2024 | Invisible art object

Exhibition: Underground 2024 (АНДЕГРАУНД 2024)
Venue: Museum of Architecture and Design, USUAA, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Dates: 29 December 2023 – 25 January 2024
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade

Dedicated to the 65th anniversary of Yves Klein’s exhibition The Void.

The Proposal

The idea for Nothing emerged from a dialogue between two artists.

“I will ask you nothing, and you will answer me nothing.”

The work was conceived as invisible, using emptiness itself as its material.

For Underground 2024, the Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade proposed an invisible object marked by red-and-white barrier tape, creating a visible boundary around an invisible presence. Conceptually, the object extended infinitely upwards and downwards.

Intended for the centre of the exhibition atrium, Nothing was conceived as an invisible axis — a “spindle of cause” onto which the exhibition’s meanings and associations could wind. The barrier also marked a boundary between visible and invisible, open and restricted, presence and absence.

What Happened

The conditions of the exhibition changed the work.

The object could not be installed in the centre. It was moved to a dark corner, reduced in scale and surrounded by several loops of barrier tape. The planned label and explanatory text were not displayed.

The visitor therefore encountered an enclosed space containing, apparently, nothing.

This raised another question: What happens when the centre moves?

Without an explanation, the object was left open to interpretation. What had been conceived as a physical centre became a hidden one.

The centre did not disappear. It shifted.

A Return

During dismantling, members of the Brigade moved Nothing back to its originally intended position in the atrium.

The gesture returned the work to its initial proposition after the exhibition conditions had altered it.

The work thus acquired another stage of existence:

Proposal → Displacement → Altered Conditions → Interpretation → Return

The change of location became part of the work itself.

Nothing continues the Brigade’s earlier engagement with absence, invisibility and empty space, including Prophylactorium (2012). Here, the work also became an experiment in how an artwork can change when the conditions of its presentation change.

Participation

Conceived in conversation between two artists and realised collectively by the Brigade.

Installation: Elena Gladysheva, Viktor Oborotistov, Vladimir Romanov, Irina Bizyaeva
Dismantling: Elena Gladysheva, Vladimir Romanov, Irina Bizyaeva, Marina Razheva

Exhibition: Underground 2024 (АНДЕГРАУНД 2024), Museum of Architecture and Design, USUAA, Yekaterinburg, Russia, 29 December 2023 – 25 January 2024
Museum of Architecture and Design, USUAA, Yekaterinburg