Stella Art Foundation presents a project by the artist German Titov with a title — “The Russian Roots of Buddhism” — that is designed to intrigue. The author is the first to admit that the name of the project is completely meaningless. And that does not invoke historical veracity, but the tradition of the absurd in Russian 20th century art, a tradition in which the Moscow Conceptualist School is also situated.
The exhibition consist of a series of pictures with pseudo-Buddhist symbolism, as well as video films and photo installations, constructed from authentic Russian material. In sum it is a monumental cipher, composed of externally heterogeneous visual images or, in the author’s words, a “Zen Buddhist koan” on the theme of the road or the way — in both a spatial and existential sense. This theme is central to the practice of Moscow Conceptualism, of which the author of the Russian Roots of Buddhism is a faithful adept.
German Titov (born in 1964 in Cherepovets) is an artist and collector. Publisher of the Library of Moscow Conceptualism. Winner of the Innovation Prize in 2010 in the nomination “Support of Russian contemporary art”. Lives and works in Vologda.
Solo exhibitions: Synchronization (New Space in Maly Kiselny, Moscow, 2010); The Golden Hand and Other Objects (as part of the Attitude project (with Andrei Monastyrski), New Space in Maly Kiselny and E. K. ArtBureau, Moscow, 2011); Insignificant Alterations (Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 2011).
