“The pondest pond” Asya Marakulina
It is a retrospective exhibition built as a closed ecosystem, a symbiosis of nature and art, and at the same time a kind of time capsule, where the viewer goes on a journey through the artist’s world. The idea of the exhibition refers to the graphic series “Around the Lake” 2017, the space is based on works from the project “There was a home” 2024 and “Recovery” 2022-2023, and also includes 3D versions of sculptures, graphics and installations from the cycles: “Agents of Intuitions” 2020-2024, “Motherfall” 2022, “Witnesses” 2021 and “Corner” 2020. As the artist herself says about the virtual exhibition: “It is a kind of mental exterior, where the remnants of plans and fantasies are frozen in some timelessness. Overgrown with grass, settled by slugs, stuck between haunted houses, fenced off by a fence. The swamp gurgles pleasantly and familiarly, and who knows what’s behind the fence? Here we are watched over, eyes watchful. Fresh air stumbles against the walls, a soft mist envelops: something moves in it and gives birth to inventive forms of life. There is a little of our precious freedom in it.”
The timelessness of the present, shards of the past and the fog of the future, with a slight taste of deja vu. The exhibition is like a pendulum from despair to hope, like a walk around a mysterious black lake. Water pours out in a waterfall of tears, gradually filling the entire space of the claustrophobic courtyard-well, a puddle in the middle of the thicket turns into a mysterious pond. So, imperceptibly, the viewer finds himself somewhere between the reality of now and then, the lost lacunas of Vienna and St. Petersburg. At some point the water, like an idea, will beckon to its depths, but you will not be able to enter it twice, and even more so in the usual way (from the shore and gradually). You will have to climb all the heights, find a way and strength to jump into the unknown… Any bottom is a great place to think about the meanings, and then push off and start again with new strength.
text: Kate Mikhatova
sound: Simonov Anatoliy
