After Aladin Garunov’s 2006 large-scale retrospective exhibition, “Painting, Objects, Installations”, in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the status of the inventor of a new ethnic (Dagestan) Pop-art has been firmly assigned to him. But the global nature of the mass culture of Pop-art and the ethnic tradition are two concepts which combine with difficulty. It is exactly in this borderline zone of “the incompatible” that Aladin Garunov creates. The new technologies, industrial aesthetics, industrial materials, pungent smells and geometric forms collide with the author’s wilful search for the meanings of the anthropological. In his installations he manages to combine the symbolic material-paradigms characteristic of Pop-art: industrial rubber and objects made out of it with the principles of abstractionism and the avant-garde approach to the modelling of spatial structures, having reconciled two opposite and contradictory trends in Art. (Dedications to Kazimir Malevich “led” him to participate in two exhibitions, close in spirit, which explored the life of avant-garde paradigms in contemporary art: “The Adventures of the Black Square” in the Russian Museum and “100% the Blacksquare” in the pop/off/art Gallery.) In the project called “Self” (pop/off/art Gallery, 2007) A. Garunov used his characteristic methods of photographing, technical design, photographic printing, but instead of the popular mass media heroes he displayed his own self-portrait, having affirmed the right of the “authorial” in that of the mass, the omnipresence of the “I”.

Educated as a sculptor, for many years he made paintings and nevertheless the talent for plasticity, the desire to work with volumes and spaces led him to installations, the ready-made, to the creation of objects and assemblages.

Circular compositions in various industrial materials: components made out of rubber, tubes, tyres, covers were subordinated to the synergetic dominance of the authorial. He has bent, turned inside out, stretched the rigid rubber forms – the product and symbol of modern urbanism and has subordinated them to his own – Self structures and Self tasks. In his new project “Dhikr” Aladin Garunov has realised a direction, the signs of which can be found in the earliest examples of his art. The contemporary world, organised on the industrial model, each day cuts into the zone of the anthropological and it would seem not to leave any space for structures which are in harmony with that which is “human”. Jean Bodriar wrote about the fact that the artefact lost its “symbolic meaning, its millennial anthropological status” in Pop-art. But, it turns out that, working with the “industrial” does not contradict the exploration of anthropological coordinates, which are contained in ancient symbols, archaic structures and cultural archetypes.

Already in his early paintings had the symbols of labyrinths and spirals, circular movements, fundamental to Dagestan culture, appeared, which have their continuation in the stone labyrinth set up in the Museum in Sergiev Posad and in the circular installations made out of rubber objects. As the twisting spiral of the genetic programme defines the growth and development of the child, so have the ancient archaic symbols and traditional ornaments, materialised in the art of Aladin, defined the new line of development of his artistic quests – represented here by the project “Dhikr”.

Today, in connection with the appearance of striking artistic personalities – those coming from Muslim countries, who use the languages of cinematography, video-art and photography – much is said about contemporary Muslim art. Undoubtedly, one can single out the authors who relay in their art the conceptual, ethical and aesthetic qualities inherent in the art of Islam in the forms of avant-garde and current art. They have brought into the European art tradition their distinctive perception of the world, related to the paradigms of Muslim culture.

The author filled the space of the Outbuilding-Ruin with movement, sound, static artefacts, moving carpet ornaments and with the measured motion of calligraphic inscriptions. This fashionable exhibition venue evokes memories of the last frames of “Nostalgia” by Andrey Tarkovsky: a dilapidated majestic temple, open skies and the artist’s childhood home – the harmony of the combination of the anthropocentric with other scales.

The concept of “Dhikr” or “remembrance” refers us to Islamic spiritual practice, which consists in the glorification of God’s name, the repeated uttering of prayer formulas, the aim of which is to bring one closer to the Almighty. In Sufism “Dhikr” has acquired its own specific traits of a mystical character. Many Sufi rituals are an example of distinctive spiritually-somatic practices, in which specific ideomotor movements, ceremonial whirling, chanting, loud rhythmic recitations are used. As a result of which special states are reached, in which the Sufi, striving towards dissolution in the all-absorbing Divine unity, acquires spiritual enlightenment. The central video-installation is the author’s analysis of the “Dhikr” ritual of the Caucasus brotherhood Kadaria, it goes in a sequence of emotional juxtapositions – the artist’s thoughts about the ceremonial rites of religious practices, about the principles of the organisation of the sacral space and of the possibilities of mastering it through performance. Once again the question about the significance and energy of the colour black is poignantly raised – so important in A. Garunov’s art: the colour of the beginning and the end, of the point and of all-embracing space, of the completion of the cycle and of the primary impulse, of Sufi whirling and of the instantaneous cessation merging with eternity. In the exhibition the presented pictures-objects, created on the principle of ready-made, in which rubber and tarpaulin are combined with fragments of bright ornamental carpets, found by chance or bought and, as a rule, machine-made, – are philosophical reflections – reflections at times harsh, rigid, minimalist in form, in tune with today’s urbanism.

The apophaticism of the colour black makes obvious the predominating archetypal mythologem of the carpet as an agent in the modelling of sacral spatial structures, makes real the direct associations which exist between the image of the carpet and the idea of the garden and of Paradise – the world of harmonious structures.

The exposition offered by the author is the bright reflection of a man of the consumer society on the problems of traditional sacredness, the search for a contemporary way of communion with the beginning and with the principle of all beginnings. The artist has created his own “Dhikr” and discovered a strange harmony of the ancient traditions with the contemporary world-view, with fundamental human coordinates. The sound rhythm of the ritual recitation in the video-installation echoes in the multiple calligraphic repetitions, and the return to the initial point has something in common with the mirror calligraphic inscriptions. The images of the “Whirling Dervishes” have been reduced, using photographic technology, to the level of a symbol. The concept of new materials is entering the context of Islamic culture. Simple shoes, brand trainers, bright coloured slippers, fixed to the surface of artefacts and placed on the floor in the installation “Tavaf”, remind one of someone’s symbolic absence, of possible relocation, of the interpenetration of different scales and hint at the possible non-contradictoriness of the elevated and of the everyday symbols of mass culture.

The religious element of culture and of human nature comes through the rigid industrial materials and forms, through any consumerism, edges its way into the urban landscape.