Childhood in front of TV set. Streets. Part 1

The series “Childhood in front of the TV” was born in the spring of 2018, during the preparation for the annual exhibition at the Street Art Museum in St. Petersburg. Later, works from this series were transferred to school tables and presented at the “Not needed there. Not needed here” exhibition in MMOMA at the end of 2018. And at the beginning of 2019, a mix of famous foreign cartoons and equally popular domestic films turned into street works in Yekaterinburg, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Nizhny Novgorod.

This series is an attempt to demonstrate how the memory of modern people works. Each collage in this series is like a child born in the late ’80s or the first half of the’ 90s, sitting in front of the TV and switching channels. News, movies, TV programs, cartoons – everything is mixed, stuck together, soldered in his head. Real archive photos of those years, as if picked up from TV news; footage from films that not everyone has watched, but everyone knows; cartoons that are familiar to everyone regardless of age. These are the three components of this project. This is supplemented by a careful choice of location for each work – this place should be suitable for both the atmosphere and the subject of the drawing. Characters from the “Brigada” appeared in the well – known all over Russian district of Uralmash; characters from “Zhmurok” – of course, in Nizhny Novgorod; “Brat” – in St. Petersburg, in the next yard to the one where the film was shot; “Brat 2” – near the Vnukovo airport.

In this series, I am attracted to both the versatility and intimacy of these simple and even primitive collage combinations. Thousands of people also sat with the remote in front of the TV, switched channels, and cultivated clip thinking. But everyone had their favorite characters. And sometimes you can and should remember them to try to understand something new about yourself today.

We from the first class together. Brigada. March 19, Ekaterinburg. Photo by Alexander Yang