“For this, we turned to Michel Foucault’s well-known work ‘Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason’. At the same time, I began searching for other philosophical texts dealing with psychological conditions and soon came across the monograph by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Schizoanalysis and the Production of Subjectivity’. It significantly expanded our understanding of things: Deleuze and Guattari approached mental illness not as a pathology, but as a practice or a particular mode of thinking. We began to notice that many images of everyday life had come to us from this book. And so it happened that the process of creating our performance also became, in a certain sense, schizophrenic—it is that very table of the schizophrenic, which he can never quite finish constructing,” the director explained.

At present, the main narrative of the performance is built around the metaphor of consciousness moving between worlds. Begenov derived this from a foundational idea present in many religious beliefs—the transition of the soul into another world: “This is what the art historian Valentina Buchinskaya spoke about in the context of Kalmykov: he moved between worlds. One world is a rational space with a more or less stable system of knowledge and ethical evaluation, and the other is the world of schizophrenia, the world of an empty place. To remain there is frightening, because you do not know how to exist within it. But those who are seized by this state have moments of returning to consciousness. The moment of transition, the relation between the two worlds, is one of the possible ways to read the performance.” The rules for creating a masterpiece according to Kalmykov, which are used by Alexandra Morozova’s character, precisely embody this transition. It contains elements of terror and liberation—but even more, of destruction. Liberation, the director says, is inseparable from the destruction of the self.

The visual image of destruction can be read in the robotic manipulations, the technical basis of which Begenov’s team—consisting of 16 people—developed independently: “Our performance is a small EXPO of my life. We are building a sphere like that, only ours is square and turned inside out. We spend enormous amounts of money and essentially recreate Kazakhstan’s EXPO—though not empty in artistic terms. Our robotic arms look impressive, but they are very fragile. We put a lot of effort into making them stop breaking—or at least break less often. The difficulty is that in Kazakhstan there are very few people capable of doing this kind of engineering work.

To create the set, the director had to establish a full-scale production. Since October 2017, they began renting a workshop where the work was carried out and where the premiere of the performance would eventually take place. Over the past six months, they changed locations several times due to the enormous size of the set.

For its construction, the workers and the artist Alexander Bakanov used 300 kilograms of cardboard, as well as foil and tape. In the end, the set reached 7 meters in height, width, and depth. The space was further complemented by two large curtains, one of which is made of sheet metal and decorated with illuminated eggs. It rolls up like a video screen and weighs around 500 kilograms.

‘The meaning of everything—especially of acting—is to experience pleasure,’ Alexandra Morozova describes her role in Svetoprestavlenie. But by pleasure she does not mean something utilitarian. To experience pleasure means to feel alive: ‘When you have had the experience of feeling dead, you naturally value being alive very highly. This is the nature of my perception. It is shaped by the particularities of my psyche, and that is why I hold on to it so strongly and speak so much about living life through pleasure. Because when you know that you might not feel any of this—that you might simply be absent from yourself for a long time—you cling to it very tightly.’

‘New Genius is precisely what Begenov’s collective has been engaged in throughout the past year. It is an ironic attitude toward oneself, but not a naïve attitude toward art: ‘We realized that what we are trying to do cannot be called new naïveté—it is not naïve, we are fully aware of our actions; nor is it new sincerity—that term feels too pathos-laden and rigid. We know what we are spending our lives on, and at the same time we clearly understand that we may be directing a great deal of our energy and resources into emptiness. That is why it is New Genius.

But New Genius is not something granted from above—it is about concentration on action. To be a genius today means to apply conscious effort in a particular direction. One could even say—toward an empty place. And art, perhaps, is the only space where this can be realized, however lofty that may sound.’’