Text for the «Expansing & Cover on the Wall» exhibition

On 23 May 2025, a project was launched which brought together two exhibitions, «Expansing the Time & Cover on the Wall», created by students and artists in the «Temporary Paint» of the Master’s School of Design of the National Institute of Design. I created a text for a group exhibition entitled «Expansing Time» and a text based on the author’s description of the works to the personal exhibition of Victoria Schmigovsky’s «Cover on the Wall». Proposals were also made for the exhibition of the works.

So it happened that modern art and the railroad appeared almost simultaneously in the 19th century. As they reached the sacred suburban areas of Paris, the impressionists saw for the first time a world passing by them at great speed. One species changed for a few seconds, and so quickly began to change life, creating a desire to capture the slippery moments. The ability to travel from one capital to another in record times has led to a truly Babylonic convalescence of people and things in major cities. For the first time, their inhabitants felt as citizens of the world — now they were all at hand. Sonia Delone’s illustrations are well known for the poem «Trans-Siberian Express» by Blaise Sandrar. The thought comes to mind, one color comes to another — in the end, everything turns into a global caleidoscope pulsating in the rhythm of a new, twentieth, century. It seemed that there was a new horizon to which human history could go, or where the arrow of time could be directed — a total merger of everything on the planet, thanks to logistical and telecommunications technologies.

Technology offers a new way of seeing the world, opening up new spaces in it, including for imagination and creative creativity. After a dream, sometimes even a dream of their own, the builders and enthusiasts left in the same direction as the one in the city, in the east, where the tracks were laid, the towns were built, the villages were empty, and when the mining near the new city was over, the city also went to waste. A man comes and clears the space for life by exorcizing nature. A man walks away, nature fills the void he left behind. Every station has its own phase of the process and its memories. Where it used to be, the neighborhoods are now. Where the factory was, now the ruins. Places known since childhood, deserts, fields like the image of impressionists, all of which can be seen as a stage in the infinite development of the world.

Traveling through memories or reality, we feel that time flows in every place in its own way, no longer suggesting a single horizon, as was the case in the twentieth century, without adapting to the overall rhythm of world progress, refusing to keep pace with time. In fact, what is the overall result of growing heights somewhere instead of wooden houses, and somewhere among the abandoned workshops is a shy green?

Art and, in particular, this exhibition is becoming a study of the possibility of moving between worlds, in each of which time flows in different ways. The concept of time-variable provides a great opportunity for reflexion, because to feel your time or place, you have to look at it from some other perspective.

The work of Ilgiza Ahmetziyanov in its format resembles memes — ephemeral and rapidly obsolete pieces of information. This very short-lived form of art, because of its rapid obsolescence, captures both the era of its creation and the run of time itself. The works of Ksushi Grange, even in their names, «Meditationtime» and «Slow Down», seek to stop this race and to stop an office employee inside each of us a well-deserved vacation. The irony is that even on vacation, there’s no time to rock, so the towels begin water procedures dressed.

The art of Yekaterina Ivanitzka embodies the complexity of natural ecosystems, which for centuries inspired both folk artists and artists, academic and modern. The diversity of natural forms is already becoming a symbol of pluralism and wealth in ancient cultures. Unlike today ' s view of calculating wealth in the same (conditional) units, natural wealth, as well as cultural wealth, is untold. Alina Smolina’s landscapes balance on the edge of abstraction and figureless art. Flashing images remind you of what you see from the window of a car or train passing by quickly, or images of places without names and coordinates, memories for a second. Anna Stavipipenko depicts interiors that gradually absorb vegetation. One might wonder, what happened in the world inside the towels, whether we like what we see or not, whether we are satisfied with seeing such scenes or whether we are worried?

Pauline Philipov introduces the glitch effect into painting. This effect may occur, for example, when a file with an image is not correctly copied or when the data medium is physically damaged. Glitch shows that even digital data are neither permanent nor protected from loss. The faster the flow of information moves, the more likely it is to lose something important to us.

Victoria’s Schmigovsky’s «and carpet on the wall» project explores attitudes towards everyday life. One of the most recognized items connecting the recent past and the present is the carpet. It carries memories, emotions, and cultural traditions. The rug was once a symbol of wealth, later a vestige of the past, and now again as a ghost appears in our day-to-day context in unexpected contexts. Attaching the Kover card to culture has gone through all stages, from a useful object in the home to a status item — fetish, to useless junk that can never be thrown away or preserved. It may be in the third stage that it becomes a full-fledged cultural object, a memory keeper.

The carpet can be seen as a model of almost any product, and the work of an artist exploring the different phases of its cultural existence as a study of how values are formed in a society of consumption. While utilitarian value and market value can be quantified, value as a memory or culture custodian is difficult. A paradoxically incredible value is what a carpet or traces left on it by a person or by time can remind you of. It can be family meetings, quiet evenings with a book, or difficult and even scary moments in life. The role of the artist in this case is to let the subjects tell their story.