18 works of this project were shown at M'ARS Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow. Installation photos here

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Walter Benjamin used the term Jetztzeit ('now-time') when referring to a moment without history, a moment outside of time: a sort of secularized version of the Scholastic nunc stans ('everlasting now.') The present is disengaged from history's causality, and from history's diktats: today's actions are no longer predetermined by earlier events. However, when allowing the historical continuum to collapse onto itself, signs and symbols are separated from their meaning, familiar iconography is gutted from its original content and the historically accumulated ideals of society are voided.

In the way that fashion evokes costumes of the past, the now searches the past for its roots, and models itself on past archetypal events and personalities. These works explore our vestigial cultural memory by conflating the iconography of contemporary entertainment with the archetypal images that are grafted in our consciousness. Thus, a visual and conceptual framework is created that serves as a compression chamber of cultural tendencies.

Models of being and of behavior from past and present are seamlessly joined. The world of mediated, simulated reality becomes that of the everlasting now, and the media moment becomes a moment of religious exaltation. Contemporaneity is represented as existing in a space divorced from history, where tradition is transformed into re-enactment, where historical images and personalities become prefigurations of contemporary media events, and where fixed meaning is challenged through the fusion of value systems.