The personal project of the artist, model, performer and provocateur Danila Polyakov «Sport» is dedicated to the human body and the controversy between reality and self-presentation. The project grew out of the theme of the upcoming Paris-2024 Olympic Games, which, as for Danila, embody the modern mass culture - a symbiosis of technology, ethics, the cult of the body and its beauty. In the new reality, this semantic dichotomy of competitiveness and virtual presentation of the best version of oneself seems especially strange.
«In the modern world information is transmitted instantly and people, overloaded with global knowledge, cannot see what's what. In my project I talk about sports as willpower, ability to abstract from what is happening around. Come to think of it, the ability to dress and improve your body has always been there, and my semi-fantastical/semi-historical narrative is devoted to the process of how a person evolved, modifying his body, developed and represented himself before the technology existed» (Danila Polyakov).
Working with various media, Danila has created a large series, which includes embroidery, installation and video art. The museum space, entirely covered by the exhibition, passes viewers through complex layers of the artist’s visual experiences and eventually brings us back to simple eternal questions of judging, superiority, choice and myth, proclaiming the irony of our civilization. More than 30 of Polyakov's works were prepared especially for the ART4 Museum exhibition and were presented there for the first time.
