Kazakov Boris

Small adventures like “Alice in Wonderland” grow into sagas like “the Lord of the Rings” populated by heroes, villains and mystic creatures. “Doctors/Huts” is a kind of series with familiar characters. We know their dispositions and habits, and we find it endlessly interesting to observe their trials and tribulations in an ingenious plot woven from the past and the future, avoiding the present. For example, doctors today no longer wear white hats with red crosses. Huts on chickens’ legs are displaced from fairytales by new characters, but in the myths and legends of Boris Kazakov they are alive, muscular and in places even very sexy, just like bad boys should be. Rock’n’roll is dead, but the romantism of

necrorealism and the “new savages” lives on!

Boris Kazakov is an artist who equips technology with his own mythology. His technology is animation, drawn on paper, film, burned on wood and frozen in ceramics. Kazakov came up with a saga for these hand-made techniques about the struggle of a man-made society with pagan huts on chicken legs. You can see a story about folk medicine and the medical industry in it, or you can see life.

The artist's studio in Kolomyagi, an ancient garden and house from the century before last, is surrounded by a ring of hundred—meter—high termite mounds, making him doubt progress. Progress is mixed. It is the huts that are guests from the future (they were portrayed by Vadim Ovchinnikov), and the totalitarian civilization of doctors is our obsolete past, the dead, grabbing the living. Doctors, like the military in the movie Stalker, patrol the areas of huts behind barbed wire. Like the Americans on the famous secret tape dissecting aliens, they perform meaningless experiments on huts, because they cannot understand the structure of huts. Doctors came in a line from Soviet life: from posters about sanitary hygiene and civil defense, illustrations for Aybolit and Barmoley. But Kazakov sees their genealogy deeper, they feast on the paintings of the Wanderers, and who will figure out already where Perov's hunters are and where Peresvet and Avilov's Chelubey are.

“Huts and doctors” is a story about everlasting struggle between knowledge and innovation on one side and tradition and natural roots on the other. These two kind of forces personified in images of endless interaction of fighting and loving, chasing and giving up huts and doctors. Their adventures are reflected in “secret drafts” and wooden objects, which remind of old cinema stills.

Boris Kazakov