I have a tale to tell…
It is commonly believed that the very first story that art ever told was about the magic power of art itself. Those silhouettes of people and animals drawn on the stone walls of a cave thousands of years ago are seen as primitive, yet rational, attempts from a human being at conjuring up game that could guarantee survival and the advancement of life.
The visual arts have kept such a power ever since. Art history never stops to tell us the tales embedded in paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs and works of art made with other artistic media. A visit to a museum of fine arts, as a matter of fact, is unquestionably an experience of getting to know stories about people, places, habits, customs, and traditions of a past which often mirrors the present.
In ‘I have a tale to tell…’, the third issue of the New Archive of Edition Art (NATI), nine artists tell us their stories (Nikita Alexeev, Boris Groys, MishMash, Andrey Monastyrsky, Damir Muratov, Pavel Peppersten, Viktor Pivovarov, Anastasia Potemkina, Where Dogs Run).
From the second half of the XX century onwards, with the progressive dependence of social functioning on technology, it has become evident that expressing artistic creativity through media that allows the making of copies is a powerful approach to appropriate and comment on the world surrounding us. It turned out that the 2019 Venice Biennale wish “May you live in interesting time” predicted with a certain dose of ghastly irony the pandemic that broke the timeline of the whole planet. The global pandemic has forced us to focus on the here and now, because it is not possible to determine what rules will be in force tomorrow. More than ever, this is the time to find the time to listen to the story that artists want to tell.