Elizaveta Glukhova

Moon Gallery invites art projects and artifacts inspired by the Moon and by the thrive for human exploration to join our mission. Moon Gallery is an international collaborative artwork and a gallery of ideas worth sending to the Moon. Moon Gallery intends to launch 100 artifacts to the Moon within the compact format of 10 x 10 x 1cm plate on a lunar lander as early as 2022. In this Petri dish-like gallery, we are developing culture for future interplanetary society. What are the ideas that we want to promote into the future? What are the ideas that we want to leave behind? Moon Gallery as a pilot plat- form within the framework of the Moon Village, ITTACUS & ILEWG aims to instigate inspiration for the global space exploration and demonstrate how the challenges along this journey drive innovative design thinking and interdisciplinary collaborations. Art Moon Mars collective leads this project, coordinates events and develops content through a series of open calls. A selection of submitted to Moon Gallery artworks and artifacts was exhibited at ESTEC and Space Expo Museum Noordwijk, Salone del Mobile Milano 2019, Hoogtij#57 Quartair The Hague. In collaboration with Anna Sitnikova and Bernard Foing. The founder of the gallery Alexander Zaklynsky.

Our journey in this project started in Enschede, a city in the east of the Netherlands. We were wel- comed to stay for a week at a Christian commune called “De Wonne” that is housed in a former monastery in the center of the city. The commune is almost 40 years old. Ever since its founding, it has been a home to those who are in need as well as people who lost their way in life and are looking for some stability. We were welcomed into De Wonne as guests so that we could learn about how its inhabitants coexist with one another; to see how – in this microcosm of a highly diverse society – people from different places, countries, cultural backgrounds, social strata, and life experiences manage to live under a one roof, support one another, and share similar daily routines. The story we want to tell our audience is about how to be a guest in someone else’s house – a place where everything is unfamiliar to you. It’s a story about how people can learn to understand one an- other through shared experiences and in so doing make sense of new or different values, traditions, and attitudes. In collaboration with Nadezhda Titova.

“Cabinet of Accurate Delusions” is a mixed media installation, created as a reflection on the use of biological data in the medical research and healthcare. It is the outcome of extensive investigation of the ways how data is collected, analysed and used. The general look of the installation is inspired by the 16th century Cabinets of Curiosity (Wunderkammers) and enhanced by the video projection and interactive machines that collect data from visitors. The metaphor of Cabinet of Curiosity came from its historical background. Collectors were used to arrange the items according to their view of the world, displaying real as well as fictional objects together in order to create a new meaning. This combination of science and speculation seems very relevant to how medical data is treated nowadays. The metaphor of Cabinet of Curiosity came from its historical background. Collectors were used to arrange the items according to their view of the world, displaying real as well as fictional objects together in order to create a new meaning. This combination of science and speculation seems very relevant to how medical data is treated nowadays.

The reading of “A Political Treatise” triggered us to think about the relation between government and individuals and how Spinoza depicts it. He highly values rational thinking of individual and claims that people can only be truly free under the control of the government when they use their own reason. Spinoza’s solution is simple and clear. The individual should obey the law, but in order to be free, also have to understand its true purpose and honestly believe that society benefits from it. But how should an individual make a choice when his beliefs or moral values if they don’t match the law? Could morality replace the law? By interviewing people with deep understanding and living experience with modern law such as lawyers, professors, policy makers and human rights defenders, we tried to investigate the contradictions democracy faces. Stories told by these people whom practice the “absolute” law are still stories of individual humans, and the subtle or extreme differences in their ideas reveal the complexity of these contradicting yet co-dependent elements of democracy: law and morality. In collaboration with Jungeun Lee.

Nostalgia is not only a poetic human weakness, but also a powerful political tool. We tend to look at the past thinking that back then life was much better and rarely aware of how fragmented those memories are. A great example of a common nostalgic period in Russian culture is “Ottepel” a specific short period in the history of USSR, when the political, social, and cultural life of the society was vastly improving. This VJ-ing tool gives a tour though the landscape of photos of that period, however it is only fragmented pieces of what reality was and the illusion we keep in our memories. Music by the Russian instrumentalists, “Megapolis”.

