They are border crossings between illusion theatre and performance, between documentary and propaganda. For the exhibition Nikitin and his team have reworked the object, transforming it into an unusual installation, it offers a many-facetted reflection of developments in global society over the past 23 years and links them with the moment when ordinary people first volunteered to be observed round the clock for a TV show.
It was a democratic utopia, dystopia and work of popular Conceptual Art rolled into one: an auto-surveillance system, a permanently auto-updating readymade, a paradoxical authenticity machine, and the socio-architectural prototype for the twenty-first century. It is an imitation of a building that was itself already a simulacrum. As a historical artefact, it stands in the space like a solitary relic; it has become a time capsule linking the year with the present day.
In the intervening decades, the world has been reshaped, the Big Brother house has become a museum exhibit, the surveillance cameras are old, the furniture out of style, the questions about the nature of reality omnipresent. The installation by artist and theatre director Boris Nikitin is a quintessence of his work to date, dealing for over fifteen years with reality and its falsification, with documents and propaganda.
The Last Reality Show develops these themes further and makes new connections, linking the question of creating illusions with another issue he has focussed in recent work: the vulnerability that arises when people expose themselves.
Nikitin is considered as an important voices in contemporary theatre. He directs and writes, designs sets and makes video works, as well as curating festivals, symposia and happenings. The question of the manipulability of claims to truth is a thread running through all of his works. Long before fake news became a troubling buzzword, he was already inquiring into the nature of the real.
