“A Quarter to Twelve”, shadow kinetic installation, 2018
Collection of the M HKA Museum, Antwerp, Belgium
Graphics on transparent tapes projected on three walls with the help of light bulbs creates shadow theater of moving images: a series of figures, mechanisms, animals. This multitude is constantly in motion, the procession circles to the beat along with the social rhythm, with the rhythm of history, the "music of the revolution", which is heard as whispering in the echoes of Alexander Blok's poem "Twelve". The figures are layered on top of each other, flow into one another, thus forming a common ornament inscribed in life, and consisting of images and actions influenced by social anxiety. Installation "Quarter to twelve" tells us about the feeling of collective expectation, about a permanent cycle of change: the transition from the post-industrial society to a global network.
Installation view, M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium, 2020-2021
Photo credits: courtesy of M HKA Museum
Installation view, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2019
Photo credits: courtesy of Moscow Museum of Modern Art
Installation view, XL Gallery, Moscow, 2018
Photo credits: Alexander Anufriev
“A Quarter to Twelve”, marker on canvas, dimensions variable, 2018-2019
Private collection
“Quarter to Twelve”, sketches, marker, paper, variable dimensions, 2018
Courtesy of the artist
Katya Muromtseva. A Quarter to Twelve
Valery Ledenev in conversation with Katya Muromtseva in the run-up to the installation’s first display, which first took place at the XL Gallery in Moscow in 2018
VL: Your installation in the gallery is inhabited by numerous figures. Animals, mechanisms, cars, people, and robots, where do they come from?
KM: The drawings, which were transferred onto transparent tape and then projected onto the walls, consist of interweaving images: people, mechanisms, and animals. Some of them were borrowed from the media; others are from my memories. In a BBC report on a flood in some US city, I noticed a photo of a woman carrying a dog on her shoulders out of the flooded house, as if it were a biblical lamb, and decided to draw it. Once in Kaluga Oblast I saw a herd of cows right at the bus stop — these cows looked as if they were waiting for the bus together with people. Animals in the city in an extraordinary way break the rhythm of everyday life.
VL: In this work there are a lot of human figures, what is their role?
KM: It is important to stress that I am depicting the figure, not the body. Painting deals with the body interpreting it in an intimate, emotional manner. Graphics portrays figures, which act as structural elements of the composition, a multitude of figures forming an ornament of life.
My exhibition “More than Us”, held at the XL Gallery in 2017, featured large-scale watercolors. They also portrayed numerous figures, but figures as signs and imprints on a white background in an airless space. In those works, as in the present ones, there was nothing about individuality. The figures were part of the social rhythm that we all equally share.
Regarding historical reference, for me the so-called “Baltic Way” was an important visual reference. On August 23, 1989, more than two million people in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia joined their hands to form a human “chain” spanning more than six hundred kilometers and connecting Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn. The event was held to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Europe into the “spheres of influence” of the Third Reich and the USSR.
VL: You’ve mentioned the “multitude”, albeit in a different context; it is a key concept in social theory and is defined as an entity that transcends cultural borders and consists of people, rituals and actions, which are constantly changing and have the capacity to quickly self-organize. It seems that many contemporary artists, when working with graphics often depict the multitude. I mean not only your works, but also drawings by Sveta Shuvaeva, David Ter-Oganyan as well as Boris Kashapov's project “Hands Up!” (2015), which portrays hands turned into various directions.
KM: What you’ve just said is partly reflected in the project’s title — “A Quarter to Twelve”. It refers to collective expectation. Not the changes that have already taken place, but anticipation of change. Anticipation of an action or just of a new day that will begin after the clock strikes twelve. In my view, this number itself symbolizes changes. They are happening every day, albeit not through revolution. Today they are less apparent and we are all part of perpetual change. The radical revolution turns into a gradual one; we are moving from a post-industrial society to a network society.
VL: The works from your previous exhibition portrayed the multitude itself, which was nevertheless associatively incorporated into the contemporary context. In your present project, the figures belong to various historical periods and contexts: we see images connected not only with the recent protests, but also with the history of the October Revolution, industrialization, and the Gulag. Why have you turned to history?
KM: An interest in history connects my present and previous exhibitions in the XL gallery (Katya Muromtseva’s exhibitions, which were held at the XL Gallery in 2017 and 2018 — MMOMA) and my video “In This Country” (2017). In this video, history is shown as a myth that moves away from us. It often seems that our lives are just our private stories and the “big” history is made somewhere far away from us. But, in fact, we are all subjects of history. I’ve really enjoyed the project “1917. Free History” — a website designed as a social network of people who participated in the events of 1917 and consisting of their diaries and documents, presented as Facebook posts. What Lenin, Trotsky, and John Reed would post? History not with a capital “H” but with a little “h” that is always changing.
VL: I would like to return to Blok’s poem “The Twelve”, allusions to which are present in your work. It is interesting that the text of the poem and your exhibition are counterpointed. Blok portrays revolutionary Petrograd, describing empty streets almost devoid of people and blizzard raging on them. The poem is focused on “the music of revolution”; Blok called for listening to it “with one’s whole heart, with one’s whole consciousness.” On the contrary, your installation is full of images and actions involved in a social movement.
KM: I was guided by the rhythm and musicality of the Blok’s poem, for the reason that my work is built around images that move and as though make noise. Blok wrote in his diary that while he was working on a poem, he would hear noise, physical noise around him. This is the noise that I wanted to portray as the sound of the time. Not all of my images are distinctly drawn nor they can be immediately recognized as figures. They overlap, flow into each other. It is about the time that is being shaped by us here and now.