It is hard to say what interests the Swedish video artist Johann a Billing more – experimental music or dance, performance arts or social sciences. For one of her projects she invited the Stockholm art college graduates, young people of various professions, frequently clumsy and awkward, to rehearse an experimental dance together and watched the results. For another project she sent local Edinburg musicians and freshwater sailors on their first ocean voyage accompanied by an ironic soundtrack of the same name, This Is How We Walk On The Moon. In most of her looped works the artist concentrates the viewer’s attention on those events that slip out of the ordinary and rule-regulated course of life, akward situations and moments od discord, instability and tension.

The film “The Rape of the Sabine Women” in 1960-s stage scenery retells the legendary story, which happened in Ancient Rome; it reminds to the art-critics of the neo-classical canvasses by Jacques-Louis David and Nicolas Poussin.

This Danish videoartist doesn’t attempt to demonstrate the seriousness of his art by pseudo documentary or “non-professional” filming. There is no trash, on the contrary, his films please the eye with the visual effects luxury, complex light work and considered music; the professional actors, sound directors, camera men, light designers are brought into play – everything associated with the expensive full-length production is present here. Nevertheless, the artist can’t fool the viewers and critics with his sweet visual “trompe-d’oeils” – they compare atmospheric works by Jesper Just with the movies of Visconti, Fassbinder, Gus van Sant, and come to look at them to the Brooklyn museum or Tate Gallery.

The main work of the Shanghai artist Yang Fudong “Seven intellectuals in the bamboo forest” was presented for the audience at 50th Venetian Biennial. Within the X Media Forum it will be possible to see, in the end, in Russia the full version of this Yang Fudong installation. Within the X Media Forum it will be possible to see, in the end, the full version of this Yang Fudong polyscreen installation. The artist revives for the spectators a story about seven Chinese wise men, running away from the bustling world. He does it in noir-film aesthetics accompanied by an ambient soundtrack. Contemporary scenery doesn’t diminish the poetry and depth of the narrative, which theme is the frustration and confusion of young intellectuals, these ambitious and well-educated people, who expected from the world something it couldn’t have given them. Fudong tells the story about the way which his heroes go through in search of Utopia, ignorant of their own future or the purpose of this way.