Memoryscape

memoryscape

Some say that history has no conditional tense due to its factual nature; however, personal stories may transform endlessly because that is one of the things that memory without documentation does. This way, an oral retelling of a story can become more detailed, and gain a phantasmagoric twist that none will be able to proof-check. It means that such a construct as memory on its own is an ephemeral term that can become malleable in any individual’s personal interpretation.

Memoryscape is a safe space for artists to talk about this phenomenon in a reflective way. Each piece is a story that slowly unpacks a term which, by its nature, is inherently multifaceted. Flashbacks, loss of memory, vanishing scenery, selective memory, “lost in translation” and many other such mercurial globules create a greater ocean of memory which carefully envelopes each viewer as if a kind of quicksand.

Curator: Alexandra Orlova

Curator's assistant: Sofiya Galimullina

Artists: Xenia Dranysh, Olya Eliseeva, Natalia Ershova, Marina Fomenko,

Gentle Women, Alexandra Mitlyanskaya, Elena Romenkova, Anna Sapunova,

Lena Shtemberg, Andrey Suzdalev, Alexander Tarasenko, Leonid Tishkov, Yury Vasiliev, Kutay Yavuz, Maria Zaikina

Special thanks to Michael Rodgers and Dustin Zarnikow for their notes

and criticism while editing the supporting texts of the show

flashback

One of the most interesting twists is connected with somebody’s recollection of memory. Unpredictable in terms of the moments it’s going to happen, connected with strong emotions, cold showers with the past that jolt you into sudden understanding. However, a flashback in this project has a calm, melancholic tone, which allows us to analyze such recent events as the COVID-19 pandemic. The global lockdown became an area of nostalgia for many of us. A unique, traumatizing experience that allowed to understand the value of human connections and the rapid nature of change.

Andrey Suzdalev

Last Playground
Animation
2021/2023

The poetics of this work connect us with blurbs of what a merry child's play may look like. The name of the piece lacks the definite article, which could refer to the idea that the artist highlights the fact that this flashback is a symbolic full stop to the theme, negates the idea of precision and defamiliarises a ubiquitous concept. However, the sense of indefiniteness that is the main idea of the cartoon makes it an open form, a collective flashback, a melancholic landscape that anyone can reflect on.

Maria Zaikina

Morning Meditations
Video
2022

Uncertain times create peculiar decisions to preserve one’s sanity. Meditation is one of the most harmless of them. It creates a safe space where an individual investigates their mind and reflects on events of the past. I Am a Flower is one of the popular meditations. It offers people to push themselves back into a form of a plant and calmly reflect on the past.
In this piece, the artist chose to clash two opposite environments – the meditative state of mind and the Moscow Metro, which some call “a special department of Hell”. This blend allows for creating a flashback connected with the older generation of Russians, who probably use their time on the subway to think about the past, which was connected with their youth in the USSR.

absence

The ephemeral nature of memory makes it easy to lose it in different ways – forcing one to forget traumatizing moments of life, mental condition, and the fact that some events were so irrelevant that they fade in time like sand that runs through fingers.

Alexander Tarasenko

It is Stronger than You
Video
2019/2025

Endless repetition of one simple phrase creates the impossibility for the artist to move forward. He became a prisoner of a time loop filled with fear and anxiety, which erases the past and the possible future. It is only here and now in this OCD environment.
The fact that at some point we see consciously unachievable promises of the very last time before moving forward demonstrates to us the physical torture the artist experiences while attempting to leave the time loop he is stuck in the past.

Lena Shtemberg

Sand
Video (filmed by Andrei Boguslavskii)
2025

Emigration is a challenging experience. Every day becomes a struggle due to the constant creation of a new life and attempts to hold onto those memories of the past that keep one sane. This process is daring, empowering, fragile, and painful at the same time.
I create drawings first with my fingers, as if remembering the past in fragments, and then I lay out lines in the sand, bringing these images together. But the drawing is still doomed to disappear, erased by the wind as time erases the past.
The moment of destruction of these drawings becomes a ritual of acceptance: of loss, change, the impossibility of holding on to all that was. The need to let go of the past to build the new, knowing that it too will one day disappear.

vanishing scenery

Originating in cinema, this term describes the blurbs or the past that are vanishing in the present, and the only way to keep them in our memory is by depicting them in a piece of art. Abandoned facilities, grotesque interiors may seem vintage and archaic. However, these sites create the collective memory of cultural landscapes that each of us is a part of.

Leonid Tishkov

Derelict Utopia
Video
2021

An abandoned skate factory in the North Urals became an object of interest for the artist. Once a prosperous facility is isolated. Juxtaposing pompous classical music with deserted scenery reminds us of the past glory of that interior. Now fading, it managed to keep all those small reminders of the foretime, which was filled with people who worked there and made the building alive.

Anna Sapunova

Border of This Garden
Video
2023

The past is flowing into the present in the endless corridors of the Sovietsky Hotel. The main character emerged from the infinity of walls in the environment where time became a sadistic killer.
The whole story is a memory of the past that hasn't frozen in time, just like the hotel itself, with its now-deserted halls.

location

Place of power for one and sorrows for another, or, probably, a trailhead for somebody else. A location as a construct has a powerful multilayer meaning that preserves all sorts of mementos, keeping them not only as physical objects that remain, but as ephemera, like certain situations that transform into past adventures to be missed.

