2012 | Video installation
Catalogue title: Dispensary
Exhibition: The Eye Never Sees Itself
II Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Main Programme
Venue: Ural Worker Printing House, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Dates: 13 September – 22 October 2012
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade
The Work
The work was installed in a darkened room within the former printing house.
Its walls were covered with the words: “Никого нет” (There Is No One).
A video projection (I, II) showed the same room. A person entered, looked around and said that nobody was there. Other members of the Brigade then entered the room.
The visitor entering the installation therefore encountered a situation that had already been played out and recorded.
But the statement remained impossible to sustain.
Someone was already there.
The visitor was there too.
Prophylaxis
The Brigade called the work a “prophylaxis of the self”: “Remember yourself. Guard your own dignity.”
The work uses the simplest possible contradiction — saying that nobody is present while being present yourself — to turn absence into a question of perception.
The empty room is not actually empty. Its meaning changes when someone enters it.
The work therefore depends on the visitor not simply looking at an image, but recognising their own presence within the situation.
Exhibition Context
Prophylactorium was presented in the main programme of the II Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, The Eye Never Sees Itself, curated by Yaroslava Bubnova.
The exhibition occupied the former Ural Worker printing house, a constructivist industrial building in Yekaterinburg. The biennial explored ways in which artistic vision can analyse and transform the world through acts of looking.
The Brigade’s installation opened the exhibition and became one of its first encounters with the viewer.
Documentation
The project was realised collectively by the Brigade.
Elena Gladysheva, Viktor Oborotistov, Marina Razheva, Vladimir Romanov
Original project documentation →
Catalogue: 2nd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art: The Eye Never Sees Itself, 2012, pp. 95