GES-2 showed an exhibition-remembrance of the pandemic

Home Apocalypse score

Now the pandemic seems like a half-forgotten dream from the life before. However, its consequences were deposited somewhere in the subcortex. It is not only about the acquired reflex to wash hands more often and other everyday habits, but also about the relationship with the surrounding and personal world. It is this topic that the exhibition at HPP-2 entitled “House and Garden” is devoted to.

The project was created by artist and photographer Sergey Sapozhnikov during quarantine. It turned out to be a total installation, where the outer world is in black and white, while the inner, homely one is painted with bright colors and filled with music.

What is the most important thing in art? This seemingly rhetorical question opens the exhibition of Sergei Sapozhnikov. The answer is offered immediately: “The relationship of the artist and the surrounding world.”

This world is woven from the views outside the window and objective memories. The first exhibit of the exhibition is a “skeleton” of a bicycle: only a bright frame remains from it, but there are no wheels, seats or pedals. This “legless” mechanism hangs in space and looks at a black-and-white landscape — in a video where the author of the exhibition moves away from us, dissolving in a colorless forest. The entire exhibition is built on contrasts and consists entirely of “windows” – portals to the outside world, which invariably remains black and white.

In the framed photographs, which seem to turn images into windows, we see real windows with b/w views of nature. Sapozhnikov took these pictures every day, sitting at home, in Rostov-on-Don, during quarantine. Moreover, the walls on which the images hang are pasted over with photo wallpapers with the same colorless landscapes.

On the floor is another “portal”, already round – this is a photograph of a black and white sky. Through the walls here and there passages are “cut”, but not all of them can be passed through. But in the next room there is a lot of bright contrasting color.

Here, in the frame-portals and on the installation in the form of a conditional house, we find the artist’s everyday world: flowers on the windowsill, doors, a musical installation, a sofa. Everything that surrounded Sergey in that quarantine life is filled with flashy colors of acid green, crimson, yellow and blue.

People appear in the total metaphor episodically – they are all on screens in their home interiors. In space, the “Score of Time” by artist and theater director Dmitry Tsupko and “Waltzes” (17 compositions) by composer Alexei Hevelev sound. Meditative music emphasizes the contrasting emotions experienced in quarantine. Everything around is frozen, but inside everything is on fire.

This sketch of a personal pause, which everyone on the planet has felt, has its own charm, romance and irony. Then it seemed that the outside world was collapsing, and the household around, for lack of other options, had to be studied literally under a magnifying glass, learning a lot about an old sofa or a flower pot.

Now this time has turned into a memory that Sapozhnikov, like many, seems to miss a little. Everyone was then tired of sitting at home, but, having come out of confinement and plunged into the new madness of the outside world, now that moment of seeming apocalypse and unbearable boredom is more and more perceived as romance, turned into a strange meditative score, where their pleasant black and white and bright colors.

After a while, the artist returns to that moment to show that sometimes it is better to turn off the outside world, perceive it in black and white, in order to better understand one’s personal inner.