Nahova Irina

“Paradise is an artificial space, it is absolutely safe and lasts forever,” – this is how Irina Nakhova describes the essence and meaning of her installation. The characters inside dwell “between heaven and earth”, literally, as some of them “eternally enter the water” while the others “eternally float in the sky”. The spatial and existential dialectics of the installation is plain to see. And this dialectics is characteristic of all Irina Nakhova’s work.

Irina Nakhova’s work has always stood apart from the rest of the Moscow conceptualism system. Even though the artist belongs to the school’s third generation, she managed to retain the powerful potential of their visual appeal. Here, one should also bear in mind that, aesthetically, conceptualism looks not only to criticize contemporary society, but also to study the circumstances which art functions in, both as an institution and as a figurative system. It should also be noted that the artist’s gesture is a radical one. Irina Nakhova virtually originated a new genre that had been non-existent on the Russian art scene, nor had it existed, I daresay, in the international art. Here I refer to the so called Rooms, which look like installations or environmental art only because of their formal attributes. Indeed, the Paradise installation is an immediate continuation of her own Rooms. The very logic of how this new genre has developed has led Irina Nakhova, through the enfilade of the Rooms she has made, to a better understanding of the aesthetic essence of totality.

Irina Nakhova, being perfectly aware of the tendency of her gesture, “artificially” reproduces “an ideal exhibition space” inhabited by “ideal characters”. This choice also possesses the pathos of a dialogue. This time a dialogue with such an important notion for the Moscow conceptualism as “an artist who is also a character”. However, there is even more to the logic of this space than that. Irina Nakhova makes the viewer yet another character of her work, as the visitors are allowed to enter the Paradise. In fact, you can become a viewer only once inside the installation, it is the only possible way to “get to know” the work.

For Irina Nakhova, the space of the image and the space of existential emotions always come back to the artist herself, giving a powerful romantic impetus to her aesthetics, a motif that always reemerges in art, when it finds itself at a crossroads.

Joseph Backstein


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