That Side Where Real Is

Multi-component installation ‘That Side Where Real Is’ [Uliana Apatina]: a series of physically constructed, site-specific, inter-connected installations challenging our perception of space and the idea of the space as such built from ephemeral materials or materials that become ephemeral when being constructed into the space. To go through the installation is mentally, intellectually and emotionally intense experience activated by constantly changing hallucinational spaces on the way you move. At the installation context, a body becomes a tool penetrating a space [human element penetration] confronting a built environment battling with the dissolution and vagueness.

The exhibition’s title, ‘That Side Where Real Is’ refers both to the visual challenges conveyed through the materials used and the way they trick the mind by disorienting the body, making it to squeeze in-between something that seems to be impossible to enter, perceive something that human eyes cannot simply see unless they are positioned at certain angles or fixed at the points of the space where the light is reflected. Emotionally and intellectually challenging chameleonic geometry that constantly changes into hallucinational spaces while your body is moving. It is a division between physical and abstract, rational and intuitive – with a big question mark on which of them is real.

A peculiarity of the site is echoed in here – being in an underground crypt, empty and dark, with the whole universe of life happening on the upper layer inside the building of the church itself; and, then, beyond the point of the church – in a real life on the streets. Due to the very nature of the crypt ‘That Side Where Real Is’ deals with a notion of a death/life duality.

Sound at the installation is derived from the material elements themselves – be it cracking dry leaves or transparent fishing wire strings, or black elastic shock cords. By reacting on a bodily movement, singular elements generate noises as a response. Those noises are important part of the perception. ‘That Side Where Real Is’ continues to experiment with light, its effect on visibility and depth, and a coloured light as a separate material.

All components of the installation are process-based constructions - having been built by the artist in a process of inhabiting the site and creating the artwork directly there without a preliminary plan or scaled model. The artist describes this process in one of the ‘during construction’ notes as follows:

‘And at a certain point of construction something is happening and all those feelings are becoming too much to bear - everything is pulsating all over inside my body and I can’t sleep any longer, I can’t think properly without being on the edge of a some mysterious hallucination where unreal has a logical place to happen and real has a distorted face of unreality. At this pivotal point, precisely, I am starting to understand what I’m actually building. And it terrifies me. With its bold honesty that I had not realised or even were aware about at the start of the project. I had this moment during ‘88Windows’ as well. When all of a sudden I looked at the construction and grasped what it really is. It is not something that was planned or modelled, not it is something that was read in preparation and theorised about. But it is something that I’m building only thinking that I know what I’m doing. Do I? And it looks like I’m controlling it perfectly as there is only my two hands involved and not even a trace of even a tiny assistant. If I’m controlling the whole process to such a confident extent - how then it can anyhow happen that I’m so unbearably shocked by what I have created? And somehow I know that I knew from the very beginning that it will be exactly like that’. 

Components of 'That Side Where Real Is':

Cracking incorporating The cReature film [Room1]
Transparent Invisibility [Room2]
Suspended Dreams to Eat the Time [Room3]
There Is No One In Here [Room4]
Vertical Immersion [Room5]
All How It Was [Open Room]
Black Penetration Into And Through Horizontal Dimension [Corridor. Part I]
Black Penetration Into And Through Horizontal Dimension [Corridor. Part II]
Red Gloss One String [Entry Hall]

The cReature film is as process-based as the overall construction and being organically buried inside dry cracking leaves narratively tells a birth-life-death sequence with the absolute awareness of its senselessness. Being divided on two sides a real has a character of a vague and obscure presence that is constantly transferred in-between. A space of the film prolongs disorienting irony of transparent and invisible strings, deepening it down towards the very extremes.
That Side Where Real Is : Crypt@St.Mark's, St.Mark's Church, 337 Kennington Park Road London SE11 4PW UK : 8 March - 22 may 2013 : Vertical Immersion [Room 5] is a permanent installation : www.stmarkskennington.org