Bella Matveyeva’s project “Bird Flu” is an open meditation on the theme of camp. Camp means being carried away by the Pre-Raphaelites, Beardsley, art-deco, Tamara de Lempicka, the film “A Strict Young Man’’, decoration, erotica, film stars of the silent era: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dierich, the novel ‘’À Rebours’’ by Huysmans and by the art of Bolognese academism. Camp is kitsch that has passed through the crucible of decadence and is familiar with the proverbial language of modernism, and its difference from the aesthetics of the classical salon, in that it parodies that which it exalts, and at the same time, ironizes irony itself, to which one has to resort in order not to be caught praising something that all decent people who claim to have so-called "good taste", sneer at.
Arkady Ippolitov, exhibition curator