1.
Freezing the moment, trying to stay on the surface of
reality. The ice floe is rapidly overturning. It covers the airless space with
fear and all the sounds of life are heard as if through water. These sounds no
longer relate to us, we have no moral right to them. A sense of guilt, regret
and shame, the infant interrogated for his sinfulness. Our ship is slowly
sinking. The old way is coming to an end; a new direction starts from the end
point. The point rotates like the needle of a lost compass. Your head spins too,
and before your eyes there is only a blurred fog of uncertainty and the incessant
nausea of horror.
2.
The artwork ‘Ice’ includes a two-channel video with a
recorded video game playthrough and a live broadcast, where the flat image can
be controlled using a gamepad. The shared virtual space is an assembly of
locations created by the character’s consciousness. This is a woman who has
experienced violence. In the space of the House she is a Mermaid. Her game task
is to dive in and out of her ‘trauma house’, called the ‘party house’ in the
game. The space of the House is filled with fragmentary video sensations, disconnected
texts and sounds. The viewer is able to follow the Mermaid. Her once-private
inner space becomes a public memorial to the path to liberation, an abandoned
shell found years later on the shore.
3.
Evgenia Panina’s installation ‘Ice’ draws from the literary
basis of the Slipstream genre. Entering into a dialogue with the English writer
Anna Kavan, the artist creates a bridge for the transition from symbolic to
visual poetics. Panina reconstructs the subtle movements of the human psyche
during significant changes. The concept of the exhibition installation allows
you to see two tracks of the moment separated in time: the current simultaneous
track performed by the audience and the first, initial track performed by the
true player (the off-screen player). In this situation the viewer can only see
the path, the path travelled, filled with other people’s memories and someone
else’s self-awareness. This is an important moment, a simulator with traces of
use, still retaining the warmth of a creature that has moved on into the next
training sessions. Evgenia’s work consists of three levels and two hypostases
(a human and a werewolf-mermaid), and generally follows a concept that can be
designated as ‘surfacing after submersion’. Hope after waking up, the morning
after a hard night, gaining consciousness after a serious operation – these
after-feelings arise in the process of the game-installation ‘Ice’.