A SNAIL OF TIME OR HOW ONE UNHAPPY EVENING TURNED INTO A WHOLE LIFE...

26 March — 14 April
VLADEY
Neglinnaya, 14с1А, entrance №4
11:00—22:00, without days off

Today's sense of the present has shrunk, collapsed onto itself, twisted into a snail's spiral. The snail of time crawls on the liver, gently whispering about death, the death of chronology... This idea of linearity, of time's orderliness as a law that brings order and [really?!] justice into the infinitely expanding chaos.

The snail heralds the arrival of the traveler, speaks of life on an endless journey. She is a spaceship, hovering in the vacuum of time breaking, where past and future are glued together in a devious spiral. Inside her, everything is jumbled, beginning to mutate and proliferate, giving birth to strange images. They are happy to inhabit a curvilinear space that likes to turn everything upside down.

This project is a kind of collage of scraps of travelers' diaries, sucked into the time vortex, lost in the Atlantic Ocean of tears. For example, the artist Bas Jan Ader left the shores of California in 1975 and set sail forever, making the journey, the exodus, the disappearance or the ever-present elusiveness the main medium of his major work. Three years later in Brazil, Chico Bourque would write the song Calice [*bowl, cup*], which sounded and was read only as Cale-se [*silence, shut up*]. This composition became a kind of prayer, a mantra of crawling away from censorship, the violence of power and populist nationalism. In the works of Alexander Tsikarishvili and Ivan Chemakin, the image of the boat as a state of passage without a definite beginning and end connects these two stories, reminding us once again of the intricacies of the spiral of time.

In history, everything changes and everything repeats itself. Looking forward, we can see the distant past, the ghosts of archaic creatures and medieval castles. The fracture of time has stirred everything up. An airman rolls a car tire across the Babylonian ziggurat.

But the boat is also architecture, the architecture of a tiny, fragile interior amidst the waves of an ocean filled with chthonic monsters. So too is the snail an architecture directed inward to itself, the only shelter available today. The snail knows full well that nothing is more permanent than travelling time. The belief in real estate/integrity is finally shattered. The creations of successful architects (in the broadest sense) are no stronger than a house of cards, as they stand on the quicksand of bloated capital and political interests of those in power. 

The only architecture possible today is a displaced, dissolving, imaginary form made of a thin immaterial film between the outside and the inside. It can take any form, without limiting itself to the end: the architecture of signs; the architecture of a child's constructor; the architecture of an imaginary shelter; the construction of clothes as the only available "home", made of children's photographs, T-shirt prints, and banners that have long lost their meaning; the architecture of a child's tent made of scraps of memories; the shelter of a quilt sewn from dreams, future and past. It is an architecture of elusion and change. It is malleable, mobile, elusive. The snail is doomed to reinvent its shelter every day.

So, the snail is an eternal traveler, doomed to carry its luggage, which cannot be thrown off. If it is impossible to get rid of the baggage, it is the snail's task to realize it, to find a symbolic form of representation for it. Thus, the painstakingly displaced creepy post-Soviet baggage takes a variety of forms, documenting the ongoing process of its collective experience and survival. These include giant, human-sized orthopedic Ballet Machines, which seem to have emerged from Dr Schreber's childhood nightmares, fixing the immobile model in an "ideal" exemplary ballet pose. And Samuil Marshak's wooden children's construction set painted with bureaucratic paint, which folds up with the crushing architectons of the adult present. And the monstrous face of everyday life, which literally bursts out of you, concealing all the roots of violence, in Kirill Savelyev's photographs.

One evening can fall into hundreds of shards of different times and worlds, different paths, which, moving away from each other, seek forms for new connections and foundations for future languages. A snail cannot drop its baggage, but reassembles it into a new spiral at each stage of the journey, moving forward.

Text by curator Lisa Tsikarishvili. V