Khora Contemporary is the first Virtual Reality art production company. The company provides artists with the tools to realize their vision using Virtual Reality. Khora Contemporary’s goal is to establish VR technology as a widely applied medium within the arts, and to bridge the artists’ vision with the infinite possibilities of Virtual Reality.
At If So, What? Khora Contemporary will feature a cinematic room with a the premier of Ukrainian artist Nikita Shalenny’s “The Bridge,” and Paul McCarthy’s C.S.S.C. Coach Stage Stage Coach VR experiment Mary and Eve, 2017 . In Shalenny’s VR work the viewer goes beyond the horizon on a compressed forty thousand kilometers journey around the world. Shalenny has long been fascinated by the idea of the bridge, using it as a starting point for imagining a way of escaping the ongoing crisis in the land where he resides. Based on watercolors by the artist, one setting replaces the other as ghostlike figures cross birch forests, oil fields, abandoned churches and oceans in a limitless universe.
Paul McCarthy’s Virtual Reality experiment is based on the artist’s long-term project, “Coach Stage Stage Coach”, (“CSSC”). Encompassing a wide range of different media, the project includes a new film, inspired by John Ford’s Western of the same title from 1939, starring John Wayne. Taking the form of a spin-off, a phenomenon associated with the entertainment industry, the Virtual Reality work builds on a scene from the film by the artist, involving the two characters, Mary (played by Rachel Alig) and Eve (played by Jennifer Daley). Caught in the claustrophobia of constant surveillance by the two women and their doubles, the viewer becomes part of a vicious mind game. All social conventions break down as the plot unfolds and escalates into a psychosexual trip of rape and humiliation