Books from a Kyiv apartment
dried fruit, soviet collections of works by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Leskov,
polyefir gesso, oil colours, 2023, 40/35.25, 35/25/20, 45/30/35 cm
In Georgia I saw huge piles of books, half of them were in Russian, and half in Georgian. Old Soviet books in modern Georgia, in a territory that was part of the "Soviet empire". It was a plastic expression, an image that touched me. Intuitively I asked my mum's friend from Kyiv to go to our old flat and take some books from there. Books of my grandfather, his old collections of essays, from the fifties, sixties. I unfolded the piles and put them in my place, not knowing what to do with them. Then they reminded me of a pillar, which supports nothing, which is also very pathos-like. What could make this pillar complete? Probably something perishable and already dead. That's how the image of rotten fruit came in, partly as a reference to the decor of the Stalinist Empire like VDNKh*. As if this whole idea of "empire" had rotted from the inside out. Maybe it's been rotting for centuries. Even though these books are dear to me, I read them, because I grew up reading them.
'Chapel' series
2021-2022
The Chapel project explores the topic of post-religious society and tries to build a new model of relations not so much with the transcendent and distant, but rather to establish a connection between a person and the world around him and change the anthropocentric model of interaction with it. The project speculates on religious themes and cultural phenomena in general. The chapels imitate places of worship, in which anthropomorphic images are replaced by images of animals, and instead of iconographic faces, there is emptiness.
Recognition of the animal as a new apostle, and the forest as a new temple? Perhaps that’s it.
The purpose of The Chapels remains hidden to us.
The main characters in them are not saints or people, but emptiness as the center of the composition. Fragments of objects of human everyday life, as a substance or building material. In The Chapels, the presence of animal figures as clerics of some (or no) cult is possible.
Plastically, I chose the form of pseudo-religious buildings, because along with the phenomenon of the invention of the tool of labor, I am interested in the phenomenon of religion, which forms the basis of such a phenomenon as architecture (religious buildings preceded residential architecture.
'Antiantrop' series
2020-2021
It seems that the charm of the Antiantrop, series by Fedora Akimova, is provided by the classical iconography of objects - their symmetry, laconicism, proportionality, craft perfection.
But we are rather captivated by the strange reception mode created by this project: we hang in a void without supports, as if in the state of weightlessness. This suspension creates a distance for re-reading the culture from a position of inhuman, albeit interested, perception. As if alien artifacts for some reason imitate human culture without understanding the meaning. The imitation sharpens them with emptiness and loss - this is the relationship of any artifact with its future. Any culture is permeated with a similar relationship with tradition. Fedor Akimova combines several impulses - the aesthetic and the sacred ones seem to be basic: the icon case and frame unfold these impulses in the universal coordinates of art, cult, history, power, while undermining their universality. A frame with a decorative motif defines the aesthetic, but what does the frame embody? Not at all a picture, not its mimetic emptiness and technical illusionism. This is an imitation of the very practice of imitating reality. In addition, the invisible base, disappearing under the painting, and the thread instead of the pigment imitate the medium, but depict the disappearing matter of reality rather than its forms.
There is a structure of devastation in front of us. In its recognizable coordinates, geological, biological and cultural time mixes, canceling history and affirming an anti-historical present. Current day-to-day routine returns in archaeological artifacts, i.e., it disappears, creating a distance of the remote future after humanity. But there are environmental articulations left behind it - all items and materials of the series were found in landfills and flea markets. And the female practice of embroidery poetically exposes a certain oblivion of the basics, leaving a pure illusion without a referent.
Alexander Evangely
'Android Tatyana' series
2020-2021
A series of objects Android Tatiana speculates on the form of a classical frame opposed to the imitation of mechanistic embroidery. Several layers of transparent fabric seem to be trying to put a holistic landscape together, but the system fails and the picture of the universe still crumbles into fragments
'Silt' series
2021
The Silt project, like many of Fedora Akimova's projects, arises out of the conservative plastic tradition. The exposition includes ten assemblages, or collage assemblies of two series, found as ready-made, and several videos. The project generates the idea of a kind of planetary alternative, ecological and radically antisocial - this is the Earth without people.
The epic principal video documents the placid landscape and its inhabitants - large animals and dinosaurs. In an alternative history, they had not died out, but continued to evolve improving their minds, survived glaciations, civilization and now, in harmony with themselves and with the world, rule the planet along with other animals. The shallow shelf where they graze has a wonderful feature - there materializes and disappears a grandiose portal, marked by the visual code of the sacred, by a dialect of an inhuman cult.
Intricate and fanciful designs and formal assemblies of shapes, textures and surfaces, fragments of household items found in landfills and flea markets are the best that familiar things could offer. And yet everyday things are the familiar to us boundaries of the developed territory of the human, they show us its close border. We know that we cannot overcome it. But you we reassemble these familiar things and gain new experience, while remaining within the same boundaries.
Alexander Evangely
'Tatyana' series
2019-2021
The Tatyana series (embroidery on transparent fabric) appeals to ancient feminine practices, while the partially lost landscape speaks of the fragility of this world and the impossibility of returning to a holistic picture of the universe.
'Noah' series
2021
Small series made from old floor desks and toys.
Once near our house, among the construction debris, I found a lot of Soviet parquet.
Plastically and figuratively, old parquet is material that speaks for itself and is very anthropomorphic: for decades a hard floor was the embodiment of comfort and stability, and now it resembled a shipwreck or a “soil skin” that had fallen apart at the seams.
The main problematic of the project is irresponsibility, indifference to the environment. Such an attitude will sooner or later lead to an environmental disaster. Human infantilism and indifference make nature and animals only toys and "decorations".
'Soviet glass' series
2019
Small series 'Soviet glass' consists of three objects made from soviet dishes for celebratory dinner.
