Alexandra Sukhareva Christa, Argiris, Eudora
The three works by Alexandra Sukhareva in the exhibition “We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams” were made at various times and in various circumstances and have been brought together in the trilogy Christa, Argiris, Eudora. This triad of names has no known topographic or mythological connections. It references Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd (Persian for “the land of nowhere”), a landscape of the imagination in the discourse of Henry Corbin, the French philosopher and researcher into Islamic Gnosticism. In the paper “Mundus Imaginalis,” Corbin describes a world located between the perceptible and the sensible, a “fully objective and real world with equivalents for everything existing in the sensible world without being perceptible by the senses.”
Sukhareva’s works define and guarantee this Corbinesque reality of cognitive experience. They are not artifacts, nor are they traces of acquired experience or free interpretations of “visions.” They are keys. The first work the visitor sees in the exhibition is a universal communicator, a specially developed mechanism designed to be used by two people simultaneously. Each visitor is asked to place their arms in the special sleeves, which are attached to a lever. Underneath the lever is a circular panel holding a sheet of paper. Participants are deprived of their usual optical regulator and, placing their trust in the motor image—a distinctive echo of an idea within the body— create “seismograms” of their mutual knowledge.
Inside the communicator the parts are painted in various colors, which are not random. Here, color is a proto-element, the origin of painting and, more broadly, of artistic practice as a whole. The different colors enter into specific power relationships with each other (while remaining hidden from the people working with the communicator). Nor is it accidental that the process of work with the communicator is collective. For Sukhareva it is important to create a new type of communication, which opens out beyond the boundaries of social interaction. As she puts it, “to fantasize is to smash the conventions of the present’s imaginative stagnation.”
This different communicative basis can be seen in another work by Sukhareva, which takes the form of a space for a collective “hypnotic séance.” As with the communicator, participants cannot see what is happening around them: they are blindfolded. A theme, moderated by the voice of the artist, passes from person to person. In a vaguely trance-like state, participants have the sensation of a different kind of connection.
Another work exists in a flickering regime. It involves “sleep séances” within the exhibition. According to some theories, the location and circumstances of sleep can influence dream production, with the image-bearing structure of dreaming affected by that which surrounds the sleeper. In this context, the exhibition “We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams” becomes a sleep laboratory, a venue for experiments in which participants experience mediated communication that takes place outside the zone of our usual daytime reality.
Christa, Argiris, Eudora is a whole that is experienced intuitively. The basis of this wholeness can be considered the possibility of creating a new type of relationship. It is the relationship of an alternative connection between people, which occurs, as per Corbin, in “a place beyond the boundaries of place; where it is impossible to answer the question ‘Where?’ with a hand gesture.”
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