‘Osman’ is a work in response to the Ultraclub project, which is a non-profit advertising agency, ran by students for one semester in Boekhorstraat, The Hague. The goal was to collaborate with the community of the street by creating visual identities for the local shop merchants. This in hand, created a network between the artist and public space, as well as telling the locals’ stories as a result of this merge. ‘Osman’ is a restaurant, where its owner collects random objects for years and places them in the space. Each item is sentimental to him since he remembers exactly where each item was purchased or found, and how much it had cost. At first, he is reserved when meeting people for the first time, but he opens up when it comes to his possessions, opening a new world for the listener. With his objects and stories, you are no longer in the kitchen anymore with him, rather in his gallery space, where objects are valued not by the price, but by the story they leave behind. The project documents every single object of the collection and the story behind it.

GPS 37.660818, 25.165621 Aegean Sea, near Tinos In their map of the Mediterranean Sea, Elizaveta Glukhova and Natalia Vishnevskaia illustrate a landscape of media ‘voices’, related to the refugee crisis which has played out across the Greek islands from 2015 until 2016. The team collate opinions and statements from online Western media, tourist comments as well as refugee interviews, to show how different people subjectively experience the consequences of the same global events and how Greek Mythology connects to current events.

This installation is a poetic representation of research on the Romany identity. Romany or Roma is a common name for several traditionally nomadic ethnic groups, scattered across the world. Historically they have always lived separately from each other, but shared similar life styles and identity. The pattern on the skirt is a collection of all Romany names and the movement is a metaphor for their culture and traditions, which are strongly represented in dances, music and performances. When the skirt spins, all names merge and unite into one colourful blur and the spirit of culture takes over the formal division.

Love in all its appearances is one of the strongest human desires, but also the greatest human weakness. We can’t control it, can’t predict it. Love drives even the most rational people crazy and leaves them blind. Being desperate to fulfil their desire, people start looking for supernatural signs. The “Oracle” installation is a prediction machine that gives people random prophesies about their coming future. Some of them make more sense than the others, but at the end of the day the question is how far would go you to see a meaning behind a random selection of words.

Immigration is quite a big issue nowadays, however not a new one. The immigration across US - Mexico has a long history and still remains complicated. It’s a sensitive topic concerning differ- ent aspects such as economical, political, and humanistic dilemmas. During my research on this topic I found some sort of dualism in the perception of this question. Once we face a story of a single person of his achievements and struggles, it is very easy to be humane and com- passionate. But when we try to see a general picture zooming out of all kind of complexities surrounding this issue, it seems that a personal story loses its value. This book is my personal re- flection on this dualistic approach. It is divided into two parts; the top part consists of scientific articles, written by Nicholas De Geneva and the bottom part is an inter- view of immigrants conducted by Walter Gallacher. This is my visual proposal on how we should view this issue, by attempting to look at both sides at the same time.

The experimental typographic project Vertical, Horizontal, Half Circle is inspired by the observation of differences between communication to humans and to computers. While the instructions given to computers should be precisely defined and give an expect- able and constant result, instructions to humans are personal, built on anticipation of knowledge and its correctness is barely questioned. Therefore we will always get an output on our instruction given to a person, but often not what we imagined. We gave formalized instructions to people describing the letters of the alphabet. Since people all understood the instructions in a different way, they created several new alphabet. Actual Website: http://vertical-hor- izontal-half-circle.jungeunlee.net/ Collaboration with Nóra Békés, Close Jungeun Lee, Ies de Jong Special thanks to Lizzie Malcom

The city puzzle is an interactive installation that was made for an exhibition “Moving Type, Moving Cities” (14 December 2015, Fokker Terminal, Den Haag). The work is concentrated on the unnatural conditions, which influence the development of modern cities. It questions the idea of seeing the city as just a set of separate pieces, which have to satisfy someone’s personal needs, but not as one organism. The series of posters was made as a sketch for the installation and refers to the fact that sometimes what state is not what we actually do. The installation itself is a 3-dimensional puzzle, which give a player an opportunity to experience how it feels, trying to make one construction out of separate pieces. Is it going to turn stable or beautiful? That’s up to you to decide.

The book is an image-based reflection on the poem “What I believe” by J. G. Ballard. This piece caused very conflicting feelings in me. On the one hand it is a beautiful poem, which invites a reader to think about his own beliefs, but simultaneously it feels detached from daily life. So what is it, a sense of life or just big words, that don’t have any real implementation? The name of the book is “I Believe in the Beauty of Reality” and it juxtaposes very poetic, professionally staged images and the most ordinary shots of kebab restaurants. Treating them as mere compositions of imageries, both categories of images are treated equally without any hierarchy.