Trash Resources explores our long history of exploitation of natural resources and human labor, as well as, economic order. These themes are the centerpieces of the work of Russian artists, Andrei Molodkin, Arsen Savadov, and Yevgeniy Yufit.

Economic order rules the world and the task of ideology is to justify it. While contemporary art is dependent upon market conditions, art undermines economic order by distorting pricing orthodoxy; Andrei Molodkin’s sculpture of the god Apollo filled with oil costs many times more than the market price of a barrel of that same oil.  In this case, the container determines its price.  Molodkin collects residue oil from the pipelines of national corporations to create his art. Acrylic blocks are molded from wax sculptures, which are then filled with crude oil, creating liquid sculptures encased in transparent blocks.

Arsen Savadov explores the dichotomies of modernization by synthesizing upper and lower worlds.  In his photographs of the Donbass Coal Mines, Savadov’s blackened coal miners in tutus are heaven and hell.  They are allegories of industrialization - their swan-like presence embodies romantic idealism with swans and miners occupying a space bordering life and death. 

Yevgeniy Yufit is the originator of Russian Necrorealism and questions mortality through his films.  Yufit’s subjects blur traditional boundaries of life and death, questioning who is dead and who is alive in a postmodern age.  

Since Industrialization, there is a history of exploitation of natural resources and human labor for economic means. By burning energy resources, mankind burns geologic memory. While the First World burns human memory through the mass media, the Third World sacrifices geologic memory to the First World. Global amnesia takes the place of natural evolution and memory, too, becomes a Trash Resource.

Olesya Turkina and Victor Mazin