Photos of the glasses of an empty KUNSTvitrina gallery display windows were shot with the analog medium-format camera. Images in the form of 17 photographs were printed on the large-format pressure-sensitive film and pasted inside the glasses of the display window located inside the exhibition space. A viewer had a chance to see the artwork only being outside, from the street, where his natural reflection was added to the image, so the glasses themselves became a part of the artwork.

According to the theory of recognition of a visible object we are not able to see an object without any experience of recognition and there appears the so called blind area.  Recognition process will work only  if any object is already known to a viewer from the past. In case our gestalt does not work out, perception passes from the recognition mode to the affective perspective. Alfred Gell in his work “Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory ”(1998) argues that primitive art cannot be viewed through the prism of creating meanings as it is more oriented towards creating an affect. We may be the heirs to this way of perceiving art and it is the reason of the success of everything new, not existing earlier and therefore not seen before. Perception always aims at creating a concept. Gestalt becomes formed as soon as the concept is created, and what was seen passes into the field of knowledge.

Does a thing exist before it is revealed to us, before it becomes a concept and gets a name? Probably for this it is necessary to isolate it from a number of phenomena. By putting a photographic image in the place of the object itself, I form a microtrauma, enter a viewer into a state of affect, depriving of an opportunity to automatically relate the object to the past. By analogy with the formula of Ferdinand de Saussure - S / s - glass in this work is the dividing line between S (Signifier (or “sound-image”)) and s (signified (or "Concept")). This feature, like the water surface, cannot be separated from both adjoining areas, actually it is their meeting point, the unification of the Signifier and the signified. If we transfer this logic to the visual field of work, then we mean the real (the image object) and the imaginary (photographs). In psychoanalysis the Real cannot be catched, it always escapes. We can only experience it as the Imaginary (area of gestaltic images) or as the Symbolic (area of language, or image, as in our situation). Looking at the artwork from the outside, a viewer becomes included in the image himself through reflection in it. This system of reflections, flecks, reality and image creates a situation in which the real and the imaginary coexist simultaneously in the same projection plane, making it possible to create a previously non-existent visual experience.

Getting into public space, this experience becomes available not only to visitors of the galleries, but also to anyone who has encountered it, taking the elitism of the experience itself beyond the limits of exhibition space.

Location: Communal Library, St Petersburg, RU

Curator: Timur Musaev-Kagan