Roy [Swarm]

Nikolay Alekseev turns to the memories of his grandfather — a Soviet engineer whose main passion was beekeeping. The grandfather, as the artist claims, saw the world through the prism of the bee order, in which everyone contributes to the common cause. For Alekseev, his grandfather’s optics become a tool for analysing the Narkomfin Building, a house-commune — a Soviet utopia in concrete. As the artist himself says, "bees are always in the plural." The bee family becomes for him "a conceptual scheme for thinking about the connection between society and the individual." Alekseev builds real wooden beehives and fills them with fragments of his family memory — watercolours and short videos based on the artist’s personal archive. As befits hives, they sound: you can hear them through the accompanying stethoscope — a specially recorded free improvisation by the musicians Oleg Dautov, Yaroslav Borisov and Arkady Pikunov, split into many fragments, "echoing the structure of the installation." Thus the artist embodies the family myth of his grandfather’s trumpet playing — which, however, no one ever saw or heard. Alekseev seeks to feel the experience of living in a utopian world order, which in his eyes unites life in the Narkomfin Building, his grandfather’s story and the harmonious structure of a bee hive.