Gentle Women

Arteria Carotis Interna
Video performance
2022

The Kaliningrad area is famous for amber fossils that are constantly found there and transformed into different sorts of jewelry. However, this area was considered a place of transhipment for those who wanted an easy transition to Europe.
The performer goes through the amber beans she’s wearing in order to create a sound similar to that that train wheels make, while moving. This monotonous activity is an attempt to create an environment of transition from one point to another, yet highlighting that the baggage of the past will always remain with the traveler.

Kutay Yavuz

Don't Look Back | A Memoir
Video
2025

The city of Istanbul is a living representation of constant change: once a capital of the Byzantine Empire, a Medieval center of Christianity, which transformed into Turkey, a country that united Christian and Muslim cultures in that ancient city.
For Kutay Yavuz, Istanbul is a representation of a lifelong journey that started there and brought him to where he is now. He depicts former Constantinople as a place of change that inspires its citizens not to be afraid to change their lives as well.

Marina Fomenko

At the Edge of Oblivion
Video
2021

The Temir-Khan-Shura synagogue and the Jewish cemetery in Buynaksk remain as a poignant reminder of the once extensive community of Mountain Jews in this Dagestan town.

Guest

The synagogue, built in 1861, is well-preserved, but the sad signs of oblivion are becoming increasingly clear. Sometimes, the synagogue opens its doors, and then guests come. This guest is a special one, an enlightened and attentive observer. He recalls and writes down words in Hebrew and Arabic, studies the synagogue’s decorations, and examines details. The guest tries to imagine what it was like when there was life here, filling the emptiness of abandonment for a while.

Saida

Saida lives at the Jewish cemetery and looks after it to the best of her ability, just as her father and grandfather did. Maybe her great-grandson, who lives with his mother here in the cemetery, will do the same. Saida’s life at the graveyard, with her geese, chickens and dogs, is natural in its daily routine, combining Muslim customs with respect for another religion, and the cemetery keeper imagines no other destiny but to care for the graves of the deceased Jews of Buynaksk.

recreation

Natalia Ershova

After Us
Video, AI
2025

"As a child, I often saw time-lapse footage of weather changes, plant growth, and storm clouds moving quickly in popular science films. Now there is a huge number of videos created with the help of AI on the internet, and very often they differ in some details or oddities: sometimes a model's hair changes length, or an extra arm grows out of their body. Often, there is no internal logic within them. But all these videos give rise to a new visual experience. If reality, then photography and cinema taught us to observe the world before; now, a completely new dimension of visual learning is emerging. I deliberately took my photos of the sky and asked AI to make a film, like fast-motion clouds, so that the viewer could not find any inconsistencies, but they are there. This way, I create a faked reality of the clouds – once documented by a photographic lens, now they have become pixels that AI tempered with to attempt to preserve my memory of the reality".

Alexandra Mitlyanskaya

Don't Miss the Moment
Video
2024

Using the aesthetics of Andy Warhol’s Empire, the artist creates a chamber space of anonymity. The viewer, as the artist herself, is not familiar with the boy in the picture, but understands the time this image was taken. Furthermore, the refrigerator ice we see in the foreground makes us believe that we participate in the slow unpacking of a list memory.

Olya Eliseeva

Tropinki Obratno (Paths Back)
Video
2025

"Filmed in my late father’s apartment, the video captures his reflections on art and his process as a painter. After his death, these fragments became a space of return, a path back into his presence and into the landscapes of memory.
The work explores the reconstruction of memory, loss, and the quiet persistence of what remains. Through slow, meditative rhythm and a sense of stillness, Tropinki Obratno embodies the act of remembering as movement: a walk through spaces that once held life, and still echo with it".

lost in translation

The final block of the exhibition, which highlights the trixtery nature of memory. Some details we think to remember from the past may go through a metamorphosis in our mind due to the need to preserve our sanity or the need to create an illusion of happiness. However, forcing one's mind to forget or edit events of the past may end up appearing in dreams that some treat as symbolic prophesies, even though they hide nothing but the past.

Yury Vasiliev

Lucid Dream
Video
2024

A lucid dream is a state of mind where a person understands that the reality they are in is just an illusion that may be manipulated. The dreamer appears to possess absolute freedom — the ability to reshape reality through intention alone. Yet this freedom operates within constraints: the dream logic that persists despite awareness, the inability to fully control all elements, and the eventual pull back to waking. This mirrors our waking condition: we have agency within a system whose fundamental rules we did not choose and cannot escape. Such experiences make us understand that the border between our unconsciousness and perception of reality is just a thin, fragile line that can be torn apart at any moment.

Elena Romenkova

Memory Transformation
Video
2025

In her piece, the artist works with the phenomenon of memory as if it were a living tissue that cannot be controlled at all times. The fact that what we remember cannot be classified as a solid document sometimes creates certain bugs and glitches that make everyone’s perception and recollection of the past a unique environment. Some of these environments are hard to navigate due to different conditions like dementia, where some memories fade, yet others blast out of nowhere and mix themselves with the present, as if it were the same moment.

Xenia Dranysh

Snaked
Video
2019

The artist understands a snake as a symbol of change and hope. Once meeting one in a dream, it made her understand that the traumatizing and heavy memories of the past stopped being a burden, and she could allow herself to move on into the future that would allow her to use the gained experiences in order to create a better reality.

If you want your memories to become a part of the show, please send them as a text via email memoryscape2025@gmail.com

The Wrong Biennale