Since 2016, CUBO has supported the Arteam Cup Award because it believes in the development of talent and because it is in line with the award's mission, aimed at the growth and promotion of emerging artists.
The overall winner of the 2017 Award is Anna Skoromnaya, our guest at CUBO with her new project - KINDERGARTEN. Childhood Denied - curated by Matteo Galbiati, designed specifically for Spazio Arte, from 11 April to 1 June 2018.
The exhibition project is a very special playground, without however any children playing. In their place we find moving images, their voices evoked by children's rhymes in the background, embedded within the shapes as if they were toys.
With this apparently playful solution, the exhibition investigates the theme of the denial of children's rights in an intense and suggestive artistic work, capable of making the contemporary work of art a "unifying force of differences, a vehicle for those who have neither strength nor voice, focusing attention on the shadowed corners of our society". A surreal journey among the ruins of a fragile and delicate theme through an intense artistic work, with a strong ability to restore the task of being a bearer of not only aesthetic and cultural reflections but also social reflections to the contemporary work of art.
Child soldiers, child brides, child labour are just some of the faces of this violated childhood denied any chance; in the Kindergarten series, Anna Skoromnaya raises her uncontrollable cry of shame towards what she felt was her duty, even before the urgent need to give it shape.
The following works from the Kindergarten series are on display: Popcorn Machine, dedicated to children used as instruments of death related to pseudo-religious terrorism, and Cream Hand Mixer, dedicated to children used as work tools, and the new installation Cotton Candy Maker. The two brand-new works, Cotton Candy Maker #1 and #2, are dedicated to the drama of child brides.
- Anna Skoromnaya, Popcorn Machine #1, frame
- Anna Skoromnaya, Popcorn Machine #2, frame
- Anna Skoromnaya, Popcorn Machine #3, frame
- Anna Skoromnaya, Cream Hand Mixer #1
- Anna Skoromnaya, Cream Hand Mixer #1, frame
- Anna Skoromnaya, Cream Hand Mixer #2
- Anna Skoromnaya, Cream Hand Mixer #12, frame
- Anna Skoromnaya, Cream Hand Mixer #1
- Anna Skoromnaya, Cream Hand Mixer #2, frame
Made of different materials, the installations combine the tactility of sculptural artifice with the narrating multi-sensory nature of video, providing stimuli that seek out and draw from individual memories. The videos reveal the implicit morality of each of the artist's interventions, as if each of her works were a fairy tale.
The illusion of experiencing a scenario of apparent normality reveals its crudest face when – abducted by colours, sounds, images – we collide with the actual reality of the facts: Anna Skoromnaya's holograms portray children intent on performing actions that only the atrocity of the daily news remind us are real.
