Nikita ALEXEEV

FUNNY, SO WHAT?


The art by Irina Nakhova could be easily classified by several, sometimes very different, categories. It's often said her art is "historical" i.e. it's rooted into cultural and historical continuity and it questions about past to present relations and how could art exist without roots. In fact many of Nakhova's works are a kind of Borjes "libraries" packed up with interrelated quotations from the art of the past. It's also true that Nakhova is mostly engaged in the problem of space perception. Her "rooms" perform complex and convincing experiments on shifting human to environment relations. One can't but agree that Nakhova is obsessed with themes of biology, sex, gender, Eros and Tanatos, everything where birth and death, health and illness mix up. No wonder she possesses a unique position in the circle of "Moscow Conceptualism" because unlike her colleagues she is serious as for material she works with. For her oil on canvas, paper, plaster, cement or whatever is used, is not only a medium of concept but also a self-sufficient thing that lives on its own. Although that seems a bone of contention, as if the problem of "form and substance" be still actual, there's no doubt that Nakhova isn't afraid to get into more intimate relations with the material than it is accepted in local "Conceptualism". Assuming all said about Nakhova's work one is drawn to paradoxical conclusion: even when Nakhova refurbishes walls, ceiling, windows and everything else in her own apartment with glowing grey, even when she makes colossal, "non-woman" effort to make something very big and heavy, even when she produces almost disgusting pathological "body" objects, somehow she stays besides all that. She is the master of distance, driving so that neither those in front nor those behind would hit her. And that is not a kind of "kolobkovost" by Kabakov or Medical Hermeneutics (that is ability to avoid or skip anything), but rather a humorist "living in a world of her own". Especially when it happens more and more difficult to understand what is the world we're living in and who lives there.