I want to fly to the sky like a dog. A touch on the archive of Ry Nikonova

The exhibition «I Want to Leap into the Sky Like a Dog» is the result of a six-month project by the laboratory. Within this framework, project participants studied the archives of the artist and poet Anna Tarshis (1942–2014), known by the pseudonym Ry Nikonova.
Each work is not merely an interpretation, but a dialogue with Nikonova’s methodology—for whom language and text were not rigid molds, but living material.

Rye Nikonova’s practice balanced radical experimentation with systematic rigor: she replaced the word with the void of the page, musical notation, and technical drawings, asserting that any sign—from science to the mundane—is equal in artistic significance.

Her name is associated with two phenomena: the «Uktuss School» (1964–1974)—a unique example of the Sverdlovsk underground—and transfuturism—a movement of the 1970s–1980s focused on reinterpreting the avant-garde. Calling themselves transfuturists, they defined the main vector of their art: translating existing works—be they textual or visual—into new planes, formats, and tonalities.

A similar principle formed the basis of the project participants' interaction with archival materials. The archive itself serves as the «ready-made form”—a heterogeneous collection comprising drafts, copies, versions, and sketches. Its fragmentariness and permeability became the starting point for artistic investigation.