Actually, the world of advertising is unearthly. A prosperous citizen can try to repeat the virtuality of a glam heaven in his personal continuum, but all in vain. The attributes of success and prosperity can be easily neutralized by a lack of personal freedom and mental discomfort. Each new advertising message forces into a new loop of the consumer labyrinth, where a hypermarket visitor is a Theseus and a Minotaur himself. The everlasting dissatisfaction, like the unreachable line of the horizon, attracts a soul to a cart with purchases: from one shop window to another, from one cash-desk to another, and every check here is like an indulgence. But what is awaiting the customer at the entrance, what is he going to consume after death? A hypermarket works 24 hours, but this does not mean for ever. An SMS from the land of the dead is an advertisement from the other world!
Posters from “SMS From the Land Of the Dead” series are pictures of apocalyptic shopping. Death, the salesman, catches the consumer unawares.Iit is necessary to associatively adapt the goods from the other world to the already disappeared worldly needs. And the static consciousness of a shopaholic perceives this new disintegrated reality in the familiar setting of his all-selling god, a marketing illusionist.
Sergey Stakanov
Was born in Perm in 1970.
His first personal show “Advance” was held in 1991 in “Khudozhestvenny” cinema. In the middle of the 1990s Stakanov cooperated with PO SHR (Primorsk affiliate of the Russian Artists Union): he was director of the “Artist’s House” gallery attached to the artistic fund, showed his works at collective exhibitions of PO SHR members. Later he founded a group of young artists called “The Torch” (Fakel), which arranged a number of conceptual artistic events. Stakanov’s project «V. R.» evoked a wide response in the federal mass-media. Within this project a dozen of personal shows took place; they were devoted to “Russian Vera”, a heroic character serving kind of an answer to the superheroes of American comics.
In 2005 Sergey Stakanov became a nominee of the «Fame”, the Russian newspaper Izvestiya award, nomination “Representatives of art and culture in the Perm region”.
Sergey Stakanov is a constant participant of “Art Perm” international show, where in different years he presented his conceptual series “Diaries Of The Sacred Assembling”, “Length Of A Corridor”, “Life Of Prominent Spies”, etc.
Sergey Stakanov presented his artistic project «V.R.» - «Russian Vera» - in the State Centre of Modern Art (Moscow) within the big all Russian program «9000 km». In 2007 «V.R.» project was also exhibited in the capital of Russia at the “New Angelarius” show, and “Russian Vera”, the character created by Sergey Stakanov, was included into its catalogue, together with Ilya Kabakov’s and Zurab Tsereteli’s works.
In 2007-2008 Sergey Stakanov initiated and participated in a travelling exhibition of satirical posters “Way of Bribe: Evolution Not According to Darwin”.
In 2009 Sergey Stakanov is a participant of the “Living Perm” festival, where he is presenting his new project “Art ToTable”.