Cold Front*
A wall-sized chronicle of global losses from the past year.
Acrylic, chalk, charcoal.
Late January, 2022.
You can take a piece of chalk or charcoal and write down what still hurts. What has been lost forever.
You can erase what you no longer have the strength to face.
Fires and landslides, floods and hail, droughts and storms, frosts and scorching heat, tornadoes and sandstorms, epidemics, wars, terrorist attacks. Tragic accidents.
All of it scrolls like a news ticker across the world I look at. The wave of loss wipes away homes, forests, rivers, works of art, bridges, hospitals—
entire villages and entire peoples.
I want to pray away the endless hum of life.
I can forgive.
Even myself.
* Homage to Erich Maria Remarque ("All Quiet on the Western Front")
POO-TEE-WEET
Installation-labyrinth, 27×27×27 cm
2021
A collection of losses — just trinkets. Nothing more.
Gathering what’s been lost is a child’s game, isn’t it? A gesture of trying to preserve what is no longer there. What time has taken: days, things, cities, people.
The installation is interactive: you can look through optical “peepholes.”
* Homage to Kurt Vonnegut ("Slaughterhouse-Five")
Bells
duration: 2 hours
On the eve of the exhibition’s opening, the artist performed a durational act titled “Bells”, listing remembered disasters from the past year.
The documentation is presented as a series of analogue photographs.
* Homage to Ernest Hemingway ("For Whom the Bell Tolls") and Alexander Bashlachev (“Time of the Bells”)
Lady bug, lady bug, fly away home.
Your house is on fire, and your children alone,
They will burn, they will burn
Ladybug
Installations (multi-part), documentation of a performative act 270×270×270 cm
2022
"Ladybug,
fly up to the sky,
carry away my losses,
my fears and my troubles,
my earthly sorrows.
All I regret,
all I’m running from,
all that must be released—
take it with you.
And please,
find your way back soon".
This installation presents various versions of the traditional Slavic children’s chant “Ladybug, fly to the sky,” collected across different linguistic groups, historical periods, and semantic layers. Yet in all of them, the ladybug — or "Little Sun" — is called upon to witness the problems of the earthly world: personal ones (Where can I find love?), environmental (drought, fires), or collective tragedies — war, plague, and the uncertain fate of the world.