For several days the artists act as taxi drivers and transport their passengers to their destinations around the city free of charge; instead of taking money they tell people about art.

How To Tell About Art is a performance by two artists Alexey Martins and Igor Lazarev; it is aimed to examine a possible dialogue between 'complicated art' and different audience. The art project explores a major issue on the role of contemporary art in post-Soviet society. For several days the artists act as taxi drivers and transport their passengers to their destinations around the city free of charge; instead of taking money they tell people about art. A strategy for increased involvement allows an artist to act far beyond museum space and to take his own initiative to approach the audience, and not the other way. Art intervention into community might be different; besides offensive actions there are other ones that on the contrary follow the ideas of commonality and view it as an instrument of social 'superconnections', transferring the act of an art work observing into a joint experience, and turning a viewer into a coauthor. Working within the aesthetics of cooperation the project is an attempt not only to provide better access to contemporary art, but to consider a dialogue as a sole artistic utterance.

For the first time the performance took place on October 18-19, 2014 in the city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia.

The second act had been hosted by ARTBAT FEST in Almaty on September 02-03, 2016.

The program of ARTBAT FEST included a short retrospective of selected multimedia performances by Sergey Kasich since 2013.

Sergey Kasich is one of the representatives of the Russian sound art community. The author who creatively works with modern technologies to make hybrid works of contemporary art and has a particularly keen interest in sound and its derivatives.

"Oral Pong" was created in 2014 for the Festival of Media Performance of the Platform Project (Vinzavod, Moscow). Two local musicians participated in the performance along with the author. The only score of the piece is the interface of PONG (one of the first computer games), in which all actions are controlled only by the sounds of musical instruments. Thus, a new piece of music is created each time, which, however, is not an improvisation.

"Virtual Escape v." was originally created in 2013, but has been repeatedly modified since. In this performance, the author uses a computer game engine as well, a most advanced this time. He creates a virtual 3D space where each object is a specific sound. And during the performance, he actually travels with the audience throughout this world of sound objects, following the virtual choreography plan, which at the same time creates a sound composition in time.

In Almaty, Sergey also showed the sound performance "Fingertips," implementing a special interface for multi-channel performances, which was created in 2016 for a concert with composer Kirill Shirokov at the Electrotheater (Moscow). The author presented to the audience a mixture of acusmatics and electroacoustic improvisation, using various sounds, including the sounds recorded in Almaty, distributing them in the space of a multi-channel sound system, this time not in a virtual environment, but the real one.

The performance can be briefly described as playing a game of Jenga in a public space with the use of forbidden tricks. The artist creates a magnified copy of the classical Jenga and plays it with the visitors. The point is to play this game with random passers-by, using unusual means and forbidden tricks. For example, liquid nails, scotch tape, mounting foam. When the artist pulls out one of the cubes that can tear down the tower, he holds the remainder in place with glue or adhesive tape, liquid nails, or pours foam into the emptied spaces.

The performance is a metaphor for modern construction technologies in the post-Soviet space. Optimization saves money, effort and time. The optimization in this project happens by means of cutting (theft, plundering) the budget and "patching" the holes with the help of improvised means. The inspiration for the project was the new buildings that are constantly collapsing throughout the CIS, becoming unusable after several years of operation. The problem is universal and clear, as well as its visual demonstration during the performance.

Today's life is full of alienation. Even people who consider themselves to be close to each other, often turn out to be competing for a place in the sun. However, in the process of growth, the humanity has got the taste of various form of competition. Over time, it has increasingly come to the conclusion that the survival of man as a homo sapiens, rather than as an animal, is expedient through various forms of symbiosis. A couple of centuries ago, the theory of the social contract was formulated, which probed for a boundary between the individual freedoms and the individual's duties to the society.

The performance took place in Almaty on September 3, 2016 at the opening of the artistic and research project "Symbiosis" in the Botanical Garden.

Photo by Dmitry Ananyev and Yana Malinovskaya

with the participation of: Aura White, Alexey Shindin, Zitta Sultanbaeva, Ablikim Akmullaev

The coming of a butterfly out from a pupa is a metaphor for rebirth, a transition to a new, perfected state. As an artist who gives away his soul, setting the spirit free, the new form finds its starting point. However, we live in a world of illusory signs. The parts of the mechanism of life become an uninterrupted absorption of objects of consumption, which leads to the disappearance of the transcendent from the modern man's view of the world, giving way to the absolute power of external illusory signs – "simulacra." The modern era is characterized by the feeling of the lost reality, which culminates in the destruction of the body, the return to the static state of the soul – the pupa.