Since 2010 

A research cycle that tells the story of the hidden aspects of history in the context of public space. Working with hidden history and displaced memory, for which historically-saturated public places in different locations around the world are chosen. For each work of the cycle the image of a storefront (English store is similar in sound to history) is created, in or around which the fragments of the work are placed. Various strategies are used to create showcases in the cycle: showcases/ ballot boxes; a showcase/greenhouse that defends environmental protest; a showcase/spontaneous monument about state sacralization of censorship; a showcase/parasite that returns the historical layer to a decorative monument; a fair showcase that criticizes the commercialization of history; a showcase/laboratory that ironizes the phallogocentrism of science, and so on. The images of transparency, glass/screen and showcase/window appear more than once in the cycle: the window-laboratory on a university campus in Stockholm, the window-scare reminding about victims, the screen for the blind, the "blind window" as a symbol of hidden history, etc. Also, as part of the cycle interventions in museums are created, where their own museum equipment is exhibited, decommissioned after prolonged use. The project is implemented in different cities, so far these are: Bialystok, Bishkek, Vilnius, Homiel, Dnepr, Krakow, Minsk, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Tbilisi, Warsaw. The cycle is part of the project ST()RE where the image of a showcase becomes a transparent ballot box.

ST()RE #11:
Blind Window

(Breakthrough)

W75.1

︎ technical info
Site-specific installation
For Forum Regionum, Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, Dnepr, Ukraine

The installation is located in the lobby of the building of the early 20th century, which for a long time was in an abandoned state. Now in this building repair and creation of the Dnepr Center of Contemporary Culture has begun. The main large window in the lobby is missing. Installation repeats the emptiness of its opening. The sculpture is pasted over with a rocaille film depicting marble (the sculpture is hollow inside), creating the effect of a heavy marble slab. This work also belongs to the cycle Social Marble.

On the reverse side, a detailed glossary is displayed on the installation surface, which tells about the many connotations and contains references to historical and current processes. This installation is about the reorganization (breakthrough) of the historical space into a new cultural institution and a warning about the dangers of creating fakes.
 

W74.1

︎ technical info
Site-specific installation
For festival Contexts 2019 / IX International Festival of Ephemeral Art, Sokołowsko, Poland

The action of the book by Thomas Mann "Magic Mountain" takes place in a sanatorium for patients with tuberculosis. The writer introduces the romantic term Kadaverruhe (German: “corpse” plus “rest”), which can be translated as rest of corpses or rest on corpses. In sanatoriums to maintain importance for recovery, optimism was forbidden to discuss their illness, complain about health, and talk about death. These motels for many hopelessly sick were hospices. Just as no one suffered, did not see. Everyone who disappeared from the sanatorium was immediately consigned to oblivion.

The cycle of works ST()RE is devoted to the opening of an invisible history. Showcases are always used for this project (in this case, the window of the former sanatorium). On the glass are placed xero-wallpaper with the image of the X-ray of the lungs of a patient with tuberculosis. This is a deliberate reminder at the carefree festival of the many victims of the disease.
 

W51.1

︎ technical info
Public-art installation
For group exhibition Market, part of The Kyiv International — Kyiv Bienniale 2017, Zhytniy Market, Kyiv, Ukraine

Public-art installation
ST()RE №9,
Zhytniy Market,
Kyiv, Ukraine,
2017

The installation is a stall from the 90s in Belarus.

W48.1

︎ technical info
Public-art site-specific installation
For festival Art Prosрect, Gareyev Botanical Garden, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

The Internet is filled with news about the reconstruction of the old Gareev Botanical Garden in Bishkek and the struggle for its territory; about the wild decisions of deputies and illegal logging in Kyrgyzstan, etc. But the main thing is this news about the birth and consolidation of environmentalists, urbanists, cultural workers and other members of the public. For Sergey Shabohin, this greenhouse installation is an image of the park and the situation around it. An image of how the wildness of nature must oppose the wildness of politics and economics. The image of the greenhouse, which still grows exotic ideas of citizenship, as they begin to strengthen and break out.

A greenhouse is a reduced copy of a orangery built in a botanical garden in the 1960s and located in an emergency. Posters depicting plants from a greenhouse are pasted on the inside, on which fragments of articles from the Internet are layered, telling a variety of dramatic stories around the park and the greenery of Bishkek: on illegal logging, on the crisis of the scientific center, on garbage, on initiatives and consolidation, on festivals and public involvement, etc. The installation is integrated into the Botanical Garden. The viewer, thinking that the posters contain information about plants, is confronted with the history of the emergence of civil society in Bishkek around the catastrophic situation with the ecology of the city.