Angle of Incline

Igor Samolet came to the fore in the late 2010s, when he offered a new approach to project photography, basing his multi‑part installations on screenshots of messages in messenger apps and on social networks. Samolet considers these traces of human communication or reactions to the world a basic unit of personal and collective memory. In his projects of the past eighteen months, the artist has begun to reconsider his method, introducing into his practice various objects, documentary photography, and texts by invited curator friends.

The installation Angle of Incline, shown at XL Gallery in spring 2024, reflects this stage in his search for a new voice. The screenshots became memories, dark silhouettes‑like books or faded photos‑in the counter‑light of fabric pockets. The artist appeared in the video, where his condition and intention were revealed not through words (a message in online correspondence) but through actions: resisting the pressure of water strong enough to knock him down and defending himself with a deformed canvas “until he found a position that balanced his effort and the opposing pressure. This balance was the perfect ‘angle of incline’.” However, it was unstable, as the tilt angle (in geodesic terms) is always described in percentage rather than exact values since it is dependent on the original horizontal and vertical coordinates. That is why the expressive video and the minimal curtain with pockets, which might lead the viewer to reflect on geometric abstraction or poetic refrains, are complemented by a shabby box in which the artist sent the work to a curator friend. It is evidence of the horizontal connections that, today more than ever, are essential for our stability.