CATAIVANCOV

The main subject areas of Genetrix Foundation are situated around ethnography, the museum, and globalization. 

The work is often tongue in cheek and morphs prehistory into the present day through imagery, materials, words, and signs. 

I am interested in speculative archaeology, the strands of archaeological research which are connected to the unknown, things for which there is no evidence.  The idea of the Anthropocene era is relevant in the sense that it sees our human era as if from the future, eliding different cultures and eras into one long era of human-driven change. In a similar way, the museum in my work elides cultures and sees human culture generally from an alien perspective.

The museum sees consumerism as a powerful, mysterious and silly religion to be looked back upon in confusion from the distant future. It entertains the idea of dead culture coming to life, ritual and its modern equivalents, the slippages of signs between art, science, advertising, industry, and religion. The principles of juxtaposition and illusion are prominent.

My museum puts on the same level both the ‘worked’ materials that are accepted as aesthetic objects and the consumerist objects like chocolate and picture postcards; associations can be made between signs in any material configuration. The work has some precedent in ‘institutional critique’, in the way that it gets under the skin of seemingly objective museological modes of display