EMPTY EXPECTATIONS VOL.1,2
(2017) INSTALLATION (PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO, SCULPTURE, ARTIST BOOK)
"Photography can also be used as a mechanism to examine itself. In her series Empty Expectations, Russian photographer Ksenia Yurkova (1984) expresses the process of photography. Thinking of the way that visual construction can be expressed verbally and vice versa, as well as the way that the subsequent reading of a translation can result in a semantic loss, Yurkova creates her images with a conglomeration of collages, Photoshop manipulations, and chemical experiments with lm and paper. She combines these photographic works with illustrations from two old books, a handbook of forensic science and a handbook of gynaecology, desiring to imbue her heavy-minded philosophy with some ironic levity. Overall, she treats the series as an 'alchemy manual', a set of practical experiments related to the visual meaning of photography and its translation."
Katherine Oktober Matthews
GUP Magazine Chief Editor
Katherine Oktober Matthews
GUP Magazine Chief Editor
2-channel video installation Empty Expectations (09:00);
Installation (Photo and Video);
Sculpture;
Artist book
Installation (Photo and Video);
Sculpture;
Artist book
This project appears itself in a complicated multilayer construction with a conglomeration of interrupted narratives, reflections on the material, and stereotypes about the image – all mixed with the ironic pathos of seriousness inherent to an alchemist ripping up the mystery of nature. Visual language develops itself in a set of links and attitudes. Almost like verbal one does. Whereas a word frames and encloses a part of the world (photography does it literally), then a word's juxtaposition may cause a possibility of meta text, as well as a possibility for the words to change their meaning.
Working with a straight and modified image in this manner may cause a bad joke in spectacular's perception. Each element of the sequence would be called into question. Visual language camouflages behind the façade of its failure. Defining at the same time a new dimension of visual space with the help of collaborations inside its structure.
Photography actualises the shape; its status and condition are placed outside brackets. Photography is the modality of the latent image, poised between life and extinction. Each shape is the Golem. Nonliving substance. The deal with reality. Alchemy is always a deal.
Working with a straight and modified image in this manner may cause a bad joke in spectacular's perception. Each element of the sequence would be called into question. Visual language camouflages behind the façade of its failure. Defining at the same time a new dimension of visual space with the help of collaborations inside its structure.
Photography actualises the shape; its status and condition are placed outside brackets. Photography is the modality of the latent image, poised between life and extinction. Each shape is the Golem. Nonliving substance. The deal with reality. Alchemy is always a deal.
Material existence is instinct with destrudo, the desire for death. Destrudo is the pursuit of the elemental. It inscribes itself into the act of assembly. Space is penetrated by this tranquillity.
Bodies, nonspatial essences, stand in extensional regularity to one another. The human being can't achieve order, but his eyes aspire to it infinitely. Destrudo is an ineffectual usage of the shape, the substitute for creativity and utility. To misuse, to disassemble, and to look: what is inside and how does it burn? To burn for the sake of pleasure from the flare. Just as relationships, which are on the opposite side of symbiosis.
This project is a way of witnessing the condition of the gradual destruction and transformation of self-conception and personal relations, through the materiality of visual identities and mediums. Just as a human being, consisting of about thirty non-organic chemical elements, ultimately decays to create new life forms, human relations are subject to disintegration, to changes in their aggregation conditions. They decay into basic elements to find themselves in new sequences.
Bodies, nonspatial essences, stand in extensional regularity to one another. The human being can't achieve order, but his eyes aspire to it infinitely. Destrudo is an ineffectual usage of the shape, the substitute for creativity and utility. To misuse, to disassemble, and to look: what is inside and how does it burn? To burn for the sake of pleasure from the flare. Just as relationships, which are on the opposite side of symbiosis.
This project is a way of witnessing the condition of the gradual destruction and transformation of self-conception and personal relations, through the materiality of visual identities and mediums. Just as a human being, consisting of about thirty non-organic chemical elements, ultimately decays to create new life forms, human relations are subject to disintegration, to changes in their aggregation conditions. They decay into basic elements to find themselves in new sequences.
Like the first, Empty Expectations Vol.2 is a logical continuation of witnessing the gradual destruction and transformation of self-conception and personal relations through the materiality of visual mediums. Like a human being, which consists of about thirty non-organic chemical elements that ultimately decay to create new life forms, human relations experience the same way of disintegration and the states of aggregation change by being burnt or frozen. Decaying into the basic elements to find themselves in the new sequences.
