NEGATIVE SPACE
(2020) INSTALLATION (PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO, SCULPTURE)
In her multilayered piece, Ksenia Yurkova is creating a total installation playing with a concept of negative space and researching its various hypostases. The Negative Space is a critical meditation on polarization processes arising in politics, society, portraiture of identities and ideologies. It is revolving around two concepts: the first one is taken from visual arts and points to space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space is the one that allows the subject to be rendered, as well as the negative space itself, can be or is a subject equal to the former.
The second meaning is taken from profound observations of oriental philosophical traditions: the Japanese and Korean term mu or Chinese mua or ma: can simultaneously mean "nothingness" as well as pure human awareness, before experience or knowledge. And at the same time: Impossible; lacking reason or cause. This paradoxical intertwining is widely used by zen Buddhist koans to explain the multiple nature of phenomena.
Questioning the very principle of any dichotomy, Yurkova tries to build a self-referencing system of spaces, placing them in an architectural structure inspired by tokonoma – where 'ma' means "space" or "room" - a recessed space in a Japanese-style reception room, in which items for artistic appreciation are displayed and where the very philosophy of observation makes emptiness equally indispensable.
To achieve this alienated and distorted environment of alternative understanding, of pure bodily perception the central 3-channel video-work is mixing private, intimate material with found footage, juxtaposing unrelated narratives, tailoring them together by using unobvious formal and metaphoric elusive bonds. This cross-influence has the power to make the material simultaneously grotesque and disturbing. Its theme, at first glance, can be comprehended as an accentuation of the pronouncedly inverted relations. Whose liminality is revealed through a non-distinction of a real and unreal beholder.
But more important is the question put in between of the disjoin screens: whether these visuals can operate as an enclosed structure, or it has a slit for a peeping gaze: through an interruption, an interval, a promise. The whole fabric of the work is based on different counterpoints, extended to the space of the installation. Here, the sculpture made of acryl, patron sleeves, and hygiene tampons, are playing with the literal perusal of the concept whereas the collages combining photography, typography, and poetry – perform metaphoric extension.
