Fragment Gallery is proud to present Transverse Hyperspace, the debut solo exhibition of Sofya Skidan, curated by Alexander Burenkov. A recent graduate of Moscow’s Rodchenko School of Multimedia and Photography as well as a professional yoga instructor, the artist works with a specific selection of materials, techniques and subjects to forge a relationship between Eastern spiritual practices and modern critical theory. Tapping into the complexities of postmodernity, Skidan raises questions around updated understandings of identity within today’s technogenic culture, as well as the crisis of nature and the fast-approaching environmental tipping point in the age of the anthropocene — conditions that theorist McKenzie Wark has called a “metabolic rift”, to borrow a coinage from John Bellamy Foster.
The starting point for the new works presented within the exhibition was the artist’s reflections on how the ways of thinking, the work of memory, and the perception of temporality, the body and identity have changed in the era of circulation and the continuous production of information. Inspired by the ideas of Donna Haraway, Eugene Thacker, Timothy Morton and Rosi Braidotti, Skidan attempts to set up a laboratory study of a new kind of physicality that seeks to erase gender boundaries and the alienation of the virtual body from its physical carrier. The artist harnesses representations of sexuality as a means of eradicating identity and the projection of a unified structural memory. The artist builds her video works through the medium of live broadcasts and “stories.” This tactic constantly reinscribes her within the digital landscape of the social network Instagram, thus alienating her from her physical body and generating a new image of sexuality, while at the same time uncovering the potential for interaction between several body-avatars, freed from a defined gender identity and engaged in new processes of self-knowledge.
Organized as the dimly-lit transit space of a laboratory, the exhibition restages selected aspects of the transitional state of culture on the way to the dystopian world of the future (“the world without us”), with the help of recovered artifact-ruins and landmarks that could be used as triggers for the recovery mechanisms of memory. Skidan pieces together the landscape of this forthcoming world from the scraps of information left behind after unknown events, supplemented by video installations and objects. In doing so, she offers new strategies for orientation in space, the constant reinscription of one’s self within the digital landscape and the various means of sensory perception, with the help of olfactory installations (drawing on aroma as a potent catalyst for personal memories), haptic and photosculpture, immersive video environments, and a suit designed as the uniform of the stalkers who will inhabit the earth in its near post-human future. One of the key works of the exhibition — a series of photosculptures bearing distorted images of natural landscapes — is offered up like the ruins of the digital environment, the speculative memories of the artificial intelligence of the future recalling the “lost paradise” of the nature of the past.
The exhibition will be accompanied by collective yoga sessions, combined with lectures on dark ecology and posthumanism, and performances by guest lecturers and artists, in keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the creative and curatorial approaches. The class schedule will be announced separately.
Curator: Alexander Burenkov
Exhibition dates: July 19, 2018 – August 20, 2018
Address: Bolshoy Kozikhinskiy Pereulok, 30
Opening and press-show: July, 18 19:00
