NOTHING ELSE (2022)

The exhibition «Nothing Else» is a conversation about the concept of eternal return, to which modern Russia has been striving for the last 20 years, back to bloc confrontation, on the one hand, and on the other, the identification of the problems of Russia’s cultural and historical identity.

The author creates paintings by scraping off the same kind of paint that public utilities paint once a year the city’s infrastructure. The artist seems to dig up the past in layers of paint and pull it out.

The entire exposition is housed in a 19th century building and consists of two rooms. The first is an almost 200-meter space with walls with baroque stucco. The second room is made under a white cube, a clean and sterile space.

In the first space, a labyrinth was created from old Soviet furniture, collected from ads in which Nizhny Novgorod gave away furniture for free. These are classic Soviet, Czech and GDR cabinets and wardrobes, which in Soviet times was considered the height of chic. Paintings are hung on the backs of cabinets and wardrobes. Seven Soviet chandeliers and lampshades are hung from the ceiling. The main task was to make the viewer wander between the cabinets as if through a labyrinth in the atmosphere of a chamber Soviet apartment, flooded with warm kitchen light.

On top of the Soviet furniture is a phrase referring to the words of the poet Boris Pasternak, which he uttered after he heard Osip Mandelstam’s poem about the mustachioed mountaineer (about Stalin) «I was not shown anything here, I did not see anything.»

A camera under the ceiling recorded how the audience walked around the inscription. The viewer does not see this inscription, but becomes an accomplice in the action. The video is sped up 10 times so that the bodies of the viewers are not distinguishable, so that their movement turns into a disembodied stream. This work is about the fear that binds everyone today, primarily about the fear of the state machine, which grinds its own citizens.