For their first ever artistic collaboration, Gosha Rubchinskiy and Item Idem presented РОЗВАГА ROOM, a two-hour performance which took place on May 21 in Kiev, as part of the city’s SANAHUNT Cultural Initiative.
For their first ever artistic collaboration, Gosha Rubchinskiy and Item Idem presented РОЗВАГА ROOM, a two-hour performance which took place on May 21 in Kiev, as part of the city’s SANAHUNT Cultural Initiative.
Rubchinskiy, a Muscovite photographer and fashion designer, is Pied Piper for the new generation of Russian youth who are building their own post-Soviet outlook and identity. Largely resting on skateboarding, hanging out and partying, their attitude is communal over Communist; their skateboards an apt metaphor for the tribe who are kick, pushing their way to a new future; destinies unfolding with each flip of the deck. Item Idem’s Cyril Duval, who hails from Paris via Tokyo and New York, where he is mostly based, cuts a figure somewhere between AA Bronson, a mentor of his, and John Waters; an artist who could only exist in our ticker-tape age, colliding trash/pop references and the highbrow in order to explore identity and question the broader philosophies of our hyper-accelerated culture. The two met at a fashion show of Rubchinskiy some time ago. “I usually don't go [to fashion shows] because of my lack of interest and energy for them but I was very impressed by his aesthetic and how he was precisely defining his creative world around him, commitments I value for myself or others and in general,” Duval tells AnOther. “We started to hang out on my following trips to Russia and began talking about collaborating on something one day. Our first idea was actually to create a boyband!”
РОЗВАГА ROOM, pronounced ‘Rosvaga’ and meaning peanuts – “it’s a room of fun,” Rubchinskiy explains, “the first word is Ukrainian” – reflects both artists’ fascination with “the ephemeral beauty of the crystallised instant that we call ‘teenage’”, whilst acknowledging Kiev’s culture. Taking in performance and installation, photography, digital art, publishing, the internet and socially-engaged conceptual practice, disciplines are stuck in a blender to produce a project greater than the sum of its already respectable parts.
The duo invited a group of local teenagers, cast from the streets of the Ukraine, into a Soviet-styled hotel suite featuring local craft and artifacts, sportsgear, and Kiev kitsch gleaned from markets and tourist haunts. Their teen idols were encouraged to explore this lost-in-time penthouse whilst reacting to an update of Surrealist party game Exquisite Corpse, where, through rhythmic attacks on Google’s search engine, they created their own web/fanzine. As an audience of onlookers munched on Ukrainian delicacies.
Text by Dean Mayo Davies
