Eng:

"Honeymoon" is the first and the most pleasant stage of cultural adaptation to a new country.
The works of the artists invite you into the visual "Honeymoon" of Alanya, immersing yourself in which you can notice more complex themes of interaction with the environment.

The exhibition took place in a future office building. The construction works stopped for the duration of the exhibition and "HONEYMOON" appeared in this space as a link between the past and the future, between visitors to the region and locals, as a beautiful dream of Alanya.

One of the main inspirations was the Friday market in Alanya, and markets for tourists with souvenirs and trinkets made of beads, imitations of famous brands, cosmetics, fabrics, useful items for the home. These are places where local women and tourists' interests intersect. The presence of a large number of tourists leads to a baroque exaggeration of everything, to a sense of endless festivity, repeated every day, the exploitation of traditional motifs, symbols, their distortion, change under the influence of the desire to please tourists. The desire to please, to charm, to conquer is very familiar to anyone in love, as is the desire to possess, to own undividedly. I am in love and I want to be the best, perfect, to anticipate the desires of the other, to capture his attention, to become the object of his desire, so that he chooses me. And so, under the influence of the gaze of tourists and the striving to be desired, to be bought, decorative motifs become distorted, transformed into hybridized and industrialized objects, denatured commercial reproductions. There are no more noble materials and "good taste" here, traditional motifs become fragile and sensitive to the desires of foreigners, just as one's own identity becomes fragile and sensitive at the peak of falling in love. I am in love with this sense of the possibility of endless changes in reality influenced by my desires. This is how connections are made, transforming and distorting, confusing and deceiving. When the traditional blue eyes protecting from the "evil eye" become pink and yellow and whatever it takes to please me.
These stores exhibit a fixation on notions of beauty. Same eyebrows, fake hair, fake lips, fake flowers, fake perpetual celebration. An aesthetic of fakes that does everything it can to make itself desirable. This is where beauty of a certain kind is created. Here you can acquire the trappings of class without the fortune. To look like someone you're not. "Almost like the real thing." Slipping and transforming, the artificiality of the world artists have created, like the artificiality of this celebration, the artificiality of this baroque, the counterfeit of the real world.

Artists of the exhibition: Ianita Voit, Maria Michi, Yulia Zhivichina, Tanya Bashlakova

Curators: Evgeniya Sterlyagova, Katya Finkelshtein, Maria Michi, Ianita Voit