ZIMA Magazine’s Artist of the Month. June winner – Andrey Chugunov

Andrei works at the intersection of digital and analog media, combining sound art, installation, technological sculpture, generative graphics, audiovisual performance and work with readymade in his practice.

Born in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in 1991, the artist received an engineering degree in unconventional and renewable energy in 2008-2013 at the Ural Federal University and a master’s degree in Digital Art at the Far Eastern Federal University in 2018-2020. Chugunov was also part of the stream of the first set of the Young Artist Lab at the Ural branch of the State Center for Contemporary Art in 2018.

A participant in exhibitions and festivals in the UK, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong and Cyprus, in his solo projects he often addresses notions of mortality, temporality, autonomy and the ‘fading’ of memory.

In 2018, Andrew was honored at the 22nd Japan Media Arts Festival in the “New Faces” category, and in 2020 he was a nominee for the J.C. Watson Award. Sergey Kuryokhin in the Science Art and Media Art competition program in 2022. Chugunov has also been shortlisted for the 2022 FutureTense Prize in Hong Kong in the Digital Art category.

The artist now lives and works in East Kilbride in Scotland.

From the author’s manifesto: “The main basis of my projects is the concept. I like to compare the formation of a basic idea to outlining a thickening fog in the air. In the process of developing an idea, I like to establish hyperlinks between aesthetic codes, philosophical concepts, and “chthonic” manifestations of everyday life. A first engineering degree in Unconventional and Renewable Energy, as well as a long sonic practice involving noisy music and experimental synthetic sound, defined my penchant for technological and digital artistic tools.

Working with media as material, I explore the process of “fading” of memory as a fragile construct in the flux of constant personal “reassembly”. In the course of it, memory appears as a living and self-styled matter, limited to more than just the function of storing sterile data. With this approach, we can view the world as a dynamic network of objects that retain material configuration for varying amounts of time, where in the boundary zone one matter can interact with another.

Important in this context is the weak tolerance of society to the themes of death and its acceptance as another event in the series of life processes. I believe that recognizing one’s own finitude is a step towards co-living with other people and objects included in the world.”

Katya Granova, curator of the Artist of the Month project: “We are pleased to congratulate Andrei Chugunov on his well-deserved victory in the Artist of the Month competition. Andrei is a multidisciplinary artist, his arsenal ranges from sound art and performance media to light installations and generative sculptures. Working at the intersection of the human and the machine, the artist addresses many existential themes – the fading of memory, mortality, temporality – but also often touches on global social issues, such as global warming and the widespread development of artificial intelligence. Andrei’s works are very subtle, balancing on the narrow edges of different themes and approaches, combining the corporeal, personal, emotional with clear lines of light panels, straight angles of sculptures, mechanical aesthetics of the machine”.

Pavel Otdelnov, artist, member of the expert jury: “Voschev would sometimes bend down and pick up a pebble and some other sticky ashes and deposit them in his pants. He was pleased and disturbed by the almost eternal stay of the pebble in the clay medium, in the cluster of darkness: it means that it has a reason to be there, the more it should live” – Andrei Platonov, “Kotlovan”.

I am very happy that this time the Artist of the Month is Andrei Chugunov. Andrey is a media artist from Yekaterinburg, working with a range of topics related to the concept of time. Some of his works are about what we often fail to notice and what we are accustomed to ignore, and about what has stirred the imagination since childhood: the death of distant stars, the scale of time, the boundaries between life and death, memory and oblivion. Something that is both very simple and complex, and that is unimaginable on a human scale.

Andrei’s works seem to exist outside of this mundane world. Interacting with them is a kind of meditation. Andrei himself describes his artistic practices as “meditative media”. In his works he makes visible what cannot be imagined and thus allows the viewer to push the boundaries of his experience and feel again like a child asking questions to which adults have no answer.

I wish Andrew more great works and of course to find his audience here.”

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