FEDOR HIROSHIGE
I CAN FEEL THE DISTANCE
(Saint Petersburg, Russia)
As we share a single space with the rest of our households during the lockdown, many of us have found ourselves short on personal space. For example, for Fedor Hiroshige, this took the form of his relatives forbidding him from listening to music and asking him to turn off any audio he played. For the festival, Hiroshige will outfit his balcony with wooden karaoke—wooden karaoke being scattered logs featuring wood-burnt lyrics from songs sacred to the artist (such as Tory Amos’s “China,” Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” and a-ha’s “Sox of the Fox”). At scheduled times, Hiroshige himself will emerge into this fertile environment, dressed as a hypersensitive mushroom man, and lead several sessions of silent singing. “Especially during the quarantine, many people have been resorting at times to [famous Soviet fictional secret agent] ‘Stierlitz-style singing’, i. e. as silent as possible,” says the mushroom man of his vocal practice.
Balcony appearances October 15–18, 12:00–12:30 p.m.
Fedor Hiroshige is an artist working in wooden sculptures and installations and performance. Hiroshige’s post-digital work both analyzes and creates many-layered transference phenomena. As he takes selfies for social media, this fictional post-humanist character comes alive and is transferred into the everyday life of today. His object-oriented method of image creation is transferred from digital editing software into the world of material objects. In Hiroshige’s work, syntactic modules set in Book Antiqua surface on wooden beams that shore up the ceiling, while Tibetan script is transferred to Russian ground and appears on birch logs alongside portraits of great thinkers and anime characters.
Fedor Hiroshige received his bachelors in Linguistics from Saratov Chernyshevsky State University. From 2010–14, he was a founding member of the artist collective Repa, which focused on a critique of consumer society. Since 2011, he has been based in St. Petersburg. From 2012–19, he was an active member of the creative collective Parazit. In 2014, he participated in the parallel program of Manifesta 10. In 2017–18, he was an artist and model at North-7’s School of Active Drawing and Performative Posing. In 2019, his installation Fedor Hiroshige’s Buddhist Monastery was nominated for the Kuryokhin prize for Best Visual Art Project. Hiroshige’s work can be found in private and public collections around the world, thanks in part to the Parazit in the World’s Museums project (Tate Modern, MoMA Library, etc.).