Hyperborea

We are pleased to announce the Opening of our new laboratory space, The Bakery for video and installation projects.
The Bakery is a space within a space at Braverman Gallery that focuses on the rhetoric of video and installation art with lectures surrounding the exhibition to further the dialogue of contemporary art.
Anton Ginzburg inaugurates The Bakery with his piece Hyperborea which premiered at The Venice Biennale in 2011.
Hyperborea is a video installation that documents the journey attempting to locate Hyperborea according to its descriptions in literature, newspaper articles and mythology. As the supposed birth-place of numerous cultures and nations, Ginzburg leads the viewer through a progression of events in a visual odyssey that commences in the Northwest of the United States in the primordial forests of Oregon, continues to St. Petersburg with its eroding palaces, reveals the archeological sites and Gulag Prisons on the White Sea and concludes in Italy.

Hyperborea is a mythical region that was recently claimed to be discovered on the White Sea in northern Russia. Hyperborea was originally described by the ancient Greek writer Herodotus as the land of the Golden Age, and was thought to be a place of pure bliss, perpetual sunlight and eternal springtime. It has been an inspiration for early modernist thinkers such as Nietzsche and Madame Blavatskaya while acting as a central theme to the early twentieth century St. Petersburg poetic tradition of Acmeism — dealing with the “golden age of man.”

Ginzburg was born in St. Petersburg in 1974, where he received a classical art education in preparation for the Soviet Academy, and emigrated to the United States in 1990, earning a BFA from the Parsons School of Design in 1997. His works have been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York; White Columns, New York; and the first and second Moscow Biennales. His art is represented in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, as well as in private collections around the world.