Aliens II text to the exhibition in the gallery D137 by Andrei Khlobystin

After Barbarella, the title character of Roger Vadim’s 1968 movie played by Jane Fonda, embarked on a space trip to find and stop the evil scientist Durand-Durand and particularly after she knocked out the Excessive Sex Machine, glamour, irony and eroticism conquered science fiction. Since the late 1960s, the mix of fantasy and ‘cosmic soap opera’ has been gradually taking the lead in this genre. The death of science fiction is as widely discussed as the death of art: within last ten years no significant work appeared in either sphere. At first, the literature was suppressed by film fantasy dressed after comic-strips and then both were displaced by computer games that, in turn, started to generate films and books. Meanwhile, science has grown too complex and overspecialized. In relation to science, anyone now is a layman, whether you are a sci-fi writer or a man in the street, who nowadays does not differ much from his 15th-16th century’s forefathers since he tends to take the fictional characters of the entertainment industry for real just as his forefathers took for real the dog-headed people. Interest in space that used to be the pivot of science fiction seems to have disappeared. In 1990s, it was replaced by the so-called virtual reality. The astronaut Barbarella who was once recognized the sexiest sci-fi movie heroine, yielded to the archaeologist Lara Croft (the UK science minister, Lord Sainsbury, called her ‘the brightest achievement of British scientific thought’) who plunges into the depths of Earth (come forward, psychoanalysts!). In such a situation, forty years after Barbarella and the Sorbonne revolution, Nina Vitanova, the artist of Bulgarian/Russian origin currently living in Switzerland and France, resolves to create her own space utopia. Nina has many talents. Besides being an artist, she is a good dancer, a society woman and a skilled cook. Armed with these talents, she went to conquer the artistic space and fine societies of Russia’s both capitals. In 2004, her exhibition Brain Extension at D137 Gallery showed her Russian friends as characters of her multi-layered digital works. Now, in her new exposition The Aliens, the artist leaves the jungles of the subconscious and takes her characters into the open space. The project has several parts. One of them includes large-size photographs processed to resemble traditional comic strips. They picture the artist herself exploring new galaxies together with the joyful mega-star of local actionism Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe. These two are defined as ‘the aliens’, the new Adam and Eve, the sexy Uebermenschen who conquer the unknown with comic grimaces and theatrical gestures.
­­Andrei Khlobystin