Asya Marakulina

The name of the project is taken from my work emails with the curator. It emphasizes the conflict between two contradictory urges: to stop, take a break, plunge into solitude and a desire to be a part of the big world, to register its changes, to reflect, to come up with new events and projects. The life and work of an artist pass in a delicate balance of these urges, which are so difficult to satisfy simultaneously.

The exhibition followed my way to the studio, which became more valuable to me than the work itself. It turned out that this studio was just an excuse to take a daily walk and a place to reflect on what I saw. Therefore, this project is a statement about the process of movement, during which the elements of the surrounding world acquire weight and significance.

The exhibition occupied two floors and started with a two-channel video installation. The two animated projections were united by a common horizon - the silhouette of the houses around the studio building. The first projection was based on photographic observations of the clouds, and on the second - clouds were animated with the help of paintings on the glass. The screens had the same angle, and the clouds flew from the center to the viewer, creating an illusion of movement in space.

In the center of the room, against the projection, there was a table. As pieces of a large puzzle, there stood drawings, fragments of a panoramic landscape: high-rise apartment buildings, lampposts, birds, grey clouds. While sitting at the table and looking into the drawings, a viewer was temporarily included into the installation space.

Further, in a long corridor on the way to the studios, I made a series of drawings on the window panes - a sort of a graphical diary of the clouds’ movement indicating the time and date of my observation. Perception of these drawings changed within a day depending on the sunlight. Following the diary, viewers entered my studio. There was a painting from the «Roadway» series, which depicted interchanges and traffic flows.

The exposition ended with a graphic animation of a moving cloud. The projection imitating a window was directed at a tiny hole in the wall, * through which one could see a piece of the landscape.

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* The hole was made by the artist Alyona Tereshko, with whom I shared this studio. When the light is off, it turned the studio into a camera obscura, and a projection of the surrounding landscape would appear on the walls.