“Tomorrow Morning, at Dawn, Home Will Return, They Say” Exhibition
Group exhibition: Anna Bystrova, Yulia Virko, Mila Gushchina, Vatsa, Artem Lyapin, Anna Maramygina and Alena Rogatko
Curator: Kristina Romanova
Terminal A — Krasnaya Sloboda 9A (Nizhny Novgorod)
April 26 — June 26, 2024
Curator: Kristina Romanova
Terminal A — Krasnaya Sloboda 9A (Nizhny Novgorod)
April 26 — June 26, 2024
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The image of home has changed several times in recent years: from a closed fortress during the pandemic to a nomadic tent. The feeling of home, often found in the artists' works and exhibition projects, becomes key in this exhibition. Young authors are united by a common experience: their home has moved, changed, or simply does not exist yet. The title of the project is an excerpt from Agniya Barto's poem "The House Has Moved", which is dedicated to the history of the movement of houses in Moscow in the 1930s. Reflections on home - lost, changed, internal, found anew - unite painting, graphics, ceramics and textile objects by artists from Irkutsk, Omsk, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow.
The acquisition and loss of home is the main theme in the works of Mila Gushchina, Artem Lyapin, Alena Rogatko and Anna Maramygina. For Mila Gushchina, the image of home is a living form of happiness, which the artist hopes to find by visualizing an elusive dream through embroidery. The series "Path" is Mila Gushchina's story about herself in the colorful language of hand embroidery. For her, artistic practice becomes a way of living anxiety.
Home has never been “in the present tense” for her. At different stages of her life, it existed only in the artist’s imagination – as a flickering dream of peace of mind. But fate intervenes, changing plans, and these changes destroy the walls of even the most firmly built dream. “In my works, I want to look into the reflections of a distant mirage, turn away from its alluring sparks and go towards the home that I have yet to find within myself,” says the artist.
Artem Lyapin's works from the project "Here Once Lived" became the starting point of his practice and thoughts about the fact that everyone should have their own home. This was the artist's first solo exhibition in the house where he once lived. The project combined his three years of experience in weaving carpets and bobbin lace, experimental printing and graphics. Lyapin's works show both his experience in puppet theater and his desire to experiment with technology.
Narratives and media gradually transform, but the visual code — the recurring image of a wicker house and its inhabitants — remains unchanged. The house takes on different forms: from a hut and a ruined hut to a castle in the air. Lyapin's mystical universe expands from intimate graphics to large-scale printed canvas, involving viewers in the process of how an entire world is formed from tiny sticks and snowflakes.
Alena Rogatko turns to traditional hand weaving techniques and creates a four-part composition depicting a family circle that thins out over time, gradually disappearing completely. This plot refers to the history of the artist's home. Recognizable images of people disappear, leaving the space empty. The now abandoned house, where the artist's family once gathered at a large table, becomes for her "a place of complex memories"; a place where she would like to be if she could turn back time. Through the technique of hand weaving, Rogatko relives her personal history - through the texture, transparency and tactile sensations of the canvases.
Ceramicist Anna Maramygina literally reproduces the image of a house, simultaneously endowing it with the ability to both escape and take root. The series of works "Dream Cabins" arose from the artist's dream, in which houses on branch-like legs were huddled together to form a fairy-tale village. "I kept wanting to catch them, thinking that I needed a house: I'll catch at least one and settle in it," says Anna. Houses on legs become a symbol of her own space for which she is still searching. The artist's hero Aaron also dreams of his own place and goes to live with the ants in the forest, remembering that home is where he is.
Artists Yulia Virko and Anna Bystrova turn to finding a home as a way of finding themselves, using different optics for this. Yulia Virko travels and wanders just like the heroes of her large-scale canvases: they either sail away on a boat or build a dwelling in a tree. The process of self-determination is also aided by the constant practice of sketching, which forms the basis of her works. Yulia Virko began working on the series “The Promised Mirage” during the pandemic, in a state of disorientation and anxiety that many experienced at the time. The artist’s usual nomadism in search of impressions and “one’s place” became impossible, and the house temporarily acquired boundaries.
Regular drawing practice helped her stay calm, from sketchbooks to work in the studio. It is this “routine,” as Virko calls it, that always gives the artist a sense of home, wherever she is. The works are based on a proven visual technique: putting together puzzles from reality and fiction, thinking about the possibility of an “inner” home without physical boundaries. Boats with luggage, a tent, a tree house symbolize the artist’s movements around the world alone with her thoughts, surrounded by observers. The effect of spying on others, on herself, and on the era becomes the main theme in Virko’s new works.
Anna Bystrova lives and works in the family dacha, which becomes both a fairy-tale castle in the forest, and an impregnable fortress, and a metaphor for the inner world, in the center of which the well of the "I" is hidden. The dacha is located far from the city and is surrounded by a forest and a river - the energy of nature gives the artist an impulse and plots for creating works. At first it may seem that Anna paints her house in the image of a magic castle - surrounded by fog and branches, full of magical details. In fact, this is the beginning of a large work of the artist with a personal narrative.
"Sometimes it seems that my heart lives in the forest, like these castles. And the most precious thing is hidden in the heart," says the artist. The architecture of the exhibition echoes the air space of Terminal A. The works here seem not to touch the walls. On the one hand, this is a symbol of the absence of a foundation, a permanent support; on the other, this space is a house where there are almost no walls between neighbors, each of whom is in search of their place.
Vatsa was born, raised and lives in Nizhny Novgorod. The curator's suggestion to the artist to write a "letter home" became part of the work "They Choose Us" and at the same time an invitation for visitors to the exhibition to sit at a table overlooking the Volga, take a blank sheet of paper, write a letter to their home, wherever it may be. And send a message without an address or a name to a timeless mailbox.
Vatsa expands the exhibition boundaries by creating a textile installation, “It Chooses Us,” in one of the rooms of a former dormitory in Krasnaya Sloboda. The artist works with the concept of “genius loci,” expanding it: the house does not simply give an energetic impulse, it becomes a part of us. Vatsa endows the place with a consciousness that chooses us — and not we it.
The place chooses us, and we determine the patches of reality, creating a home around us - colorful, eclectic, our own. The experience of living in a certain territory grows into a person with a visual and ideological code, forming his essence. "I belong to this land to a much greater extent than it belongs to me," the artist comments on her new patchwork installation from fragments of waffle towels from Ivanovo factories.
Kristina Romanova
Vatsa. It Chooses Us, 2024
Vatsa. It Chooses Us, 2024
Participants – Anna Bystrova, Yulia Virko, Mila Gushchina, Vatsa, Artyom Lyapin, Anna Maramygina and Alena Rogatko
Curator – Kristina Romanova
Producer – Anastasia Lebedeva
Curator – Kristina Romanova
Producer – Anastasia Lebedeva
PR – Darina Gribova
Photographer – Anatoly Kozma
Architecture – Alexandra Christina Portilla Izmail
Graphic design – Nikolay Onishchenko
Photographer – Anatoly Kozma
Architecture – Alexandra Christina Portilla Izmail
Graphic design – Nikolay Onishchenko
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