Lena Vorobyeva & Viktor Vorobyev

Laura Bulian Gallery, Milan

The Re-Orientation project by the Vorobyev couple was greatly inspired by Soviet underground art, namely the Collective Actions Group. Intoxicated with a desire to escape the reality of life under the Soviet regime, the group searched for locations devoid of any contextual references to re-enact their highly secretive performances. According to the Vorobyevs, their "... trips to the countryside were dictated by a desire to break free from the imposed stereotypes and a yearning to create a suitable metaphor for existing ‘outside the media’ and ‘outside the society’". The present work does not reference any specific history or geography; it is simply a landscape. The signs depicted here were installed directly into the landscape to create a new orientation indicative of human intervention, which the artists consider a sign of conflict.