Vlast: ORTA — What We’re Doing Now Is Fun. We Curate Ourselves. January 2021

(adapted excerpts, translated)

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Excerpts from an interview published in Vlast (Kazakhstan), outlining ORTA’s Theory of New Genius and the practice of reconnecting with the “Higher Dimension.”

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I remember it as a child: this winter and the night, these trees, and they're illuminated by a lantern, such a little fairytale picture, and beyond it – darkness. And for me as a child, it meant that there, in this darkness, there was so much unknown, so many wood goblins, snowmen, snow queens, those reindeer from cartoons wandering there – it's all there, in this fairytale. And then you grow up, and for some reason you get this feeling that there is no mystery. It turns out that you somehow know everything, everything is illuminated, everything is visible everywhere. The place where the unknown is has disappeared. And you think: how can I make it so that I can see that darkness again behind those snow-capped trees in winter? That's what we do. Children don't have a problem in this sense; they already believe in everything, and everything is fine with them. They don't even have to imagine it. We call this a certain Higher Dimension, meaning this mystery—it actually exists somewhere near us, it's always with us. Perhaps children have direct contact with it. But when we grow up, for some reason we lose this organ, this connection to this dimension where all the ideas, monsters, fantasies, secrets, and inventions reside. We say that, firstly, this dimension exists. Secondly, it's possible to reconnect to it. We try to reconnect to it ourselves and with the people who come to us. Over the course of our work on this problem, we've developed a special technique for doing this. It's similar to what Kandinsky tried to do: how can an adult, having already lost their innocence, return to the scribbles of childhood?

 

It's called the "Theory of New Genius." This is actually a theory, but it's complex; it can't be summed up in three words, like "wash your face at 7:03 in the morning, from left to right three times." It doesn't work that way. But we're developing this theory, testing it in practice, refining it, and sharing it with others through joint projects that reveal the Inner Genius of a person: childlike spontaneity, a connection to a Higher Dimension, from which one can directly draw ideas that are far from trivial, that are new and offer something that hasn't existed in this world.

 

We don't do art—in this sense, or in general. We do something that lies a little deeper, I think. Deeper than this division between art, science, and religion. Art, in this sense, is one small manifestation of what we do. For example, someone participates in our project, and something new is revealed to them during it, and they then implement this new insight in their furniture production. Does this mean we're in the furniture business? No, but we've certainly left our mark on it. Or here's another illustration: you come back from a hike in the mountains, and something falls off the treads of your boots: a painting here, a film there, a book there. It's just dirt from your boots—after all, the main thing was that you went somewhere, and maybe you didn't even know where you were going. And the Mondrian paintings you rescue from a fire are just dirt from your boots compared to the worlds he actually visited.

 

We can't work in a mode where you're commissioned to do something and you deliver. I see a huge problem when people agree to low-quality, institutional commissions. It leads to such a proliferation of nonsense! So, you're an artist because you can draw. You're an artist not because you're an artist, but because you can imitate.

 

What we're doing now is fun. We're our own curators.​​

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