Emptiness of the orchestra
The exhibition takes place in the small, independent gallery "Kerka" (Komi: house), which looks more like a catacomb than a house. To find his way, the visitor needs to go through a network of courtyards and crouch under the roof. Finally, he gets inside the space with low ceilings, below ground level.
Once you enter the symmetrically arranged room with purple illumination from the phyto-lamps and the bright green light from the windows, you find yourself in the place for a spiritual séance, where contact takes place between the material and the non-material, the living and the dead. Here you can try to connect a ghost using karaoke.
In the center of the space there is a stand with a microphone and a screen on which karaoke is running. The visitor can substitute the missing element and try on the role of an altar server or medium calling spirits into life. This empty space is hauntological by its nature. Hauntology concept is seen as a future that has not come. It is the utopian models of the world that, for whatever reason, have failed the test of reality existence and remained in another world coexisting with us as ghosts. In this work this concept is realized through the possibility of taking a non-existent place, of giving voice to ghosts, of sprouting them, of connecting to them on their territory.
The subtitles for karaoke is the text of the popular Bruno Mars song "The Other Side", translated through Google Translator, with heavily slowed down accompaniment, which makes it impossible to sing the sluggish words on the screen. It is no performing this song, unless there is faith. So as with the perception of art, where it is necessary to leave your guidelines in order to enter another world, where all the coordinates change degree. The viewer is offered to sing, to believe in art, but always at the cost of leaving his body, at the cost of pure faith – irrational and not promising anything.
In the room, mutually exclusive images combine in a hallucinatory way: karaoke masses, phyto-lamps for plant growth, organic remains of absorbent cotton, ruinous wool dwelling in slimy gaps, the insides of these ruins are digital images: stock photos of families, extinct white giraffes, amateur videos from a dolphinarium, they all fill the bodies of the tombs of objects and swarm inside like maggots in a bizarre collage.