In the last few years theme of communication in art has become annoying like mosquito's cheep or a click of computer keyboard. Undoubtedly any art uses some language, transmits some message, serves a medium between 'A' and 'B'. Though the fact that new technologies allow to pipeline in real time something called "information", doesn't mean something's being really reported to someone. To my mind WWW is 99,9 per cent a noisy street, where nobody communicates with nobody, but seeks to keep one's social identity and yet stay unrecognized. The "Anna Karenina" novel's text typed by someone, hangs around in the Web now. A brilliant example of communication fool's activity, done by one who's deadly afraid of conditional communication. Simultaneous exhibits by Irina Nakhova and John Tormey, held at XL and ICA respectively, are dedicated to the theme of communication. They're incorporating more or less modern technologies -- although the set of used devices obviously flout at high-tech. The description of the project talks of American and Russian "sides". then there comes an homonymical "site". Meanwhile, "site" in humanitarian slang means precise place, where an archaeological complex characterizing some culture, is found. Somewhere near sounds "sight". An optical definition, close to visual arts. The proposition is clear, somehow. Russian side and site is a sleeping bear's lair. Dreaming of past and future, in a long time oblivion, the beast inflates his ectoplasmatic soul that hangs up under the ceiling of his/her winter shelter.

The American Side is a herd of multiple creatures, totems of various tribes that inhabit "Home of the Brave". They try to talk to the outer world without communicating between each other. But the conceptual trick of the project -- primarily titled "Domestic Intelligence" -- consists in the fact that the creatures inhabiting the sites, or the sides, at a close sight are empty. The bear is a dummy packed with hay, his soul is an air-filled silk bubble. Furthermore, Russian bear suffers from infantile narcissism: on the wall of his stuffy shelter hangs his portrait, a picture of character from an almost forgotten -- let it be forgotten forever -- children's tale. American totems are also nothing but the empty skins. They're neurotic and suffer from being so close to each other. their only filler, their only escape from the empty emptiness, could be the other's body, the other's soul. But the "filler" might feel like a raving patient of a psychiatric hospital, if not a serial killer in a muzzle. Why do they do this reconnaissance for with all these gadgets, what do they -- or, to be precise, their stuff -- could tell each other, or spy out to further sharpen their vision of the world? Just nothing. The means of communication will transmit just an annoying noise made by the thing called "Contemporary Art", the system that translates itself.

This is discommunication. Neither a monstrous telephone, nor their clutch that scratch the buttons of devices designed for "human, too hu-u-uman" creatures, could help them. However, given the talent and special attitude to what's going on, discommunication brings the ever drowsy bear and the empty totems to the final violation of communication methods. They start talking in poetic parlance, which space makes an empty word become inflated with sense.