You Are Not The Only One Cursed With Knowledge,

Aleksei Taruts’s personal exhibition is created specifically for the Gothic Hall of the Museum of Applied Arts of Stieglitz State Academy. The performative installation represents the situation of “two-worldness” where the tower prisons, by coincidence, serve as denotations of today’s escalation of social distancing. They embody and thus isolate from each other the main units of meaning of the exhibition, two sheets of graphics made by a student of the Stieglitz Academy. These drawings are portraits of Aleksei Taruts painted by memory (the model posed for 1 minute) that demonstrate the skill of the author as a technological medium, an organic equivalent of a neural network which can reproduce or complete the image of a human face.

The separatedness of the portraits and the consequent impossibility to verify the images activate the dopplegänger mode when things are very similar but never the same, as they imply the impossibility of simultaneous existence. Entering one of the twin-towers, the visitor is prevented from seeing the whole picture but still takes it into account automatically launching memory operations. Both the place recognition and the role play give access to the inner logic of what is happening and therefore, is sealed by a 'subspace' stamp with a curator’s hair on the rear doors.    

Multiple conventiones enchant the space and charge every event with performative value. Everything here has the power of an irreversible gesture: the composition, the way of exhibiting, the way of reception. Aleksei Taruts motivates the viewer to enact his own method of arranging an exhibition — the apophenia of the present that leaves you no other choice but to gather all the existing fantastic facts into a coherent knowledge.

Text by Boris Klyushnikov for the exhibition

Publication