I did not begin with a method. I began by looking.
At ordinary things, familiar situations, small changes in what is usually overlooked. I was interested in what happens when attention shifts slightly — when something ordinary stops being transparent and begins to reveal another layer.
situation & perception
In the late 1990s, I worked with everyday situations, simple things, childhood memories, rituals and fragments of ordinary life.
I was not interested in illustrating them. I wanted to see what might happen if I changed the way they were arranged, framed or encountered.
In Children’s Room, Once Upon a Time… New Year Syndrome, Simple Things, Otto Arte. P.S. and Round Summer, familiar situations began to behave slightly differently.
Gradually, I understood that the situation itself could become the material of the work.
perception becomes action
The next shift was from looking at a situation to intervening in it.
In Attempt State: BETWEEN (1999–2001), On Ethics, Aesthetics and Breath (2001), Corridor (2002), Angle of View / Fence becomes stairs (2002) and Observation System (2002), the position of the viewer became part of the work.
Where you stand, how you move, what you can see and what remains outside your field of vision can change the situation.
I began to understand perception not as something given, but as something that can be altered through action.
object becomes relation
I became increasingly interested in objects that already carried traces of human life.
Used things seemed more interesting to me than new ones. They had been touched, worn, abandoned, kept.
In Galanteria: Shoes & Accessories (2003), umbrellas, shoes, gloves and belts became objects with possible biographies rather than neutral materials.
In New hole (Sieve) (2003), perforations changed a closed surface into something permeable. The holes worked in both directions, allowing movement inward and outward.
In Lullaby for the River (2003), sound, the body, animals and the river entered into one temporary situation.
The long-term project The Golden Eggs / Ryaba (2002–2024) developed the same question over many years. The familiar egg returned in different forms: as a broken shell, a choice, food, a commodity, and eventually as a hidden object that had to be found by the viewer.
I became interested in what happens when an object is no longer simply an object, but begins to function inside a relation, an action or an encounter.
the frame opens
At a certain point, I became interested in what could happen when the frame itself stopped being stable.
In A Single Brushstroke (2006), a beam of projected light crossed the exhibition space and passed through a window. A person, a hand, a sheet of paper, glass, a tree or a bird could enter the beam and temporarily become part of the image.
The frame could move.
The screen could be anything.
The image did not need to remain fixed.
In The Invisible Fir (2006), the tree was not physically there at all, but could be made present through an action and through the attention of those witnessing it.
In The Score of a Day (2011), separate paintings became a temporal structure. Sound, light, movement and the viewer entered the work.
I was moving further away from the idea of the artwork as a stable object and toward the idea of a work as a condition in which something can happen.
revealing what is already there
At the same time, I became interested in surfaces, traces, memory and things that seemed to be present before I consciously made them into images.
In Konspekt Assotsiatsiy (2009), surfaces became something to read and excavate. I used different materials and techniques not because the medium itself was important, but because I was looking for a way to uncover something.
In Nails as People (2010), a minimal intervention was enough to shift worn nails from anonymous industrial material toward individual presences.
I was beginning to understand that sometimes the artist does not need to add an image.
Sometimes the task is to notice what is already carrying one.
This also changed the way I thought about absence.
In Eliminates (2021), I removed recognisable faces from photographs. The absence was not represented.
It was made.
The photograph became a surface on which presence and disappearance could be experienced at the same time.
This returned me to a question that had appeared much earlier in my work: what makes something visible, recognisable and significant — and what happens when that condition is changed?
place becomes an active field
Gradually, the work moved beyond the autonomous object and into the city and landscape.
In Shoot for Color, participants walked through the city with a simple task: to look for colour. The city itself did not change, but the conditions of attention did. Familiar streets became fields of discovery.
In PanGorMonium (2008), the city itself became an instrument. Its architecture, infrastructure, memories, absences and forgotten traces could be activated through attentive presence and inner listening.
Each person could assemble this instrument differently through their own encounter with the city.
In this sense, the participant became both listener and performer, while the city became both instrument and score.
In Podberezoviki, cacti were planted among birches, grasses, ferns and junipers so that they would not immediately attract attention.
I was not illustrating displacement or adaptation. I wanted to create a situation in which a displaced living thing actually had to exist in another environment.
The place became part of the work.
The work could no longer be separated from what surrounded it, from the time it existed there, or from what happened to it afterwards.
place, material and time act
This became more radical in my later work.
I began to think of a place not simply as a setting, but as something that could change the work itself.
In The Quarry as Witness, the quarry is not represented. Its geological traces, colours, surfaces, industrial history and changing conditions become part of the work.
The artist can arrive with an intention, but the place can redirect what happens.
Material, weather, duration and chance can become active agents.
The work is no longer completely mine to determine.
the work becomes an open process
In recent works, this has become increasingly important.
In The Golden Eggs / Ryaba, the project returned in 2024 as a dispersed object and quest. The work was completed through searching and discovering.
In Nest, an egg, a growing shoot, humidity and rain continued to alter the work beyond the moment of its making.
In Flying Deer (2024), the figures were deliberately made to disappear through wind, moisture and time.
In Sieve of Silence, light, texture and touch change the experience of the object.
In Through, the viewer can enter the work, move through it and leave something of their own behind.
In To understand — one must walk, there is no fixed viewing point. The route through the landscape becomes the work itself. The body adjusts to the terrain, and attention becomes part of the act of moving through the place.
In Letters of Water, water is used to draw on stone. The image appears and disappears; the remaining water is carried back to a dried lake. The work continues as an act of return and as traces in space, memory and attention.
I am increasingly interested in what happens when a work is given the possibility to continue without me.
Not everything needs to be controlled.
looking back
Looking back, I no longer see the practice as a sequence of subjects or media.
The same questions return under changing conditions.
A familiar thing can become strange.
Perception can become action.
An object can become a relation.
A frame can become permeable.
A place can become an active participant.
An image can disappear and still leave a trace.
A work can begin with a small intervention and continue through material, place, time, chance and attention.
I did not begin with a method.
The method emerged through the work itself.
And the question remains open.
