“Time Difference”, XL Gallery, Moscow, Russia, 2021
Artforum review by Christianna Bonin: https://www.artforum.com/picks/katya-muromtseva-86051
Photo credits: Ivan Erofeev
“The Train”, video animation, 02:05
“Bicycle”, video animation, 02:16
“The Olympics”, video animation, 03:55
The title of the show is autobiographical: Katya Muromtseva has spent the last year studying online in a different time zone and lives in two chronologies, both mentally and physically. “Time difference” has another meaning still. Like in most of her projects, Muromtseva contrasts three dimensions of homo politicus. There is the dimension of known facts, accessed through an information flow. Based on these facts we make assumptions using the coordinates of our beliefs. Next comes the dimension of defaults, things we know to be true without having to witness them. Finally, there is an action dimension, a dutiful intrusion into the information flow and the everyday, that opens after the surrounding reality begins to be perceived as part of a historical process more than a comfortable event sequence and a choice of reactions. These three dimensions of the political “I” imply various types of imagery. In Muromtseva’s intricately composed works the news headlines and political cartoons are intertwined with myths that have become solid truths with time.
In life (or, in Muromtseva's phrase, «private time») it is hard to consciously discern the start of the countdown of history. A useful feeling that sugnals that start is shame. Shame of deeds, heavy as a hangover. Shame of inaction, flooding the body with anxiety, like an ashtma attack. It is easy to shame someone with a coordinated mix of image and word, using a poster format. But shame itself is very hard to depict. Muromtseva's exhibition circles around this figure of omission. In five videos, spread through the exhibition space according to Russian state laws on individual pickets, anonymous responders tell their stories on the awakening of the historical consciousness. Five stories happen in five locations, five infrastructure points: leisure (a bicycle), public transportation (a train), public volition (voting district), feast (the Olympics) and protest (a coat). After the awakening all these places and behaviors connected to them become turning points. Shame is not mentioned directly in any of the stories, but does play a decisive role in this transformation, from an allusion to Edenic nudity and fall from grace in the story of the coat to second-hand embarrassment in the video on voting.
These personal narratives are framed by monumental wall painting that takes up most of the exhibition's wallspace and six red watercolors, not connected by a common subject. Muromtseva's lines remind of «Deportations» (1940) and «Cheaper than dirt» (1943), series of graphics by Polish artist Wladislaw Strzeminski based on his witnessing of deportation of the local population of eastern Poland by the Soviet troops and transportation of Jews to the Lodz concentration camp. Strzeminski finds a highly original take on depicting horrors of dehumanization, one that art historian Luiza Nader has called «neuro-testimonies». Armed with a spontaneous grip on the workings of cognitive psychology and an “organic”, flowing line, Strzeminski turns a silent witness’ shame into a document that shows the catastrophe almost on a corpuscular level.
Muromsteva's installations can also be seen as «neuro-testimonies» of our age. She presents the political subject as a network with dozens of contradictory statements, depicted with a looping, nodular line. The sequence of these nodes might not make cohesive sense, but is perfectly clear as an experience of being drawn to a myriad of screens that dole out new reasons to be ashamed of the country, the era, the community. Still, the clarity of the line, its’ pronounced thickness gives hope. Muromtseva is not a solemn witness of media saturation. Her work catties a cautious promise of meaning. One day we will break out of the loops and understand why we were ashamed of lush openings in times of war, ideologues of the American South and Eastern European resignation, colonial expansions, museums, the gaze of the victim, the call of the feeling, and much, much more.
Valentin Diaconov