BETWEEN THE SOFA AND THE TV

All the projects presented here can be viewed as independent series, works and artistic investigations. At the same time, they exist as fragments of a single space that has gradually taken shape in my practice since the late 2000s.

I call it the In-Between space.

Its simplest model is the few metres of an ordinary room between a sofa and a television.

A hypothetical person named Ivan Ivanov lives here. His name deliberately tells us nothing about him. He has no defined biography; he is both specific and anonymous, someone almost anyone could stand in for.

Outwardly, his situation is utterly ordinary: an apartment, a prefabricated housing block, a television, a window, objects on the walls, a courtyard, the route to the shop. Yet this room is also the observation cabin of a vast system moving through space and time. The building stands on Earth; Earth races through the cosmos; Ivan remains on his sofa while continuously travelling through the Universe.

The human anthill becomes a spaceship, and human consciousness becomes an instrument of observation.

Through the window, Ivan sees the city, industrial outskirts, wastelands, shelterbelts, power networks and Sources of Visual Pleasure. These spaces appear in cheLOVEinik, Drifts, IVN and other explorations of the urban periphery.

In front of him is the television: a second portal. Within it appear Flame Mandala of a Tube TV, Abstractionism of a Tube TV, Television Test Charts, Screen Interference and TV Dreams. The television signal ceases to be a means of transmitting ready-made information and becomes an environment in its own right: it makes mistakes, breaks down, and creates its own images, religions, masks and unknown channels of communication.

Masks of the Gods look at Ivan from the walls. The objects in his room gradually acquire their own mythology.

When Ivan falls asleep, the space does not disappear; it continues to expand. This is how Bardo emerges: an intermediate territory between reality and dreams, life and memory, everyday existence and catastrophe. Other characters, rituals and landscapes appear there. Bardo Sound Travellers can be heard as the music of this space, sometimes external, sometimes sounding only inside the observer’s head.

But the longer Ivan looks, the less obvious it becomes what is reality and what is the result of perception.

This gives rise to the Astigmatism Research Institute: an artistic research institute attempting to study the unstable structure of the surrounding world. Expeditions, drifts, instructions, archives, laboratories and instruments become ways of testing what has been seen. Fluxus Camera turns photography into a ritual of interaction with a place; the IVN system searches for anomalous points of visual experience; the Buratino chrono-camera attempts to register not only space, but the passage of time.

Within this system, photography, video, music, objects, texts, walks, scientific reports and a fictional institution are not separate genres. They are different ways of investigating the same reality.

Some works can be imagined as pictures on the walls of Ivan Ivanov’s room. Others are programmes on his television. Still others are views from the window, memories, dreams, instrument readings or expedition documents.

What you see here is therefore not a chronological catalogue of separate artistic projects.

These are fragments of a single, gradually expanding world.

The world of a person who remains almost motionless between the sofa and the TV while travelling through the city, memory, dreams, time and outer space.

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Systems for Overcoming Infinity

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SCREEN · WINDOW · DREAM · INSTRUMENT · IN-BETWEEN SPACE