DEVELOPMENT OF PRACTICE
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 could happen if I changed the way they were arranged, framed or encountered.
Gradually, I began to understand that the situation itself could become the material of the work.
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), I moved from observing a situation toward intervening in it.
The position of the viewer became important.
Where you stand, how you move, what you can see and what remains outside your field of vision can change the work.
I began to think of perception not as something given, but as something that can be constructed.
THE FRAME & THE TRACE
I became increasingly interested in things that already carried a human history.
Used objects seemed more interesting to me than new ones. They had been touched, worn, abandoned, kept.
In Galantereya (2003), I looked at umbrellas, shoes, gloves and belts as things that had accumulated traces of their former owners. I began to treat the object not simply as material, but as something with a possible biography.
This question took another form in A Single Brushstroke (2006).
A beam of projected light crossed the exhibition space and went through the window. A person, a hand, a piece of paper, the window glass, a tree or a bird could enter the beam and temporarily become part of the image.
I was interested in a work that could not remain in one fixed form.
The frame could move.
The screen could be anything.
The work could happen without being completely under my control.
This was an important shift for me: from making an object to creating a condition in which something could happen.
REVEALING THE UNSEEN
At the same time, I became interested in traces, surfaces and memory.
In Konspekt Assotsiatsiy (2009), I worked with images that seemed to emerge from material surfaces, fragments of memory and associations. I used different techniques and unexpected materials because I was less interested in applying a particular medium than in finding a way to uncover something.
The surface became something to read.
Something to excavate.
Something that could contain an image before the image was consciously made.
This way of working continued through found and used materials.
In Nails as People (2010), I collected worn nails and treated each one as an individual. A minimal drawing was enough to shift the object from anonymous industrial material toward a particular presence.
I was beginning to understand that sometimes the task of the artist is not to add an image, but to notice what is already carrying one.
FROM OBJECT TO SYSTEM
Another change came when I started thinking about several works not as separate objects, but as parts of one structure.
In The Score of a Day (2011), twenty-four images were arranged as a temporal sequence. The works could be read individually, but together they formed a rhythm—a score.
Sound, light, movement and the viewer entered the work during the opening performance.
The painting was no longer only something to look at.
It could be followed, listened to, entered.
I became interested in what exists between things: in sequence, rhythm, context and the relations produced by bringing different elements together.
PRESENCE / ABSENCE
Later, the question of presence became inseparable from its opposite.
In Eliminates (2021), I photographed people in public space and removed those whose faces could be recognised. First I marked them, then physically scratched them out of the photographic surface.
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 been present much earlier in my work: what makes something visible, recognisable and significant—and what happens when it is removed?
SITE & MEMORY
The work increasingly moved into landscape and specific places.
In Podberezoviki, cacti were planted among birches, grasses, ferns and junipers so that they would not immediately attract attention.
I was thinking about displacement and adaptation, but I did not want to illustrate these ideas.
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.
This became important for my later practice: landscape is not a background. It is an active participant, carrying its own time, traces and memory.
TOGETHER
Over time, I also began to understand that some questions could not be developed alone.
R² emerged from a long-term practice together with Dmitry Razhev, where different forms of knowledge, attention and experience meet.
Here the work is not simply a collaboration between two authors. It becomes a way of thinking through relation.
The question shifts again:
not only what do I see?
but what can become visible between us, between a person and a place, between different kinds of knowledge, between what is present and what is remembered?
Looking back, I see the practice not as a sequence of separate subjects or media, but as a continuous movement.
From the thing to the situation.
From the situation to the relation.
From the visible to the trace.
From the trace to memory.
From the individual object to the space around it.
And from working alone toward working together.
I still do not know where this movement ends.
The work continues.