Environmental Performance

To understand — one must walk

2025, contemporary, Environmental Performance, Landscape Intervention, R², Revealed Realism

Total Landscape Experience

11.05.2025

Kőszikla Szurdok, Hungary

This exhibition does not take place inside a gallery. It begins on a path.
We walk deep into a gorge — a space shaped not by human hands, but perceived as an exhibition. Nature here is not a backdrop, but a co-author. We enter a narrative where every step is part of the installation.

This is an initiation route: collapsed trails, a stream that speaks with the voice of the past, fallen trees composing an invisible script. We must slow down, lean on overhanging roots, walk “not in our own shoes.” Through embodied participation, we become part of the exhibition.

At the journey’s end is a round rock niche — a stage, a theater of memories. Within it lies a mirror, buried beneath dust. Clear it away, and you will see yourself. Or rather, who you have become by walking this path.

Key “exhibits” :

  • Embracing Transition — the moment when the past ceases to define the route.
  • Working with Absence — where emptiness becomes the theme and medium.
  • New Tactility — discovering the world’s textures as an artistic language.

The “Reflection Hall” — the journey’s climax. Nothing is added here except the mirror beneath the sand. We are the main exhibits. Yet the way back is closed: the only exit is upward — a vertical ladder, stairs, daunting but leading to liberation.

We have walked this path together. Will you walk it with us?

Lullaby for the River

2003, Environmental Performance, Performance

Performance, 2003
Embankment of the Iset River, Yekaterinburg, Russia
As part of the ON/OFF contemporary art magazine launch

Performer: Vladimir Razhev

The Penguin plays the wooden flute on the river bank. The fish were arranged in a semicircle around him.
In a transparent crystal vase at the feet of the flutist there are granules of fish oil.

This performance became part of the video “Penguins, You Say?” and was included in a larger project marking the 160th anniversary of Anatole France.

Artist’s Note:

This performance is a quiet ritual of care and absurdity.
A lullaby—not for a child, but for the city’s river — burdened, ignored, polluted, yet still flowing.
The Penguin, a creature from a distant world played by a child, becomes a gentle mediator:
he sings not with words, but with breath through wood, a lullaby for something that cannot sleep.

Fish, once swimming in the depths, lie arranged on land : a gesture of remembrance and paradox.
The fish oil glimmers like relics or offerings — both nourishing and useless at once.

This is a moment of stillness amid noise.
A small act of poetic compassion to honor the river as a living being, reminding the city that even the absurd can be an act of tenderness and deeply necessary empathy.

It doesn’t solve problems, but it changes the tone.
It is a lullaby for a world that can no longer respond — and still deserves to be sung to.

“Lullaby for the River” is a poetic performance about care, loss, and quiet attention to a vulnerable world.