The artist staged an attraction of unprecedented antiforms

Connected the toilet to the TV and planted cacti in ATMs

In the middle of the pop/off/art gallery stands a car: it feels like it fell from the sky and crashed into a mess of wheels and mechanisms with its hood. Only this kind of “pedestal” and keeps the car weighing one and a half tons in a pose “on its hind legs”. The wheels of the car are bolted somewhere on the side, and two red chairs are installed in place of the trunk. From the driver’s seat, the winking face of a weirdo painted in neon paint on a torn-off door looks at you. This is how the central art object of the exhibition of a young artist from the city of Urzhum (Kirov region) Vasily Kononov-Gredin called “Antiforms” looks like. With his transforming project, the 33-year-old author suggests thinking about “the phenomenon of form being changeable.”

Opposite a foreign-made car, reassembled by the Russian “Danila-master”, there is another original design: spears with sharp tips are attached to a fitness walking simulator. You go in for sports on it, and every step turns into a prick of air. The cornerstone composition of three unseen art objects is completed by an ATM where cacti bloom instead of money. You can admire their thorns through a blurry monitor.

Vasily Kononov-Gredin presented these strange sculptures in an “assembled” form, showing by his own example how to turn familiar things into new forms and meanings. The rest of the art objects come in sets – the viewer is invited to assemble the art constructors himself. Complete sets are the most unexpected. The sets hang on the walls, packed in transparent vacuum bags. Instructions are included with each. Here, for example, the manual for object No. 3 (TV + toilet) says: install the TV on the bracket, connect the power – put the toilet in front of the TV at a distance of 2 meters from the screen – install the camera on the bracket so that the TV and the toilet are in the frame, – check that the camera image appears on the TV screen. Sit on the toilet. Watch TV. Watch. That is, behind himself, sitting on the toilet. An eloquent metaphor.

Many art transformers are packed with “references” to ancient mythology, the history of religion and art. For example, world history books come with an air mattress and a can of epoxy. And a piece of ancient wood, apparently from Noah’s Ark, with plaster, silicone, grease and steel straps.

With his first solo exhibition, Vasily Kononov-Gredin, a graduate of the Vyatka Art School (Kirov) and the BAZA Institute of Contemporary Art (Moscow), “enters into a dialogue with the minimalists of the 60s. XX century, who also used the term “anti-form”, but rather in the meaning of “non-form”, the rejection of it,” the description says. Studying the “phenomenon of the form to be changeable”, he comes to the conclusion about the “potentiality of things that surround us in everyday life”: he considers nothing as a possibility. Any form, like any situation, can be rethought, reassembled in a new configuration. Perhaps, by looking at things differently, a person will reassemble himself, breaking the patterns of habitual perception. Actually, in the new reality, the templates are already broken, it’s time to come up with instructions for reassembly.

“Antiforms” only at first scare: transformers, it seems, are about to rise up and begin to destroy everything around. Then it becomes interesting: what kind of techno-miracle-yudo is this. Having overcome the first shock, you feel the desire to play a strange constructor for adults. Blind your sculpture from a chainsaw or a vacuum cleaner, depriving them of functionality and filling them with new meaning. Leaving the exhibition, the audience was already mentally transported to their furthest corners of the cabinets and imagined what would happen from the rubbish lying around there, if rewired in one way or another. It seems to be as easy as drawing a Black Square, but check before you judge.