Alexandre Ponomarev

Alexandre Ponomarev was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, in 1957 and lives and works between Paris and Moscow.  

Before moving to Moscow and becoming a visual artist, Alexandre Ponomarev worked as a sailor and naval engineer. From this earlier profession, he retained a fascination with the sea and a taste for technological challenges. In 2000, using smoke bombs with the assistance of the fleet of the former Soviet Union, he orchestrated the disappearance of an island (Maya, the Lost Island); on another occasion, he repainted the exposed sections of a ship cemetery in the Baltic Sea. Whether designing a monumental water clock for the Centre Pompidou or a sea organ in the Bay of Somme, Ponomarev favors spectacular gestures—most notably his project for a “fleet for the defense of the interests of the international artistic community”—as well as deliberately futile machines. His monumental creations are deliberately useless, and it is precisely this lack of purpose that allows them to disrupt our familiar ways of understanding the world.  

At Atelier Calder, Ponomarev conceived several installations around the theme of the submarine, including Tube (2002) and Kiosque (2003) (a project begun in 1996 with Léonard’s Trace Septentrionale). The latter was presented in the Loire during the Rayons Frais Festival (2003) and at FIAC (2006), in one of the pools in the Tuileries Garden.