Personal exhibition
The PRO ARTE Foundation. St. Petersburg. 2021
Sculpture, video, installation, sound.
«Alesya has prepared an exhibition-shelter - individual works of the project may refer to childhood associations and memories, but their global goal is to create a safe zone. The artist uses recognizable wallpaper ornaments and ceiling lights as readymade to create a space where you can feel protected. Sculptural objects are home interiors turned inside out, taking on a collective image of urban architecture. The streets, where anything can happen and happens, are opposed to the house, and that is why the artist seeks to endow them with the visual, formal qualities of a house and thereby secure or render them harmless. It is of a prime importance that the art work refers to the events that happened in Belarus in 2020. Protests and violent detentions in response inevitably cause a feeling of anxiety for oneself and for the loved ones - the streets of the city that used to seem safe have lost this quality. You can’t feel protected even at home. The shelter created by the artist, opposed to the hostile outside world, carries this antithesis in its essence. The fragile boundaries of this safe territory continually strive to disappear - artificial light merges with the sun, the pattern on the wallpaper is superimposed on the ornament of the shadows cast by the leaves outside the window. At any moment, someone or something can break into this space of protection and thereby destroy it. The house as a shelter is like a shelter in the unconscious, where the analysand hides from anxieties and pain, but this same shelter paradoxically prevents the struggle and overcoming of these anxieties. Alesya endows the public space with the external qualities of the house, wrapping it with patterns of curtains and filling it with warm lamp light. The attempt to hide in this safe environment is a defense mechanism, a reflex that is triggered in response to an external threat and is reminiscent of a child’s reaction who closes his or her eyes to hide from a terrible monster. But can the shelter save us from the approaching disaster?»
Curator Lizaveta Matveeva