Zwei Naturtrübe bitte

Initiator: Nicolò Krättli / @BosequeRreal
Curatorial support: Angelina Burliuk, Pjotr Zherebtsov
Music support: Syoma Komlev
Fog, opacity is confusing. Even if this is a normal natural phenomenon. The temperature changes
with sunset on a mountain lake, and you can see everything, but your two hands. A natural haze in
the head haunts many people after the year 2022 - as if you are moving by feel, learning to
redefine shapes, objects, colours, truth, life. It's almost in the dark.
There's a lot of randomness to it, and it is confusing, puzzling, attitudes and positions are changing.
It's a vulnerable position. One is just timid in the front of established systems of production,
consumption, status distribution. And even those things, which are perceived as natural are already
mediated through culture. Looking at hills, or a lake, or a forest, the brain presents to the
consciousness not only the play of light on the retina but also the landscapes seen before in a
museum. If we try to detach ourselves a little, it is as if the coming experience or dream has
already been recorded in the archive, numbered and labelled.
Counting and naming as functions of language and thought have enabled humanity to achieve so
much! But at the same time, those skills serve as instruments of destruction of ourselves and
habitats. How would one get out of this logic? Is this binarity really the engine of the cycles of
existence? In the exhibition, we see number 2 everywhere in front and in the margins. Could this
be a symbol that something exists beyond opposition? Something that will allow one to escape the
constant pressure of a buzzling mind? What if we look at things a little more freely?
A beer label becomes the subject of the large canvas ‘Men Explain to things Me’, where the idea of
gender emancipation and the patriarchal dictate of rational knowledge are humorously turned
inside out through references to Renaissance painting. In the series of paintings ‘2222’,
photographs of real artistic interventions mark pessimism towards the possibility of overcoming the
climate crisis. Painted in the spirit of Appenzellian naïve painting, the wooden plates in the series
‘Appenzeller Landscapes’ show the transience and futility of comprehending reality. Reading
characters in traditional costumes are literally projected onto vault-columbaria and vault-graves.
The ‘Sets’ with collections of objects and ready-mades seem to structure the chaos, to arrange it
into a unified vault grid. Glitch flickers in the ‘Screens’ series with recursive self-reflection as if a
surveillance camera had tried to film itself. Literally, the desktop with the icons of the ‘Hard Drives’
of the series is as if the stones of an ancient temple hold the original wisdom. That said, in both
videos, it's as if there's a flicker of war going on right now.
- Ugh, the search for truth is a tricky business! Could I have those two unfiltered natural beers,
please?
All works in the
exhibition ‘Zwei Naturtrübe bitte’ except for the videos are made in Zurich in 2024 and mark a new
stage in their work after their forced departure from the Urals following the outbreak of the Russian
invasion of Ukraine. This is the duo's first major exhibition in a long time.
Angelina Burliuk, Pjotr Zherebtsov