“The exhibition “A tiger comes to the forest and has breakfast” opened on June 7, 2019 and was timed to coincide with the launch of a new clothing brand ADLR. The project in Richter space was designed to show how art and fashion, being a single database, can create a common field for expanding the boundaries of their own audience and forms of artistic expression”, – said curators of the project Victoria Cherniavskaya and Kirill Proskoryakov.
The ADLR designers gave special importance to the character of the Tigger from “Winnie the Pooh’s Adventures”. The children’s favourite has qualities that are not related to the idea of a “pleasant” hero – bloated ego, pride, hyperactivity, which gives him a hidden disorder. All this is combined with excessive curiosity, because of which the animal often gets into unwanted situations. Ultimately, Tigger is not just a child’s teddy character, but a “planted” bait that helps to view reality from the most unexpected angles.
When the ADLR brand invited me to participate in this project, I started by saying that the cartoon about Winnie the Pooh in our memory exists in two versions – American and Soviet. An important difference between these two schools of animation is a different approach to working with the character’s body: in the American tradition, heroes can grow and lengthen limbs, matter can flow from one state to another, in the Soviet – proportions are usually fixed. At the same time, it is no secret that these two schools of animation broadcast different ideologies, being essentially two “conveyors of values”. I decided to leave this moment in brackets and to take into account only the comparison of the two formal approaches. Tigger’s colleagues join in, and a sinister party begins.