Alena Tereshko. Mirror of Venus.

Today, PARAZIT is one of the most striking creative initiatives in St. Petersburg. It is a kind of creative laboratory where a mutually beneficial exchange of skills and experience takes place with irrepressible young energy.

For the new exhibition at Marina Gisich Projects, the artists of the association, which has been working on the St. Petersburg art scene for more than 20 years, are preparing a project about the viewer, imaginary and real. The title of the exhibition is "In search of a trained viewer." Or, more precisely, in search of an ideal mediator; a field in space-time where this mediation between the artist and the viewer will be non-violent, and most importantly– mutually beneficial. At least in the simple sense that all parties to this process should feel sincere pleasure. 

By and large, the state of such a search is an immanent property of the association. And then, when it climbs Olympus with its whole mass, and when each of its participants goes out alone on the highway. The request for a viewer who is at the same time quite savvy, sophisticated, and at the same time unbiased may seem like a kind of whim; however, this is not a whim, but an urgent necessity. 

Respect for the viewer is not the position in which an artist finds himself, creating a work that compliments him, or using some kind of simplifying, "selling" his art tuning. On the contrary, it is a position in which we provide him with a wide field of maximum participation, the opportunity to feel himself at the very epicenter of the meaning-making. A trained viewer is someone who is open enough not to be ashamed to try on the role of a demiurge. 

The artists of the PARAZIT association offer the possibility of such a game, which can and even should become a habit. The opportunity to remove the chains of suffering from contact with art. Perceptual training, but not one that inadvertently breaks the brain, expanding the field of vision and pushing the frame, no.

The apotheosis of a subjectivist utterance while preserving the integrity of the spectator's position "I see it that way."

Text: Timur Musaev-Kagan, Semyon Motolyanets