LADA Screens: Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich

Fyodor will present Fyodor’s Five Foundlings, a film documenting his guerrilla performances Foundlings, made between 2015 and completed in 2017 when he was was arrested and put in jail after being delivered in a box to the Met Gala in New York City. 

The evening will begin with a talk from Fyodor about his most recent museum project Temporary Monuments.

After a screening of the film Fyodor will be in conversation with Alex Eisenberg, followed by a performance called Penis and Anus, Brother and Sister.

About the Film
Fyodor’s Five Foundlings is a series of live interventions that explore the 'foundling’, a historic term applied to children or newborn babies that were abandoned by parents and discovered by others. In medieval Europe, these ‘foundlings’ were commonly left in boxes. In a similar way, for this project, the artist wedges his body into a small and claustrophobic glassbox, using 18 screws. Whoever finds the box is faced with two options, either to break the glass or use a screwdriver to open it.

Each time the work is performed, the artist invites his four friends to deliver the box to the entrance of an institution or a venue hosting an expensive gala dinner of art-world VIPs, often people who may be on a journey of acceptance relating to performance art, and how it might (or might not) be collected.

The ‘box lifters’ sneak inside under the pretence of bringing something for a renowned curator or a museum director and the box is left at the venue. Once set inside or stopped by security guards in front of the entrance, lifters throw the belt used for carrying the box on the floor and flee the venue before anyone can catch them.

At this point the work is completely out of the artist's control and depends on how the institution is equipped to cope handling, lifting or maneuvering the box

The aim of the performance is reached when the ‘donated’ work of live art (the artist’s own body) is discarded, banned or dismissed. In other words, by encouraging rejection of the object, the performance actually fulfils its objectives.

About the Performance
Related to Carolee Schneeman's ‘puppet-driven live works’ and performance lectures Penis and Anus, Brother and Sister is a feminist work by the artist. It consists of a short but intense dialog between the two most trouble making parts of a man’s body. Fyodor says of this new piece:

'Since I was three, I’ve always been fascinated by puppetry. I was really stubborn with my mother, asking her to make puppets for my theatre. The first performance had its premiere on my fourth birthday: the theatre had real curtains that opened, three bells chimes and even tickets available at door for the guests. I’ve been thinking for a long time of incorporating this genre into my performative practice, yet depriving it of the certain elements that are impossible within the performance context.’

Biography
Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich is a visual artist, curator and museum director, as well as writer, theatre director, and filmmaker. Exploring a distance between a work of art and its audience, he creates performances and site-specific installations, objects, guerrilla actions and long-durational works that he presents worldwide under curatorship of Hans Ulrich Obrist, RoseLee Goldberg, Klaus Biesenbach, and Marina Abramovic. Fyodor’s Performance Carousel was first shown in 2014 at Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, then in 2016 as the opening event of Wiener Festwochen in Vienna and received Grand Prix at Kuryokhin Art Prize 2015. Pavlov-Andreevich lives and works between Moscow (where he looks after an artist-run space, Solyanka), London and São Paulo.