The group project Bad Script is a text, a play without beginning or end, a flawed script pieced together from fragments of a crumbling language on a concrete floor—a manifesto for a new independent exhibition space, voiced without certainty in words.
Everything around us is text. An artwork is a text describing a text. A topography of signs. Art is held hostage by the literary myth of itself. The project seeks to lay bare these myths, to articulate their smirks and sorrows in its own signs, breaking language against them.
The exhibition features installations and projects across various media (video, photography, sound, objects) that in one way or another reference the form of cinematic or theatrical performance, while also examining the relationship between language, narrative, literary centrality, and the visual in art.
The project draws inspiration from the figures of renowned directors and screenwriters, from Gennady Shpalikov and the mythology of the Soviet shestidesyatniki (Sixties generation) to the late Soviet experiments in disintegrating language by Luzik and Samoryadov.
Not long ago, or a very long time ago, we often repeated the meme‑catchphrase: "Life is pain." It seemed witty. With time, "WE" disappeared, shattered into fragments… And pain became an iron reality. Devoid of any wit.
Hiding in art, in my opinion, didn't work out. Head — above the surface, torso — in the ground. Anti‑ostrich. Mutation.
Art became a meme. An endless joke: sometimes stupid, but often prophetic.
Reality outplayed everyone. The most absurd and impossible scenarios (as they seemed to us back when the phrase "life is pain" was still a meme) mutated and broke through into the present.
The sleep of reason. Bad script. Sad tropics.
What's left for artists is to write bad‑good scripts, fairy tales, illustrations.
What for? I don't know. Perhaps in the hope that our meanings will outplay the mutant of reality.
The sleep of reason gives birth to a Mutant.
Bad scripts awaken.
Alexander Tsikarishvili
Bad Script. A text, a play without beginning or end, a bad script made from the shards of a disintegrating language on a concrete floor, a manifesto without a manifesto, without any certainty in words.
Starring: Gennady Shpalikov and his black poodle named Meph, the black raven of literary ill‑omen nicknamed Poe and a red scarf fluttering in the wind, the magical sideboard of grandmother ['sobo'] Ed Kienholz and the melting pipes of a steel tongue.
Everything is text. An artwork is a text describing a text. A topography of signs. Art is a hostage of the literary myth about itself. It walks a black poodle on a leash… Or who is walking whom? The project aims to expose these myths, to describe with its own signs the smirks of sorrow, breaking language against them.
