Pankin Aleksej

Born in 1976 in Novomoskovsk. Studied at the Higher Courses of Scriptwriters and Filmdirectors. Lives and works in Moscow.

He Feels at Home in a May Beetle Song
Exhibition project

The title of the exhibition is a line by the German-speaking poet Paul Celan (1920–1970). In the final text of Die Niemandsrose (1963), Celan refers to a famous seventeenth-century German folk song, “The May Beetle”, which expresses the unbearable grief of losing parents and one’s home in a war with childlike naivety. This uncanny, paradoxical conjunction of naive form and tragic content is mirrored in the white figures frozen in small groups in the exhibition space. Pankin himself cites “questions of the genealogy of corporeality and the long history of body concepts” as the main source of his artistic interests. “What concerns me is how the ‘body’ is perceived today, given the overwhelming simultaneous presence of everything that ever existed in culture. In these works, the corporeal form, with the reduction and hypertrophy of antique norms, interacts with stiffness, limpness, bad posture, dizziness, detachment, and an inability to play the guitar”, says Alexei Pankin.

Alexey Korsi

The exhibition was held from 26 February to 30 June, 2021 at the Stella Art Foundation (Moscow)