvili, Nikita Kaem, Olga Klimovitskaya, Sofya Ovchinnikova, Danya Orlovsky, Vladimir Savostin, Anastasia Soboleva and Ya Nzi.
The research interests of the group are structured around participatory artistic practices, the art of interaction, and form prosessual and spatio-temporal foam existing in constant fluctuation. Chaotic trembling is generated by the high degree of its bubbles freedom and deforms the field of the enveloping polyphonic utterance.
Solo exhibitions include: APXIV 24 (online, 2018), Distributed Bar System (Copenhagen Contemporary, 2019), Post-industrial APXINALLE (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in the Urals, Yekaterinburg, 2020).
Group exhibitions include: Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2021), Musyem Land (PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, Perm, 2019), Presence International Festival of Contemporary Photography (Sevkabel Port, St. Petersburg, 2019, 2020), Communities and Spaces (Winzavod CCA, Moscow, 2019), Support Group (Cube.Moscow, Moscow, 2020), The First Altai Biennale of Contemporary Art (Ust-Koks region, Altai, 2020), and Art Prospekt 7th International Festival of Public Art (DK Gaza, St, Petersburg, 2020). Participants live in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
