The constant presence of background anxiety that there is nothing authentic left in our world acts as a stimulus for artists to take action. I am inclined to attribute these processes to the fourth wave of post romanticism explorations. The characteristic features of this worldview are: the therapeutic treatment of victims, the search for and rescue of what has been lost, the presence of trauma, nostalgic moods, transformation and multi-layeredness in the broadest, and at times lyrical or ethical range, etc.

The group collaboration project “Unforeseen Consequences” brought together artists from the FUTURO and ADH Gallery: Daniil Antropov, Katerina Sadovsky and Lilia Li-Mi-Yan with works by Hermione Allsopp. They offer us three autonomous artistic paradigms, in which similar features can be identified. After all, as a result of the author’s interaction, a meta-like statement is formed about the last remnants of humanity, or in other words, what we have left of humanity today. In the works of all artists, we can note the proliferation and layering of the abstract onto the concrete. It is as if multi-layeredness is the basis of their aesthetic mentality. I would venture to suggest that their desire is similar to the quest to find something more and to make this hidden reality manifest itself in a form accessible to the senses.

Sculptor Hermione Allsopp carries out her artistic practice from the perspective of comprehensive reflection. By positioning herself and her art in opposition, on the opposite side of the spectrum from the universal, jubilant representation of boundless possibilities and happiness, she thereby excludes herself from the zone of cultural production of economically relevant goods.

Working with found, non-artistic materials, Allsopp negates the concept of the Beautiful. Questioning the art object in culture and society, she shifts her focus from beautification to the interpretation of the experience of everyday human realism. Everyday objects, once embodying the comfort of some home and the fullness of being, surviving fragments of someone’s social and everyday identity, take on the plasticity of sculpture in her work. Hermione Allsopp works with the heart-wrenching concept of the present and introduces the problem of the stratification of reality into her field of research. Found objects belonging to people, the stories behind the lives they represent, serve as a symbol of the transformation of trauma into a new stage – the creation of a work of art based on the subtle experience of the transition of life after death. As an author, she seems to act in two roles: creator and guardian.

New media artists Katerina Sadovsky and Lilia Li-Mi-Yan embody the image of the future in many of their projects. Before us unfolds a picture of a biologically advanced civilisation, where life and death already represent two poles of the same process. The artists take a critical position, diagnosing the concept of the present, which they explore through the prism of post-human aesthetics. They capture the profound sociocultural shift that has taken place in the understanding of the human body, our unchanging “armour” of the soul. Analysing its current position in the world, its liberation, fetishisation and potential immortality, Katerina Sadovsky and Lilia Li-Mi-Yan conclude that bodily transformation today is dictated and conditioned by factors of survival in a technologically updated world. The artists bring to the fore the pressing issues of our time: alarmist predictions, anxious expectations and questions of cultural adaptation, inevitable readiness to ecological catastrophe and, to generalise, the collapse of the entire human system of worldview.

Transhuman perspectives and changes, where humanity enthusiastically equates itself and its unprecedented bright future with techno-optimistic predictions, cause distrust among artists. Seeing how fundamental ethical and social structures—love, death, family, personal immediacy—are collapsing and turn into mountains of historical rubbish, the artists feel alarmed. A world deprived of humanity cannot avoid a tragic ending.

The political dimension of their project is also noteworthy. The artists point out a profound paradox of modernity: the gap between dynamic development of technology and the stagnation of social relations. “Security Control” is the dramatic collapse of our time, which K. Sadovsky and L. Lee-Mi-Yan brilliantly but disturbingly manifest, where crossing forbidden zones guarantees falling into a trap.

Daniil Antropov belongs to a new generation of artists who, in my opinion, are distancing themselves from the dominant position of the creator and create their art by surrendering to a symbiotic flow or dialogue. I would correlate these authorial practices with certain settings of sensitivity registers as one of the important parts of contemporary artistic strategy. Daniil Antropov’s careful and trusting relationship with clay, thanks to their interaction and interpenetration, takes the metaphysics of the material (in its transition from a soft to a solid state) to a new level.

Of course, it cannot be said that ceramics acts as a full-fledged co-author; in any case, the conceptual “controlling stake” remains in the hands of the artist. However, it is endowed with the right to edit the art object in the process of creation. At the same time, Antropov draws on psycho-geographical experiences, supplementing his sculptural constructions with found junk, which undergoes analytical and sensual processing and is then poeticised by the artist, acquiring a new artistic status.

As if following the maxim “I am in everything, and everything is in me,” the artist achieves universal unity in his works: form, movement of plastic masses, colour, play, and expressive and convincing interaction of layers. The result is a phenomenon of living, multi-layered, complex pictorial sculpture, within which one image is inside another image, and then another, and so in fact, ad infinitum.

It would be a stretch, perhaps, to count D. Antropov among the adherents of post-humanist discourse. However, one cannot fail to note a certain permissible animation of the material. That irrepressible, accepted spontaneity and “will” when he, as the author, gives the material the right to “express an opinion,” and thus to make mistakes. The process of sculpting layers becomes a joint act of creating a new equally existent in reality tiny cosmos.

Three pictures of the world, where artistic layers intertwine somewhere with the symbolic dimension of history, somewhere with the extra-historical and utopian, but all of them reveal to us universal human values, lead us to something new – the discovery of the integrity of phenomena and processes, both in art and in the surrounding world. The unforeseen consequences can be very different, but today artists demonstrate direct proof of their authenticity. 

Text by Svetlana Taylor, curator