1 June 2017 at the site of young art START contemporary art center WINZAVOD will open the first exhibition of the season 2017/2018 — “the Café of the dancing lights”. In his first solo project, the artist from Murmansk Daria Orlova investigates the problem of loneliness in the modern world. Total installation, created on the model of the cultural centers of the Soviet era, simulates a utopian Dating club for single people. The interior and everyday life in the exhibition are juxtaposed with the artwork of the artist: drawings, collages and objects. Viewers will be able to enroll in the club and even go on a date. 

Loneliness as one of the diseases of modernity. In a post-digital society, people are always “on communications” with each other, but can beyou are absolutely lonely in a crowd of similar ones. They avoid real communication, replacing it with substitutes. “I want to speculate about love, loneliness and opportunities to find the perfect partner: do people difficulty finding his half? Do they have families? How different the specifics of the current communication from the one that was in the past? And finally, can art be a method of communication between people?», — talks about his project Daria Orlova.  

“the Café of the dancing lights” the artist calls the ideal place for Dating. It has everything to spend time with any man: you can read books, play chess, listen to music. The club has its own Manifesto and even dress code — especially for a date created with the appropriate clothing. The combination in the exhibition space interior and everyday life in different time frames with works of the artist is reminiscent of ‘work club’ Alexander Rodchenko and installations of Ilya Kabakov. Collages, a combination of bright fabrics, wood and other “home” materials — refers to "trash-design” in the work group ZIP and Irina Korina. 

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Alla Pugacheva: the song “the Café of the dancing lights” she wrote in the 1980-ies and for a long time was performed. According to one version, it was due to the provocative Association, as “dancing lights" in the French addiction means extreme alcoholic intoxication, and it could cause a negative reaction from critics and the public in the midst of the anti-alcohol campaign of Mikhail Gorbachev. The song tells the visitor of dance bars, which recalls the exciting days and nights of the past, but finds himself confused and alone in the crowd of dancing people.

Curator of the project START Faith Trachtenberg: “addressing the themes and aesthetics of the 1980s-1990s — a separate stratum of modern Russian culture, reminiscent of nostalgia for the period “thaw” in the era of Brezhnev stagnation. The nostalgia of a people whose consciousness was formed just during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev. Young artists born in the USSR, I do not remember this state for real. Their adult life began in a different reality. But, nevertheless, they constantly refer to Soviet cultural codes and symbols found “attic” phantom of memory. This phenomenon, in particular, it is shown in the project Daria Orlova”.

The new season of project START under the supervision of Faith Trachtenberg will be experimental, and exhibition “the Café of the dancing lights” — is no exception. Its visitors will be able to get out in “the Café of the dancing lights”. All instructions on how to organize it, you can get on the court. The results of the social experiment to create a utopian Dating club will help in finding the answers to the questions asked in his first personal project by the artist Daria Orlova.