Suface of Writing at Vertical Gallery, St. Petersburg, 3-13 December 2015. See complete documentation including video and sound here (in Russian).

This joint project with curator Alina Belishkina is a continuation of the artistic research focused on the historic representation of the Leningrad blockade (1941-44), first realised in the form of the exhibition called Map and Territory in 2014 at Triumph Gallery (Moscow). If, in the case of the “Map”, the question raised by the project concerned the nature of visual representation and the ambivalence of any (photo-) documentary evidence, in this continuation it is the textual representation — its specific process of revealing language as an independent structure in relation to thought content — that becomes the key sphere of artistic inquiry.

The project’s conceptual coordinates are positioned within the zone of fine differences — between utterance and writing, between voice and silence, between the recipient and the sender of the message — and it is exactly a “surface” that appears to be a mechanism that brings the game of differences into play, as once something is recognised as a surface, it surfaces, that is we have a possibility to see what lies within.

Installation photos by Oleg Savunov.