In a moment things will change
(With all our souls, even though you have non)

2022-2023, 5 zinc plates 15 x 38 x 0,1 cm, black oil-based paint, acid traces, asphaltic bitumen, glue, sawdust, 20 sheet-metal screws, Russian 10 rub. coin

Five dysfunctional zinc plates are covered with dry oil paint, which in its liquid form is used to make print copies, therefore their proper production is unachievable. It is something that remains with you. A permanent malfunction of a body.

The dead can’t be discarded or forgotten. You live with them, sometimes even for them.

Cargo 200. The socio-political notion, originally a military code name, appeared in wartime at the end of the 20th century. A multitude of coffins made out of zinc, packed in wooden boxes for transportation purposes. Lower speed of decomposition, no cadaveric alkaloid, no inconvenient ugliness, no personhood of a formerly ‘valuable' body. Just tags and the gleam of metal. ‘200' states for the maximum weight in kilograms for an aircraft to transport the dead. The notion, which was initiated more than 30 years ago is still happening. 2022 (1979) - ? (1989).

Can the late USSR be other than geopolitical, instead mutate into a sociocultural phenomenon?

Cargo 200. Also known as a film produced by the Russian film director Alexey Balabanov. Released in 2007. It tells a story of a rural city in the USSR during the times of the Afghan war (1979 - 1989). Most of the characters in the film try to talk about such topics as love, youth, hope, and happiness, but all of that works as ignoratio elenchi or strawman fallacy. Love is depicted through torture and rape, adolescence as a proposal to use others for personal benefits, hope and happiness as being drowned in alcohol and violence.

Ignoratio. Ignoring as a norm. Governmental negligence of the past events and of life itself. Only (re)production of dead bodies driven by personal interests.

Empty space with zinc plates depicting landscape-like scenes taken out of Balabanov’s movie. Presented screenshots show no human images, only their fragmented traces: a blood stain, a shadow, glasses with drinkable fluid, a hand, industrial factories, a transport system. All the plates contain images that are flipped horizontally. All the plates are burned wit asphaltic bitumen dust and etched with acid to correctly achieve the purpose of further reproduction and distribution of the final product.

1979. 1991. 2007. 2014. 2022. What is left for now? To still try, while being gassed by the (Moment) glue, to forget about being screwed to the wall.

TO DRAW ATTENTION TO AN ISSUE

2022, print on synthetic satin, hypoallergenic silicone, pigment, metal,
leather particles, ash

Performative artifacts or traces of compulsive dance. Something acquired to get away from life by actual living, which is always about pain and power. The higher the power, the higher the pain. To be in pain is to be in a process, to be in that particular moment of… To be present and not be able to tear yourself apart from yourself. It’s what can cultivate immanent surveillance and humiliation
(read: formerly punishment).

The key topics of the research were: notion of birth
in the modern accelerated and heavily militarized world; the management of faith in conflict situations; and the complexity of physical and psychic pain.

Chosen materials can be separated into two groups: ones that are immanently corporeal such as silicone, and leather; and others, whose nature functions through a technological intrusion: metal disks, synthetic fabric, and printer ink.

The main material, which is silicone, is a bodily notion of two: psyche and physic. It’s skin. A protective barrier, but also a frontage. It hides and it shows. The corrosions or scars on the skin is an in-game navigation markers (a round map, a pop-up notification that the bomb has been planted, and available weapon selection) from the Counter-Strike game series. These scars are silent helpers, but also witnesses of military plots and personal strategies of concurring.

The three-part graphic work consists of a mixture between pencil drawings and digital post-touch-ups in Photoshop. Such a formal alliance between natural and technological helps narrow the hierarchy between eternal youth and decay. God and a human. Parent and a child. Object and subject. Something tangible and intangible. And forcefully create a space of coexistence, codependency, correlation. 

IN HOPES BUT OFTEN IN A CONTRADICTION.
ALLEGRO AGITATO

2021, radiator, hypoallergenic silicone, edited track 'Molotov' by Korol I Shut, varnish, rust, resin, A4 paper, poetic interview, soil, construction clamps, fabric, church wire-system, drawing, oil traces, ceramics, two chanel audio-system, sound 06'54"

A sense of futility permeates the exacerbated physicality of the deeply allegorical work in Daria Makarova’s solo show “In Hopes but often in a Contradiction. Allegro Agitato.” More than anything, the exhibition is redolent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s vision of the future as a version of our own present but put through the wringer, with the materiality at its core stripped bare, confounding us with the same old questions.

Standing in the middle of the exhibition space is Tripod (all works 2021), a Frankensteinian construction assembled out of an old-fashioned disused radiator and myriad torsional tubes that spread like roots in all directions. Some break up, some tangle into a circular loop, and some lead straight into the sewer under the open floorboards. Flanking this central sculpture are Hanged 1 and 2, abstract drawings attached to silicone tablets and suspended from cheesecloth ropes, as well as the text piece Interview, a mysterious, barely legible dialogue printed on simple A4 paper and mounted in a dissonantly ornate frame. Like the surfaces of all the objects in the show, the radiator’s grates are clogged with a lumpy mass of coagulated silicone—it’s a heat source rendered impotent, similarly to how the images and words on view are left blurrily inarticulate under the dull goo.

Reverberating ambiently throughout the space is an altered version of the instrumental track “Molotov” by 1990’s horror-punk band Korol i Shut (King and Jester). Here, it’s made to sound like the muffled residue of a distant commotion. Rather than carry the incendiary charge of a revolutionary’s cocktail, “Molotov” now strikes the weary tone of the perpetually thwarted—of one who is powerlessy cocooned in a face-off with corporeality.

– Valerie Mindlin for ARTFORUM

REQUIEM:
LITHIUM BANK

Prison castle, Borovsk, Russia

2021, soviet period chair from the 'Krasny Oktyabr' cloth factory, mattress fabric, rust, steel, pleated tubes, fragment of a car engine, construction adhesive, timer, human hair, looped sound 12'05"

 

everything breathes ashes of the past

no use in saying that the split lies as it should
should not

so much power is spent on thoughts
on physical suff

ering
as it is used to be
sailing from one bank to another
wishing to bring banks together, to composite

but

the forces of inhuman nature are present
persistent towards man's whims
 

'’

so

what is left is to test the spiritual cultivation of oneself
to test limits of turbulent physique
what is left is to wear the boots out till the bones
bringing the banks together
as they used to stitch countries up with corpses

layered meat pie
with a prune and redberry confiture
who would kindly light a candle
who would worry about a shame

same mechanism
same system
terms differ
the smell of knees fermented by the waiting for a ferriage
another cycle

no

eternal loop
no rejuvenation
and was not
as well as candles

the shame contradicts the ashes