Anna Skoromnaya. Kindergarten

Headline: Anna Skoromnaya. Kindergarten
Artist: Anna Skoromnaya
Text: Antonio D'Amico
Language: Italian, English
Translations: Ian Mansbridge
Year: 2017
ISBN: 978-88-6057-370-4
Size: cm 14,8×21
Binding: paperback binding
Pages: 48
Price: € 15.00

Also available in ebook:
ISBN: 978-88-6057-371-1
Format: PDF
Price: free download

Winner of the Must Gallery Special Prize, awarded last fall as part of Arteam Cup 2016, Anna Skoromnaya is preparing to present in Switzerland a project of strong social denunciation that represents a fundamental stage in the growth of the artist and his subsequent research.

In the singular KINDERGARTEN, created by the young Belarusian artist and which will come to life in the halls of Must Gallery of Lugano from 6 July to 24 September 2017, everything takes place under an apparent aura of normality, there are children, the classic childhood games (swings, slides, colorful constructions), recalled both in shapes and colors, there is the apparent quiet and tranquility of an environment where everything appears orderly, under control, safe as is expected in a place such as a playground or a kindergarten for children. The visitor wanders enraptured by an immediately recognizable iconography, hearing the reassuring voices of children intent on reciting a nursery rhyme. In short, there is the semblance of a micro-world where everything apparently takes place according to actions that are recognizable in the collective imagination and, therefore, shared by the community.

The illusion of experiencing a scenario of apparent normality reveals its crudest face when - enraptured by colors, sounds, images - there is a clash with the actual reality of the facts: in the installation Popcorn Machine (2017) for example - with an unmistakable shade of green that evokes Middle Eastern scenarios and that, with a barely recognizable and whispered geometry, brings to our mind known devastation and rubble - moving holograms portraying child soldiers intent on carrying out actions that only the atrocity of everyday news reminds us to be real.

Antonio D’Amico writes in the text in the catalog:

What in the everyday life of a globalized world has the appearance of normal existence, in places where reason seems to have abandoned its function, there is a denied childhood, in which children are forced to be adults and to move in the spaces of a KINDERGARTEN that has nothing of the amenity and joy that characterizes a normal kindergarten for children.
There are places under the scorching sun where what is unnatural is presented as Orthodox, and therefore the abuse, violence, compulsion are the watchwords of a gruesome reality that involves children and makes them slaves to abuse in a game between the parts of opposites that presents itself with the same identity as a prison. In these dystonic places the sky is clean, as is the innocence of children and with it their broken dreams.