No blood.
In this work, the artist views the biological museum as a meeting place for life and death. It provides an account of the diversity of wildlife on behalf of the dead. The dead here serve as useful information and engage in relationships with the living.
In Vladislav Efimov’s project, blood’s relationship with the most important aspects of life is attached to the vault of the dead, but almost uninhabited — already immortal — animals. The search for individual organic heat, almost dispersed and mixed in space over the years of museum exhibits, is the goal of this project. It may be possible to find an extremely weak and rare, almost absent, beating of life in the bloodless animals behind the protective sheaths that prolong their postmortem existence.
Blood is perhaps the only substance that doesn’t exist in a museum devoted to development, evolution, and study of life. Its power has spread and its warmth is now feeding to the indifferent universe. And if we identify and measure its residual traces, heat and tremors, we can add this information to a global bank, a new open vault of life for everyone. And there was no death, no death.
The work «Without Blood» was shown at the Fifth Ural Biennal of Modern Art in Yekaterinburg from 12 September to 1 December 2019.
On 30 January 2022, an audio-visual production based on this work, created by Vladislav Efimov (on the basis of images of objects), was shown at the Stanislawski Electrotheatre in conjunction with Oleg Makarov (electronic sound improvisation).
