Group exhibition on how unnecessary and «no need» can be key, how inconsistencies and residues make the structure alive. And that attention to these gaps is a step to rethinking, to freedom, to seeing reality differently.
May 15 — 23, 2025 Bomba Gallery, PTA FabricaExposition of the 360 and 5 exhibit, Bomba Gallery
Artists: Zarmin Kuropatov, Alina Matveyev, Olga Mahno, Diane Narania, Catherine Senatskaya, Arena Smirnova, Gene Starikov, Elena Tormasheva, Anna Chapkina. Photo by Alice Agapkina
The concept is based on a comparison of two cyclical structures: 360 degrees of circle as a reflection of an ideal, universal system, and 365 days of calendar year as a form of organization of time, which is perceived as a natural norm. However, this «natural» cycle contains five «excess» units that fall out of the ideal pattern. They keep our time system functional — and at the same time light up its artificiality, incompleteness, mobility. These five units make it clear that even the familiar and seemingly «natural» structures, such as the calendar, are actually created by man. They are neither perfect nor universal; they have gaps, inconsistencies, residues. These five units show that the system is always a design. It’s like they’re lighting up the standards we’re used to.
Exposition of the 360 and 5 exhibit, Bomba Gallery
The work at the exhibition explores ways in which you can see a break in the conventional system, see its conditionalness and mobility. The world does not exist for us as an abstract scheme; it is always given to us through physical experience: through how we feel it, how we move in it, how light, sound, temperature, gravity affect us. The work in the exhibition changes the perception of space through visual images, replaces reality with virtual space, questioning reality. They focus on the language, signs and meanings that shape our thinking and examine the inconsistency of shape and content, showing how such failures open up new possibilities for rethinking these systems. The universality of the scientific language is also called into question, demonstrating that it is also a social construct embedded in a particular cultural system.
Exposition of the 360 and 5 exhibit, Bomba Gallery
SPACE PLAN
01 02 Zarmin Kuropatov «Trofei» 03 Zarmin Kuropatonova «Long Forest» 04 Alina Matveyev «Tak Coming» 05 Olga Mahno Po-TEE-WEET 06 Diane Narania «Zirk» 07 Catherine Senatilla «Detail» 08 Yekaterina Senaska «Remembering Childhood» 09 Arina Smirnova decode me gently 10 Oldman’s wife «The Simplest Surrealistic Act» 11 Elena Tormasheva «Sortler» 12 Anna Chapkina «Stop Space»
FOREST
This block is devoted to spatial distortions and inconsistencies. The work here explores how we fit into architecture, landscape, topology, and how these systems can cause failures: traps, dead ends, gaps, exclusion zones. Space can be too narrow, too broad, too strangely organized — a violation that can be reviewed.Zarmin Kuropatova «Trofei»
Zarina Kuropatov Trophie, 2024 paintings, mirrorwork series on mirrors distorts space: mirror surfaces show trophies — horns removed from their natural context. Their reflections multiply, overlap with each other, creating a recursive sequence in which the boundaries between the object and its reflection are erased. The mirror becomes not just a reflecting surface, but an environment for breaking space, fixing multiple states and angles at the same time. The viewer is placed inside a system of displacements, gaps and reflections that emphasize the value of any design of space.
Diana Narania Circus, 2024 VRs, video 360 «Circus» explores the duality and absurdity of human existence, where rejected characters become heroes, and irony and absurdity protect us from fear of an inevitable end. Using the 360° format, the work creates a hypnotic perception where reality and fantasy overlap. The theme refers to hidden, undetected elements of the system, identifying them as the basis for existence, despite their absurdity and imperfections.
Diana Narmania «Circus»
Diana Narmania «Circus»
A body is a condition of perception. The world does not exist for us as an abstract scheme; it is always given to us through physical experience. Work that alters the perception of the body or creates unusual sensations undermines our integration into the system.
Elena Tormasheva «Sortler»
Elena Tormasheva Sortler, 2024 plywood, acrylic paint, mirror film, 150×150×150 cm Work is a large cube with cutters resembling the silhouettes of human figures. The viewer is asked to walk through them, physically facing the shape boundaries. This object sends it to a child-classer toy, where each figure must correspond to a well-defined opening. The artist meditates on how a person strives throughout his life to «bend himself» to social norms that shape the framework of a comfortable environment and the boundaries of «normality» accepted by the majority. If the uniform doesn’t match, you don’t miss, you get stuck, or you have to change to pass. The work offers the viewer a physical experience of this tension between the individual form and the external conformity requirement.
