MEANWHILE
Nadya Lihogrud researches ceramics as a contemporary culture medium. The building of her own visual language is connected to research on works of different time periods — from lockets in classic architecture to European and Ancient Russian tiles, form antique sculpture to soviet porcelain figurines. The narratives of the artist's projects are connected to the now of recent past located in the borders of personal memory.
The Meanwhile exhibition offers a framework for archeology as an image for contemporary are — a cultural layer which future generations are going to decipher while trying to learn about our civilisation. Project's prototype are museum expositions of ancient Greek archeology, in which utile, sacred and artistic objects unite. In Nadya's works one could come across references to vessels in form of women's heads or decorated by compositions of figures and to Thanagar figurines capturing the routine of the ancient greeks. The antique artistic method toolkit in the Meanwhile exhibition is used to build a narrative on modernity and to visualise an out-of-time feeling. Along with the object with which Nadya foresees archeological future are artefacts found in the artist's studio. Some of the sculptures are flawed, undone or are test ones, forming a layer of anxious and intriguing combinations.
The Meanwhile project raises a question of whether it's possible to leave knowledge and memory of one's time (nature or a whole era) in material artefacts. Vessels and small terracotta figurines could not become alternative to a digital chronicle written today by countless sattelite systems, cameras or web-archives, but they remind one of fragility of the material world, the inconsistency of life and the value of memories.
