Farid Mammadzada - curated “Megalopolis” project sheds light on the key hot button of modernity-traumatic memory and relations between a megacity and the human being. Issue timeliness lies in unveiling the challenge for existential safety of the individual and raises the questions about humanity survival as such. You could ask me-you don’t really mean that? And the follow up response would be- I kid you not!

The human being is just a multidimensional and polyphonic creature. His affiliation to biological species is simply the visible part of his complex anthropological project. The core essence of Homo sapiens is concealed by the secrecy of his conscience and cogitation and enclosed by his inclination to challenge of the Infinitude. To perceive his biological applicability, he stands in urgent need for connection with the nature and through the nature with the Space, etc. To care safe mind and mentality, he should enjoy the warmth of the homeland while his head seeks to “underpin the Sky”. However, every single person might suffer from unmotivated rage of the relentless nature, which is revealed through rampage of the elements and natural disasters. Since then the public is barely in existence and the socium strives to shield the imbecile humans from natural disasters brutality. Wow, yet the humans are supposed to pay for the safeguard above by losing internal accord, getting deprived from the very original layers of the Genesis and self-estrangement of people from their true sense.

The megacity in its entirety represents a confluence of vampire matrix-like socium. Present day megalopolis is chiefly a distillation of the most distinctive traits of a vampire socium that consumes human energy.  The megalopolis is perfectly established and adjusted from technical perspective. Administrative and business infrastructure is developed for narcissistic self-perfection. But the megacity does not need a human being endowed with spiritual requirement, nor does it require a human (civil) society. The megacity is just mad about the rabble and lusts after impersonal human flows structured in mathematical megacity orgy configurations. Urban socium only stipulates for being a cog in the machine, a simple function and an atomic instrument of the urban space.  In brief, it requires from the humans to be a voluntary slave of “city overproduction” macrostructure. Disregard of the requirement above results in personal isolation, frustration and soundless disappearance in meanless cry of concrete piles. While requirement acceptance leads to subjugation and the follow up blowback like long-term and chronical depression when the human being feels short for breath in everyday routine morass. Taking total virtualization of public life into account, when existence of every single individual is converted into social networks, we finally meet a petrified megacity resident whose entire lifetime, a priceless energy resource, is unconsciously tossed away for the sake of visionary social actions.  Running around like a madman between the job, home and virtual social reality, the human being completely loses the core internal essence, being transformed into external image-an alien social surrounding that erodes the mortal remains of his spiritual body. In other words, an urban resident is dead and gone, he resides in the state of frustration. The matrix-like socium  has constructed a certain biological and mental imitation of Homo sapiens instead, completely well-behaved by the modern megalopolis for its own prosperity and enlargement.

The curatorial epistle by Farid Mammadzada includes presentation of art duo of two artists of different generations- Mammad Mustafayev and Niyaz Najafov. Mammad Mustafayev, an architect by education, demonstrates structural picturesque abstractions hosting strict geometry of microforms laced with schematic dogma-free emotional inclusions. His artworks, however, resemble structural drawings and unconsciously evoke the satellite mapping images. The exhibits created by Mammad Mustafayev visualize a centre of foremost city planning pieces that completely engrosses present day individuals. These are existential requirements clearly set before the humans. In the curator’s view (I suppose so), Niyaz Najafov makes such existential space visible- scanning the deeps of the Unconscious, the author struggles to depict mental freaks, marginal human-like monstrous subhuman as if grounded by megalopolis modernity. Here the grotesque hits the wall and collapsed into a black hole of incursive idiocy. Having clashed these two distinct centres of exhibition, the curator finally gets unrelieved and depressed outcome. He does not introduce a fundamentally new element combating claustrophobia imposed to the entire society as a behavioral standard everyone should comply with. The overall curatorial design might eventually lie in providing the visitor with opportunity to respond to the questions raised by his/her own rather than endowing him/her with ready-made solutions. The visitor thereby rejects the supposed role of passive consumer of the proposed exhibits and turns into active participant of performance process since the Unbearable Lightness of Megacity Being is a direct business to everyone. And it concerns everyone in inconspicuous and terrible way…

© Teymur Daimi