Elena Tormasheva «Sortler»
I>LOCK
Zone devoted to language, signs and meanings — as systems that structure our thinking but are also subject to failures, gaps, ambiguity. Work here explores how words may not fit things, how meaning can slip away, and the sign doesn’t work. Language gives us access to peace, but it can distort, limit, cheat.Exposition of the 360 and 5 exhibit, Bomba Gallery
Arin Smirnova decode me gently, 2025 Video 04>12 Thoughts to be formulated need to be deciphered in some sign system. And at this moment, a swamp-dum of senses and senses of mind measurement is being cut off by the symbol of a system of signs and symbols. decode me gently is a poetic reflection of what remains behind the word and what cannot be artifacted, but continues to sound in trembling, pause, breathing. Through the text, voice and movement, the author explores the boundaries of the language by recording how the feeling becomes a language and what is lost when translated into a sign system.
Arena Smirnova decode me gently, 2025
Caterina Senatskaya Details, 2024 Ceramics, series of 3 sculptures, «Dethalie», represents the remainder as a meaningful part of the whole. The increased ceramic fragments from IKEA manuals, taken out of their functional context, become symbols of imperfections embedded in the structure of any system. Even in the most reconciled of them, the remainder may be not a mistake, but a consequence of the interaction of order and chaos, human logic, and the unpredictability of life.
Catherine Senacka «Details»
THE field in which popular knowledge, myths, symbolic practices are considered on an equal basis with scientific and rational systems. The work here shows that magical thinking is not the opposite of knowledge, but an alternative way of describing the world that is equally effective. The zone calls into question the universality of the scientific language, demonstrating that it is also a social construct embedded in a particular cultural system.
Alina Matveyev This is how 2025 Fanera, paint, fabric Project is an installation in which popular knowledge, myths and symbolic practices are treated on an equal basis with scientific and rational systems. The work called into question the universality of the scientific language, demonstrating that it was also a social construct embedded in a particular cultural system. Magic thinking here is not seen as the opposite of knowledge, but as an alternative to describing the world. ==History==The facility is built in the form of theatre sets in the form of artifacts taken from the book of Archaeologist Yuri Voronov, «The Secret of the Cebeldine Valley». These things have given rise to reflection on memory, the language of objects, and the stories they carry through time.
Alina Matveyev, «It’s okay»
Alina Matveyev, «It’s okay»
The Old man’s wife The simplest surrealistic act, 2025 Video, projector, wooden object «The simplest surrealist act is to take a revolver into the street and to shoot the crowd as much as possible» — Andre Breton Disciplinary Structure turns a man into an empty meaning — a mechanistic function that is free of reflexia. The authoritarian system creates the only option, rejuvenates perception, and creates artificial opposition. Responsibility shifts to structure, and the performer becomes a «dead» part of its logic. The most radical gesture is to return the agency to the human being, turning it from a structure screw to an event catalyst.
Old man’s wife, «The simplest surrealist act.»
Old man’s wife, «The simplest surrealist act.»
Zarmin Kuropatov Lots of forest, 2024 Book of diary conjectures on the question of which structure is related to the entity. The forest is a metaphor for a divine place where the extremes are expressed in its entirety and the effect is increasing. And what a sign of the forest as a thing falls from the general idea of the forest. And it makes creation out of it, and the authorship of creation is made from the outside. The four-dimensionality in this case is God, what is in every substance a particle of an alien. It is the answer to large questions, and that answer exists in the epicentre, not on the screen of cold space.
Zarmin Kuropatov Multiforest
Zarmin Kuropatov Multiforest
I>WARE
Work in this area understands time as a design, not as an objective given, but as a system with which we interact and which we perceive through cultural, social and personal prisms.Olga Mahno «POO-TEE-WEET»
Olga Mahno PO-TEE-WEET, 2021 Wood, cardboard, paint, door eyes Work is a closed cube with a maze from rooms that you can view but not enter. They keep prints of what’s lost: a pairless earring, crossed calendars, charred matches, a road that’s never gonna go through again. These are fragments of memory caught at the moment of disappearance. Things that are no longer used but still live in the form of images.
Olga Mahno «POO-TEE-WEET»
Olga Mahno «POO-TEE-WEET»
Anna Chapkin Abandoned space, 2025 Video 02>30 Video installation on how abandoned space continues to exist in memory as a rattle memory. Researching the rest of the place and living in it is a gap between the person and the house. Work is a remodeling that treats the house as a path and as an image that comes into contact with the viewer through the cinematographic language. On the basis of personal memories, a collected image of all abandoned houses is formed, forming into a single memory space.
Anna Chapkina «Abandoned Space»
Caterina Senatskaya Memories of childhood, 2025 Ceramic installation Interactive installation, consisting of 120 ceramic tiles, turns to how memory preserves, erases and rearranges images of the past. It changes not only the pattern but also the perception of the image, like memories that change shapes in every new look at the past. Here, every spectator has the opportunity to co-author by re-establishing or destroying patterns of memories.
Catherine Senacka «Memories of Childhood»
Exposition of the 360 and 5 exhibit, Bomba Gallery