exhibition
Maxim Peretti. Video Icon
20 February 2020 — 17 May 2020
  • Maxim Peretti. Video Icon

Erarta Museum presented an exhibition tinged with mystery by the St. Petersburg-based film director and composer Maxim Peretti

  • Prototypes of icons of the future

  • Music, light, and universal symbols

  • Search for the ‘visible truth’

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Video Icon is an artistic endeavour designed to cater to the spiritual needs of a society in which Christians practice yoga and worship football players and actors on par with the eternal icons. This is a prototype of the future icon, an object of worship for those who seek answers to their questions not in churches or temples, but in the midst of a collective aesthetic experience: in cinemas, museums, or sport arenas.

The word, a fundamental category for Christianity, is absent in the Video Icon realm. Instead, the sacral rite is spurred on by the sensually stimulating and easily approachable music and light, as well as religious symbols which allow countless interpretations.

Signs venerated for millennia merge into a single image alluding to a cult displaced from the collective memory of nations. The ancient god raised from his slumber in the modern world points to the common source of the universal religions and perpetuity of the very search for a supreme being.

A very spot-on artistic work in form and substance, Video Icon aims to preserve the memory of the tradition and reveal the ‘visible truth’ — an image of the ungraspable. The creative act resuscitates the archaic past that transpires in the present and aims to go on living forever.

about the artist

Director and composer Maxim Peretti and director of photography Maxim Kutyansky represent the contemporary St. Petersburg underground. Graduates of the St. Petersburg State University of Film and Television and the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography respectively, these aspiring young professionals soaked up independent cinema, commercials and audiovisual experiments in their search for new forms of expression. Video Icon is the result of their pursuits.

Evgeny Grigoryev acted as the executive producer of this project, which also saw contributions by artists Yulia Titova, Ksenia Durina, and Polina Abdulayeva.

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