2002 ARCHIVE

The Gallery “ NAVIKULA ARTIS” ( Pushkinskaya ,10, St.Petersburg,june, 2002).
2003-The Gallery “ESCAPE” ,Moscou , www.escapeprogram.ru

Archive


There are 12 boxes on the wall and each has a spy-hole as that in a door. You may see through the spy-hole putting the headphones on your ears. You may hear in the headphones sounds of staircases, noises, conversations, steps, banging the door, etc. The exhibition ends with the door and separate spy-hole. Through the spy-hole beholder views himherself half face. All the time the bell is ringing as if somebody has come and stands behind the door.
To answer the quest Ion “what is the intention of an artist here?” I should answer “To catch the reality red-handed and to give telltale evidences of the reality’s existance”
Evidences here are represented by the sound records which spectator can hear during looking through the spy-hole.
During these seconds you can grasp only fragments of conversations, sound of closing door, laughing.
It seems that the less real you speak about reality, the more credible it is.
Visual picture is not clear: it is white and black photo transformed by the spy-hole glass. Sounds are not clear also. All this make to work the spectator’s own imagination, “switch on” his own archive of expirience and associations.
I used photos of staircases in the houses of the Central district (Soviet period).
Sounds in the headphones I recorded from january to June 2002.
Spectator looking through the spy-hole is between the past and the present, becoming also the past. The only present is the own spectator’s face which he see as a half face through the spy-glass in the real door in the real time.
But this reality can not be appreciated immediately, because for the first moment nobody can identify himher self in the half face proection.