New technologies I use to rethink the forms of interaction between an art work and the surrounding space. The reduction of pictorial, the rejection of narrative, an analytical approach to the media used, and the active inclusion of the exhibition space as an equal element of a multimedia installation are the defining principles of my work. An art work interests me not as a product, but as a space in which one encounters conceptions of reality that did not exist before.
When and where I was starting my studies, new media were not a thing. Since my mother is a sculptor and my father is a painter, I chose monumental painting, a kind of synthesis of the two. The Monumental Painting Department of the Belarusian Academy of Arts, despite its extreme conservatism and complete detachment from the world of contemporary art, set the direction in which I have been moving ever since. Monumental art teaches how to work with large objects and think in the context of architectural space. This, paradoxically, intersects with such a movement in art as site-specific installation.
As an artist, I follow my own canon. One of the rules of this canon is to interact with a specific space. My task is to subordinate the space to my idea. To conquer it, to appropriate it, to make it integral to my work. It is important that the whole room or building be involved in my work. My material is moving image, video. Most people associate it with cinema, but what I do is not narrative in a cinematic sense. Video image for me is a dynamic form of light, which adds an extra dimension to a three-dimensional space.
I synthesize the image from footage that I take myself or I program it. Most of the time, I work with my own visual element, LINEMENT — a stripe of light that moves against a black background. For each new exhibition space, the rhythm and proportions of this video element are re-adjusted. Initially, I only showed LINEMENT on CRT monitors. That was important because of the way CRT monitors work, with light literally poured outwards. I made several site-specific installations, ORNAMENT, using CRT monitors, lining up at first four and then fourteen monitors vertically, in a column, and then horizontally, in a line which was infinitely reflected by mirrors completely changing and overpowering the exhibition space. I wanted to develop this result of transformation and interaction further, and I began to use projection and video mapping when working with LINEMENT, to engage architectural forms as projection screens.
To LINEMENT I have turned again and again, sometimes transforming it into a material object or bringing it back to video reality, but in a new quality. Although it lacks lexical meaning, LINEMENT is akin to a canonical text organized according to the principle of musical structure. Its dogmatically sequential system of signs does not convey a specific meaning but brings to understanding on an emotional, pre-linguistic level.
Text is important to me as a form that exists in time and space, the perception of which becomes deeper and more complex when it is integrated into an art object. Therefore, apart from the theme of LINEMENT — light in space — I also work with the theme of text in space. In “ONE POEM BETWEEN THE WINDOW AND THE BLACK WALL” (where the text is literally suspended in the space between a window and a black wall), in “UNDERSTAND/FEEL” (where the viewer can interact with the text projection on water and decipher the parts of it), in “ONE ART. ONE PLACE” (where a radical text about art is broadcast through the audio system of a church building) and in “ONE SHAPE, ONE SQUARE, ONE EXECUTION, ONE TRANSCENDENCE” (where the text that is read aloud is a physical force that is literally pushing a black square), – I subject text, like light, to a medial transformation, tying its perception to a certain time interval and a specific space.
The meaning in an art object is interesting to me in its elusiveness. Semiotician Yuri Lotman talked about texts which can inform the consciousness of the recipient without conveying information or specific meaning. That is how I view my works: as a series of plastic phenomena that exist within a given, preferably architectural space and that spark a process of questioning and engagement in the viewer without being figurative or having any narrative traits. They invite to long and sustained viewing, aiming to approach the viewer on an emotional, pre-linguistic level.