In Tula, until June 8, in the Oktava creative industrial cluster, you can see the One to One exhibition. It was created by multidisciplinary artist Asya Zaslavskaya and curated by Monika North. Journalist Yekaterina Krayukhina visited the exhibition and explains why it is not to be missed.
Asya’s solo show is a creative exploration of the home. What it is? Where is it, inside or outside? Why does it attract us so much? What are we willing to do to be home? Or maybe home is when we are loved? The viewer thinks about all this, moving from one room to another. The name of each corresponds to the title of the chapter “Poetics of Space” by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard – “Angles”, “Nest”, “House and Universe”. In all works, the duality of the concept of a house is felt: either it takes the form of a dwelling, or it turns out to be inside the person himself.
The exhibition not only raises existential questions and gives us space for reflection, but also helps to formulate those feelings that in no way managed to find their way. For example, the work “I Love” – 6 lamps, on the soffits of which the phrase “I do not love you” is written (at first glance, nonsense), – clearly shows what happens inside when we fall in love or feel otherwise. Here, as in an equation, the meaning changes completely from the text that is “off” from the sentence. “I don’t love you”, “I don’t love you”, “I don’t love you”, “I love you” – a split second, just one click, on / off. Exactly like in life.
One to One is Asya Zaslavskaya’s first major solo exhibition. In addition to Oktava, Asya became an art resident at the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, the North Caucasian branch of the Museum of Fine Arts. AS Pushkin and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. The attending public had the opportunity to discover the works created by the artist during these seven years. For example, among the sketches of the North Caucasus, visitors will find a video documentation of the performance “6/8” of 2016 – an attempt to understand the traditions of Ossetia, which sometimes surprise people far from these places. Asya experienced the custom, according to which the bride spends most of the wedding, standing quietly in a corner almost all the time. The performance, which the artist calls “a silent dialogue with Ossetian culture”, lasted six hours out of the planned eight – this is the key to the title of the play.
The name of the exhibition is not accidental: 1:1 is the scale at which the objects in the drawing are represented in real size, and it is quite rare. As an architect (Asya is a graduate of the MARCH School of Architecture), the artist titled the exhibition in this way, because all the works in the exhibition are presented in full size. That is why the statement turns out to be honest, painfully close and familiar to everyone. Building grid as a symbol of change; a calendar without dates, which allows you to think nothing of tomorrow; a chessboard, where each piece will definitely return “home”, to its own cell, all on the scale of real life.
It is also worth going to Tula to the 1:1 exhibition to visit the Oktava creative industrial cluster. Behind the wall of the art space, the production of microphones of the world famous brand of the same name continues, and inside there are exhibitions of contemporary art, lectures and music concerts, a modern library and a recording studio. To get inspired go here.
