Regina Gallery presents “Love these fiery moments”, personal exhibition of the Russian artist Tanya Akhmetgalieva. This exhibition marks the beginning of our collaboration with this artist. New project was inspired by her own video-installation “Fragile Island” (2015) and fairy-tales by Hans Christian Andersen.
“Love these fiery moments!” – that sounds like an appeal. Visitors get to the ephemeral greenery where abundant shining and rainbow plays create the atmosphere of excessive, charming “hyper-fairyness”. This reminds of “The Garden of Forgetting” from “Snow Queen”: Gerda wanders among magic flowers, having forgotten, where she was going and why. This Eden is artificial. Its sparkling surface is lusty, but false-fronted. It is just a product of our aspiration to chimeras, to dreams divorced from reality with its persistent problems.
The exhibition presents textile works which are the visiting cart of Tanya Akhmetgalieva, objects and video-installations. In her embroidered panels, strings have great symbolic sense – this is an allegory of complex relations between objects, people, worlds, and the embroidery itself is a kind of drawing technique for the artist. Collages, sewed together from sparkling cloth of various textures, videos filmed through prisms – everything is flowing and shining, like a kaleidoscope. Accompanying sound for the video was specially created by famous psychoanalytic and philosopher Viktor Mazin; at the exhibition it supplies, in words of Akhmetgalieva, “the sinking sense of fragility”.
Every work of the exhibition is named after a phrase. It seems as though visitors hear fragments of someone’s dialogues, walking through this garden where flowers tells their stories.
Video-installations were made in Paris in 2016 at Cité International des Arts foundation, with the support of French Institute in Saint-Petersburg.