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The ability to decipher the seen emerges gradually, with the pathway to knowledge paved with hurdles of visual codes. But the fragments of numbers, specific names, and dates stimulate our curiosity, gently prompting us towards voyeurism.
Connections are disclosed through accumulated lines of thread. We observe the filigree materials used hand in hand with gradual dissolution of the borderline between private and public. Darja Shatalova's Zu Gast exhibition project, minimalistic in expressions but rich in content, embodies information collected by the artist throughout the past five years.
Inspired by a visitors’ book from Dieter Roth Foundation in Hamburg, Shatalova has started to record all personal encounters at different locations: her flat, artistic residencies, and vacations abroad. Her personalized version of a visitors’ book has become a sort of a diary reflecting all her social interactions, whether with close friends, family members, co-workers, or people she only met once. What began as an innocent experiment transformed with the onset of pandemics into a particular control mechanism, becoming a memento of prior unlimited free movement and getting together.
Shatalova’s analogue approach to collecting information – through hand-made notes on loose sheets of paper and in notebooks – helps her to create her own systems and categories or discover new connections. Although she later digitalizes them to achieve greater flexibility, it is the imprint and her original artistic gesture, along with colourful variations and abstract-looking graphical symbols and codes, that are attractive by their organic form, while contrasting with the coldness of digital output.
She covers, collages, and deconstructs scanned personal notes, eventually transferring them to gallery walls as monumental prints. Naturally, they lose their functionality and comprehensibility, transformed into expressive, abstract background drawings for a central, imaginative spatial map connecting people with places. Although we cannot know the identity of persons and whereabouts of the locations, Shatalova assigns a vicarious colour to each individual that corresponds with a specific coloured cord, running imaginarily from the core of the installation into levitating aluminium profiles representing times and places of meetings.
She leaves these dynamic spatial compositions to open explorations and interpretations by viewers. Shatalova forms borderline positions – be it through a contrasting character of materials used, an ambiguous interface between the personal and private, or a fluid line between conscious control and formal automatism – exploring relatively banal though rather intimate information made available to us.
Exhibition Title: Zu Gast
Location Name: Bildraum 07
Instagram Account: https://www.instagram.com/bildrecht_bildraum/
Opening Date: 17.01.2023
Closing Date: 16.02.2023
Artist name: Darja Shatalova Image Credit: Darja Shatalova
