Woodchips

2020 / 6 channel video installtion, woodchips 2’ 31 / 700 loop vids

Arnold Veber has been documenting the lives of his peers since the age of 18,
capturing the extremes of party life: expressive ecstasy and picturesque blackouts.

Today, his best-known series Last Night I’m Done (2015) looks lik a souvenir from an age gone by,
although there are no fewer parties since Crimea became part of Russia
and big cities still offer plenty of opportunities to chase the sadness away.

Veber is not an insider.
“I started seeing the scene and parties as an endless river that one can wade into,” he said at a roundtable at 25Kadr Gallery.
“It makes you feel like something is happening. You watch it like a TV series,
but you don’t do anything. Although you have an illusion of action.”

Veber’s installation Woodchips, produced for the Triennial, is an intoxicating panorama of youth.
Can you come out of it a real person and not a party puppet?
This question is allegorically posed by the texture o woodchips, but art has been answering it for centuries.
The beauty of youth is a tautology, and any attempt to force morality upon it will only make the blush stronger and the pupils wider.