Yakov Kazhdan
(b. 1973) is a Russian born-artist and a graduate of the Institute of Contemporary Art.
An interdisciplinary artist and member of a group Leto, he works in video art, performance and installation. His more recent works are meditative videos that explore the world of advertising, and examine how the creative affect and frame human subjectivity. In Moscow he has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (Yakov Kazhdan: 233 º C, 2008) and at the GMG Gallery (Art Delivers People. After Richard Serra, 2010). Internationally, he recently participated in a major exhibition of Russian art at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (Modernikon: Contemporary Art from Russia, 2010-2011). Yakov Kazhdan has been nominated for various prizes including the Innovation award (Russian State Prize, 2005).
Auditorium Moscow will show Yakov Kazhdan’s film The Black Window Looks White Because of the Curtain (2011), a poetic reading of the rhymic, auditory and temporal landscape of Moscow as a megalopolis with its huge traffic jams, endless construction sites, and its mix of languages. It is only in the gaze of a solitary beholder that this world comes to rest, gaining at least some fragmentary causal relations. In the framework of Auditorium Moscow, Kazhdan will also realize a new project on the atmosphere of Moscow’s “Golden Mile,” one of Moscow’s oldest neighborhoos which is now being turned into an empty reservation of the ultra-rich. The exhibition venue of “Belie Pataty” is located at the very beginning of this symbolic space.