The Indifference of the Heartland

2024 / meditation-exhibition / First shown at the MIRA Centre / Suzdal, later also on view at the Yeltsin Centre Branch in Moscow

Artists: Ekaterina Rozhkova, Maria Pukhova, Anna Slobozhanina, Olga Sergeeva

Lighting design: Raum bureau (Vlad Oblasov, Natasha Frolova).

In 2022 Suzdal acquired the MIRA Centre, a contemporary cultural space whose programme has for a second year running given people a reason to travel to this beautiful town. The main venue — a small museum, exhibition halls, an acoustic studio, a library and a summer stage — has taken up residence on the central street, in a handsomely restored building from the first half of the nineteenth century.

But that is not all: in 2023, in the village of Fomikha, a rural theatre of drama and comedy opened inside an old village house. Yet another venue, also theatrical — "GES on the Nerl" — appeared in the village of Zapolitsy, within the walls of a former hydroelectric station. Its scale makes it possible to host large interdisciplinary projects and festivals, though for now only in summer. Further ahead lies the creation of a museum devoted to Alexei Gastev, one of the ideologues of Proletkult, who was born in Suzdal and served his first exile here.

The MIRA Centre also runs several artist residencies — one in town, another four kilometres away in the village of Kideksha. The residency is designed for one or two people, which means you come here not for company with fellow artists but for solitude and immersion in context — of which there is plenty. Nearby stand the twelfth-century Church of Boris and Gleb, the little Kamenka river, fields, a tiny hamlet — a typical Central Russian landscape. Artists and composers are invited to the residency, and exhibitions are staged at its close.

An extract from Evgeny Naumov's article "An Interested Viewer of an Indifferent Landscape" for ART UZEL:

The curator invited the artists to convey their own sense of the endless expanses of Central Russia: "the boundless rivers and fields, the grey villages and empty churches." Ekaterina Rozhkova gave her own answer to that task.

Images of churches appear in two of her works: the stone tent-roofed belfry with its sound-holes in "Sugarloaf," and the star-studded cupola in the painting of the same name. A kind of allusion to the river of time is offered by a quadriptych depicting the flow of water with a shoal of small fry. These works are austere and melancholy, in the same way as the views of the East European Plain, and they are capable of making the visitor to the exhibition want to linger and take pleasure in the feeling of that very "Russian toska."

Notable is the technique in which Ekaterina works — fine hatching over a primed canvas, a slow, meditative practice which, for all its simplicity, allows her to build convincingly modelled volumes of light and shade. She has been especially successful at conveying the texture of metal in the series of paintings that depict buckets of snow. Graphite, with its matte sheen, is perfectly suited to such ends, and the thin, slightly chaotic lines convincingly imitate the scratches that accrue on an object from long use. Snow is a substance particular to the heartland — covering the ground for half the year: cold, unbroken, unfriendly to the eye. It might seem that fields draped in their white shroud could be the truest embodiment of nature's indifference to man, and of the effort it takes to draw any pleasure from her. But once carried into the house, snow becomes water — the source of life; such is the paradox.

River, 2024. In 4 (four) parts

Series: Indifferent Tenderness
Drawing: canvas, ground, liquid graphite, pencil, ink, tempera

Incidentally, one of the paintings with two buckets of snow became the basis for a limited-edition run of T-shirts produced by the young brand kk (kay kay). They can be bought only at the MIRA Centre or on its website — meant especially for those who want to acquire an affordable art object for their modest collection. For the image of a rough metal bucket that holds within it snow — cold, yes, but soft and defenceless — can be read as a metaphor for the unity of body and soul. The iron will one day serve out its earthly term and be sent to rot on a scrapheap, whereas the water will abide forever in one form or another, warming the winter crops with a velvet blanket, or filling them with strength during a summer downpour.

Rozhkova finds this same synergy of the earthly and the eternal in a more down-to-earth image as well — the series Starry Evening in a Cowshed. A rough, standard-issue building, standing in the middle of an empty field in the heartland, fills up with a warm, bright light. Inside live good-natured, docile animals who give people milk, butter and cheese. Their existence may not be filled with impressions, but the enduring cows stoically bear the monotony of the everyday. So it is with people. However unappealing our own image may be, however filled with dullness our own days, each of us is unique in his own way, and each of us brings something useful to the place he stands in. Perhaps we, too, would do well to learn from these unhurried creatures, gazing dispassionately at their dull landscapes with their large eyes.

In the work Fog, the dense thickets of wild grasses, again rendered with strict pencil hatching, look distinctly unfriendly. From the pale patch of fog wafts a chill damp. Just as uncomfortable to look at are the two landscapes with white dogs: one of them howls with abandon, its head thrown back, becoming the point at which the expression breaks out. The other dog simply looks at the viewer — not exactly aggressively, but without much interest either, like the very embodiment of indifference.

A well-worn aphorism of Friedrich Nietzsche has it that "when you stare long into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you." Of course, the boundless monotonous landscapes of the heartland are not quite an abyss, and they are wholly uninterested in the hypnotised viewer. Neither the snow-covered field nor the wall of the forest is going to look at you. But are they really so different from any other space? Any interest in the views of nature is brought to it by man, but only the artist is capable of showing sympathy for the natural indifference of the universe — of showing sympathy for this non-emotion and giving it form in his work. So that any visitor to the exhibition might, in turn, take pleasure in a disinterested act of looking.

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