SCARY TALES
YEMAA Center of Contemporary Culture, 2022
Scary Tales is a meditative space created by artists and curators.
Participating Artists: Dariya Kokonja, Syrlybek Bekbotayev, Mansur Smagambetov
Our project is now more than two years old. We arrived at it by different paths and at different times, and the pandemic and the January events accelerated its realization.
Scary Tales was conceived and produced as a response to the rupture in the fabric of everyday life and the resulting suspension of familiar meanings and cause-and-effect relationships, and, above all, as a response to the devaluation of the knowledge about the world and culture that we had spent years accumulating in universities, schools, online, in forums, and on social media. We came to live in a new, hyper-anxious mode: events unfolded rapidly and unpredictably, exceeding the adaptive capacity of the average psyche. We could not keep pace with making sense of events; the world multiplied and fell apart, only to begin multiplying again.
Scary Tales was conceived and produced as a response to the rupture in the fabric of everyday life and the resulting suspension of familiar meanings and cause-and-effect relationships, and, above all, as a response to the devaluation of the knowledge about the world and culture that we had spent years accumulating in universities, schools, online, in forums, and on social media. We came to live in a new, hyper-anxious mode: events unfolded rapidly and unpredictably, exceeding the adaptive capacity of the average psyche. We could not keep pace with making sense of events; the world multiplied and fell apart, only to begin multiplying again.
Now, having caught our breath, we are exploring the possibility of an absolute knowledge that could be converted into something relevant in any social, cultural, or climatic situation. Turning to the achievements of various schools of thought, we realized that this inquiry leads not outward but inward. Scary Tales is therefore a departure point for a journey inward, in search of singularity, so that we might return with knowledge approaching the absolute about this world, and all worlds to come.
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