Office for Comparative Reality

Sabotage

Since 6 July 2023

Pushkin House is inaugurating Sabotage, an intervention by the Office for Comparative Reality, into the space of the Pushkin House Bar. Sabotage is an unsettling environment exploiting the manipulative nature of media flows, hypertext aesthetics and artificially generated imagery to reflect on the incessant persistence of decentralised militarist propaganda. The installation brings together a number of elements, including a looped video piece, a wallpaper consisting of map-like glitched textures and metadata, a flag designed by a neural network, ink portraits of the dead bodies of Russian troops abandoned by the Russian military commanders in Ukraine, as well as the sounds of a grand piano in the process of tuning. The resulting setting reveals that distortion, fakes and mimicry constitute dominant features of aggressive media landscapes, which aim to suppress our awareness and shape our perceptions. 

In the course of the intervention the space of the Pushkin House Bar is adorned with the flora typical of swamps and marshes, further perverting its architectural minimalism.

Office for Comparative Reality (OCR) is a speculative collective organisation focusing on subversive political art. It was established by Katya Sivers shortly after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine with the aim of creating a safe platform for artists to amplify their voices against the war and to become agents of change. OCR focuses on the question of manipulation of realities reflecting political upheavals and technological innovations connected to existing power structures. OCR operates as a design-research laboratory with a variety of formats, including exhibitions, publications and events based on radical collaborations.

Artists: Danya Orlovsky (motion design), Boris Shershenkov (sound), Katya Sivers (concept, project lead, creative direction) and those, who preferred to stay anonymous.