UNLEARNING. Domie, Poznań, Poland. 2021
АЗБУКА STRIKE! Pickle Bar, Berlin, Germany. 2022
Learning to Defeat
Painting on the wall, acrylic, 150×280 cm
From the series Holding a hedgehod with your bare hands
The project originates from taking a closer look onto a belarusian post-war satirical magazine The Hedgehog (Вожык). During the WW2 years it was called Defeat the fascist beast. One illustration of that time shows a soviet soldier handing a pencil to the Hedgehog, clearly associating the pencil with a weapon.
I was intrigued by those transformations: a soldier to a hedgehog, a human to an animal, a mashine gun to a pensil, and, to take it futher, a pensil to a needle.
Russian analogue for a proverb 'to keep smb. in a tight rein' directly translates into english as 'to hold smb. in hedgehog gloves'. Obviously, it only means that these gloves are so thick one can catch a hedgehog and not get hurt, but as a kid I always assumed those really were some very pointy, hedgehog-y gloves. It seems that needles and pinning could be great tools for coping with one's inability to grasp the bigger picture: use them to pin as many clues, pieces and fragments as one can carry.
Holding a hedgehod with your bare hands is like trying to hold history: it's not easy to catch, it might hurt, but it's fascinating and it's worth a try.
АЗБУКА STRIKE! Pickle Bar, Berlin, German
Curator: Patricia Couvet
UNLEARNING. Domie, Poznań, Poland
Curators: Aleksei Borisionok, Raman Tratsiuk, Vera Zalutskaya