'Sashas', Group Show Curated by Marija Orlova at Garage Studios, Moscow

The exhibition project of three contemporary artists emerged from the common experience of the residence in the Garage Studios (by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art). Past several months the artists spent in the Studios, outside of which the perspectives, like the future in general, were seen as blurred, and thoughts about perspectives and the future induced anxiety. The residence occurred to be a kind of "non-place" according to Marc Auger - a liminal space, a transition zone with standardized architectural solutions and interiors, creating special conditions for artistic practice and productive interactions. Sasha Lemish, Sasha Yakutina and Sasha Yazov - artists, friends, colleagues, like-minded people, soulmates. What distinguishes them from other residents is their deviation from conventional artistic methods, such as text-centricity, conceptuality - everything that is encouraged by the organizers of the residence. This exhibition is an intuitive self-study, an analysis of the system of relations through an appeal to the practices of everyday interactions and the processing of each other's artistic languages.

 

All three Sashas are artists with different backgrounds. They are at different stages of their artistic careers, they belong to different age groups, come from different regions of Russia, etc. These formal characteristics largely determine the difference in the artists’ worldviews. Each of them is immersed in a unique information and social bubble, similar to a personalized news feed formed by algorithms. However, these "bubbles" are filled with very similar components. The artists are interested in Internet aesthetics, they work with nostalgia, mental experience and shifts in the context of Internet cultures and social networks. Internet subcultureness turns out to be a common feature of the three authors, as well as a high sensitivity to visual content and emerging trends on the web.

 

Sashas are linked by subtle bonds and forces that form a special social field. They cross over each other at the points of similar professional identities, feelings of solidarity, friendship, love, support, as well as they meet in a cluster of more volatile and ephemeral energies from the area of ​​personal preferences and values, which artists call similar personal energy vibrations (“vibe”). It is the ghostly and elusive nature of these energy vibrations that becomes the central subject of the research and, at the same time, the manifestation of the three artists’ relationship. Thus, the ghost serves as a metaphor, on the one hand, of an exclusive connection, and on the other, a certain collective image of a contemporary artist familiar to everyone, endowed with the features of all Sashas. The ghost lives in the interiors of the Studios, it can be found right around the corner. In the new artists’ works there is a certain continuity of artistic methods, which also elaborates a collective image. The works illustrate fragments of everyday life and situations of interaction in which the system of interpersonal relations was contracting and unfolding itself.

the sasha next door

— Marija Orlova