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The past is a painful point; this is the zone of trauma and intimacy. The past is at the same time a wound, a refuge, and a sign of the irrevocability of time – something similar to narcotic substance. The past is something that has an infinite relation to us. The past can be compared to the body, sexuality, and political position. The past of a forced emigrant is a foggy road leading to a transgressive act of breaking up with this very past. Where does the past become the point of no return? The moment of the decision to leave the homeland? The moment of crossing the border? This spectrum of non-obvious and problematic issues certainly greatly worries Vika Malysheva, a contemporary artist who explores the artefacts of human existence and consciousness which may fill the gap between the past at homeland and the future overseas.
The Artist as a Researcher
Vika Malysheva explores the past meticulously and honestly, as if through the prism of several paradigms. As an apophatic theologian, she tries to define what the past is not. The past is not… the present? The past is not… the future? The past is this, not a memory? The past eludes Vika endlessly, but it happens within the framework of her artistic strategy, within the framework of a controlled experiment. As a person of the post-conceptual era, Vika is also looking for traces of the past beyond the logocentric model of the world. According to Vika Malysheva, the past is easier to identify through smells, tactile sensations, sounds, and visual images. As a person with an active political and civic position, Vika approaches the concept of the past through the prism of various models of social criticism. Is the past a social construct? What is the difference between an individual and collective past? As a contemporary artist, Vika Malysheva, as part of her art practice, creates spaces for the actualization, paradoxification, and intensification of these topics and issues.
“This is Mine” Exhibition
The most striking example of the implementation of her unique art concept is the exhibition titled “This is Mine”, which worked with great success in Georgia, Armenia, and Turkey in the spring of 2023. The exhibition is a complex structure for documenting, presenting, understanding, and bridging the gap between the past and present waves of forced emigration from Russia caused by the monstrous war of Putin’s regime against independent Ukraine.
Vika Malysheva creates a mobile archive of emigrants’ belongings, but this array (things, data, analysis, dreams) works simultaneously as an archive and as a non-archive. The function of the archive is to fix the status quo, the moment, and the collective experience. The function of the non-archive is a subtle and barely perceptible undermining of confidence in the forms of witnessing, rehabilitation of shock, and utterance about the most stressful mental experiences. Vika shows reality in its entirety, in all its polar manifestations, monstrous and happy, full of hope and despair. But at the same time, Vika denies the seriousness of reality.
The exhibition of Vika Malysheva is not only the traces and consequences of preparing for the ultimate experience but also the theatricalization and performance overcoming of the horror of the real. Emigrants’ belongings can be stupid, ridiculous, and meaningless; however, they perform important psychotherapeutic and magical functions. Indeed, the exhibits exist somewhere between collective magic and collective care.
Methods of Liberation
Vika is an artist who works with reality and overcomes it. She offers methods of liberation as well as relieving the tension from the horror of reality. However, she does not offer to plunge headlong into the sweet honey of good old escapism; she offers survival strategies. “This is mine” exhibition can be called a sharp surgical scalpel and a soft conspiracy at the same time. This is an amazing experience. I strongly recommend you to survive this.