Scrip #3
AIRPLANE WING
When this dress was being sewn, there was no hint as to what would happen. My friend and wonderful dressmaker Anya said, "Let's add some buttons and a collar, shall we?" I didn’t have any objections, but once the dress was hung up in the gallery, it became clear: with the collar and buttons, it only bore a passing resemblance to an airplane, but without them, it would be absolutely unmistakeable. What a sharp eye Anya has!
MOSQUE
I must confess: I have a fair share of Muslim ancestry. My grandmother's name was Aisha Abdullah Sultanbeck, and my great-grandfather Abraham was an imam and head of all the Muslim people living along the cost of the river Don in Southern Russia. Whenever you take on a subject like this, it always seems that Muslims are going to hate this. But then at your opening, it becomes quite clear that every visitor understands your work in a different way. For some, this installation talks about the pressure that every artist experiences from the end of the gallery. What a shame!
Two men, one touches the other’s nipple (NOT INCLUDED)
A man wearing a dress is quite a touching spectacle for a European eye. But once the man is already naked and the dress is already hanging at the gallery, you cannot touch this man anymore as this might be taken as harassment, neither you can touch the dress as by that very moment it becomes a museum piece. All you can do is admiring it from a distance which is so boring.
JESUS
When you are doing an installation on dependence or enslavement, there is always a sign of a special type of bad luck that accompanies your process, and it comes in a form of a of workshop production team enslaved by you in order to finish your masterpiece before the deadline. And if your workshop is in Moscow, your team willl be most likely Muslim from Central Asia. But to compensate that coincidence, in the day of your opening there will be a small naked man that will be seated in the corner of the room playing a Muslim. And of course, despite the looks, his origins would have nothing to do with islam, he will most likely be Spanish, and to make it look even more wholistic his name will be Jesus. What a beautiful world it is.
PUTIN
How do they feel, all this people wearing fur coats and down jackets at art galleries? Drinking champagne while sweating to death and still wearing the fur coat? This is the way the gallery wants to tell its visitors: we've got no cloakroom for you as we don't want you to hang out here forever. Or what? In Russia we have cloakrooms even at McDonlads. And it's a must to take off your fur coats while at an art gallery. So when it starts rustling, all these coats and jackets at my opening, I always think: we should ask Putin to come and sort things out.
PROJECTOR
There is no chance you would make a human being seat on the floor naked for the long six weeks in a row. That's why after two nights a real small man who's been already filmed back and forth, is being replaced with a video projection. A small man projected into the corner looks even more lonely than his counterpart made of flesh, and his hands covering his face look even less protected, while his lovely belly looks even more cute. Yes, we should admit his cuteness.
Medium: Mixed Media
Edition: unique piece
Year: 2017
Size: 50 x 40 cm
