"Video Icon" by Maxim Peretti

Erarta Museum of Modern Art opens an unusual exhibition "Video Icon". Its author is the St. Petersburg director and composer Maxim Peretti.

"Video Icon" is an exhibition-sacrament. Its central exhibit - a video installation of the same name - arose as a reaction to the spiritual needs of society. If an icon is an image that a person worships, then the “Video Icon” is an image that all of humanity worships. There is no word in the "Video Icons" space. The action on the screens is controlled by music, lights and religious symbols.

The author of the project collected signs revered by millennia into a single film that recalls a cult suppressed from the memory of peoples. The protagonist of the Video Icon, the ancient god Baal awakened in the modern world, points to the viewer the common origin of world religions and the eternity of the very idea of finding a higher being.

Working on the script “Video Icons,” Maxim Peretti studied the Bible and the Qur'an, various Masonic and occult teachings, Kabbalah, and the work of symbolist artists. There he searched for the origins of the religious cults of antiquity. And the deeper the artist plunged into the topic, the more questions he had. He distinctly began to realize that he needed a person who would share new knowledge with him and help systematize the knowledge already available. With this thought, he walked for several days until he received an invitation to film the performance of Yuri Berezkin, a prominent archaeologist and ethnographer from the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was simply amazed when he heard his story about the phallic cults of antiquity and their connections throughout the earth. This meeting and conversations with Yuri helped Maxim draw up the idea of “Video Icons” and make sure that he was on the right track.

In addition to knowledge, the film needed specific images, characters and characters. Circumstances in this case were successful - the author accidentally ended up in the 300th Anniversary Park at sunset, when the sun was behind the Lakhta Center tower. In the backlight a perfectly clear phallic symbol appeared, which was ideally suited for the film and for expressing the idea of Baal - the “lord of the gods”, a cult associated with male power and the sun. In the Video Icon, the images of Christianity and Islam are combined to meet Baal together.

Filming one of the central scenes of the film - the ascension of the baby to the altar pedestal - also could not do without mystical incidents. Filming took place in the summer, when there was an abnormal heat in St. Petersburg, and the altar was draped with black cloth. When the scene was ready, the child was taken away, and the artist, director and cameraman were still standing on the pedestal, for some reason the fabric flared up and burned. Maxim Peretti saw this as a symbolic sign: at the heart of the cult of Baal lay fiery sacrifices of the first-born (infants), respectively, his "artistic" sacrifice was also accepted.

The installation of the Video Icon in the exhibition hall is complemented by paintings by artists Julia Titova, Ksenia Durina and Polina Abdulaeva based on the film.

The music for the "Video Icon" was written by Maxim Peretti himself. Director of photography and co-author of the project was Maxim Kutyansky. The producer is Evgeny Grigoryev.