Artem Goloshchapov is an artist who works at the intersection of video art and experimental cinema maintaining an interest in such classical mediums as painting, photography and total installation. By mixing these art forms into digital collages, the artist creates a new tense reality. He explores the field of digital manipulations with images that reflect the reality of the post-digital era. Goloshchapov’s language is a product of a new generation of clip culture with its fragmented perception of reality, where the culture of YouTube and TikTok has replaced narrative television, and memes have become the ultimate truth. Artem’s works create an impression of ‘hyperreality’ where the world and its inhabitants look neither artificial nor genuine. Goloshchapov’s projects can be divided into three major fields: reassembling the decaying reality, the figurative system of modern-day icons, and digital painting, which continues the ‘dissection’ of traditional mediums. All these themes are united by the quest for our place in the modern world, where we are constantly urged to solidify ourselves with one point of view or another, preventing us from making our own decision, and the choice turns out to be way too grand.
As part of Cosmoscow Foundation’s Series program Goloshchapov suggested the idea of the graphic novel The Truth of Nine Foundation. Its plot was developed based on the conspiracy theories of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020, collected by the artist in Russian-language Telegram channels or inspired by them. Goloshchapov believes that in a world divided by the coronavirus, only fiction and fantasy can once again unite people in the best possible way. Unfortunately, Giovanni Boccaccio’s idea of culture as a fundamental link in human life does not work anymore: Karl Popper’s ‘religious prejudices’ have been removed from the public life, and new ‘demons’ and ‘gods’ should replace them, while the ideal democratic civilized society itself is able to exist only in conditions of isolation fleeing from disease and death out in the country.
The story of the series begins in 1986, when the attention of the whole world was drawn on the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the American diplomat Jim Tufft proposed to the government a plan for the final establishment of US hegemony around the world. The idea was so outrageous and sounded so stupid that even the have-seen-it-all Wall Street oligarchs were shocked. Tufft argued that the decisive advantage could be achieved through comprehensive surveillance of all the people in the world with the help of drones that in the form of city birds' replicants: pigeons, sparrows, gulls and crows.
Nowadays, encounter of six girls (Maya, Alice, Eva, Sofia, Anastasia and Gia) in ZOOM results in a trip to country estate in order to escape from a complete lockdown, to protect themselves from unpleasant experiences, to put together an electronic girl band that exploits 2000’s nostalgia, to immerse in joint creativity, yoga, and, perhaps, lust and debauchery if the pandemic becomes too deadly, as well as storytelling, like the characters of the Decameron, who left the infected Florence for a country villa and escaped the plague.
The full version of "The Truth of Nine Foundation" you can find on Instagram. Please note that each publication in the gallery has texts for the series.
Artem Goloshchapov is an artist. He was born in St. Petersburg in 1987. He currently lives and works in Moscow, Russia. He previously worked as an editorial photographer. He graduated from the St. Petersburg State University and the video art workshop of the Rodchenko Art School. He participant in the Forumak Summer School on Contemporary Art. He obtained an educational grant from the Objective Reality Foundation. He was nominated for the Innovation Prize (2019) and the Kuryokhin Prize (2020).