Picasso: Untitled / With Sound: El vigía [The Lookout], by Omsk Social Club

'Picasso: Sin Título' es un proyecto de La Casa Encendida y la Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA) comisariado por Eva Franch i Gilabert. La exposición cuenta con el apoyo de la Comisión Nacional para la Conmemoración del 50.º aniversario de la muerte de Pablo Picasso, y la colaboración de la Comunidad de Madrid. La muestra forma parte del programa oficial de la Celebración Picasso 1973-2023 que cuenta con Telefónica como empresa colaboradora en España.

El vigía is a hyper-performative itinerant experience developed through a series of sound and verbal scores.

The audio guide examines the act of portraying subjects through the Gothic lens of the snake-haired Gorgon, Medusa, not as a single head but as an array of different characters. El vigía takes viewers on a meditative journey where they can explore the act of capturing the image of another person while simultaneously exploring the exhibition as a complex device of power, history and personal fiction.

The work borrows milestones from art history, literary acts by Fernando Pessoa on heteronyms, stories like Bluebeard with his bloody chamber of heads, and our own social complexity of characterisation and representation. All of this is woven between lines of research on the potentially anticipated promise that we might one day be able to produce a portrait of another person.

OMSK Social Club is a stewarded and sprawling collective whose artistic practice is created between two lived worlds: one of life as we know it, and one of roleplay. These worlds merge into one, generating a chasm of enquiry that takes the form of a specific immersive methodology, coined in 2017 as “Real Game Play”: collective immersion and the creation of speculative worlds. From these live iterations media relics are harvested, such as films, screenplays and large-scale installations that invoke states and gateways that could be a fiction or a reality not yet lived.

OMSK Social Club works closely with networks of spectators: everything is unique and unrehearsed. The live installations created examine virtual egos, popular experiences and stories with a moral, allowing the works to become dematerialised hybrids of modern-day culture alongside the participants’ unique personal experiences. In the past, the Real Game Play immersive environments of OMSK Social Club have explored landscapes and topics such as memetic visual architectures, cryptoraves, desire and sacrifice, asemic hyper tools, micro-gridded affinity groups, DAOs, and consensus rituals.

They have exhibited across Europe in various institutions, galleries, theatres and spaces such as Martin Gropius Bau, House of Electronic Kunst Basel, HKW, Berlin, Volksbühne, Berlín, Stroom den Haag, Netherlands, and Light Art Space Berlin. They were included in the CTM Festival (2021), the 34th Ljubljana Biennale (2021), the 6th Athens Biennale (2018), Transmediale Festival (2019), The Influencers (2018) and Impakt Festival (2018). In 2021 they co-curated the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.