Whatever, performative Installation, Serlachius Museum Residency, Finland February 2020

“Do not come any closer,” God said.
“Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing
is holy ground.”​​​​​​​ Exodus 3:5 NIV:

In Russian, the word Whatever is translated as Любое (Lyuboye) and refers to the form of the verb to Love: Beloved, which is paradoxically the opposite of Whatever. The same contradiction in the Latin word Quodlibet Giorgio Agamben unfolds in his book The Coming Community: “The Whatever here relates to its being such as it is.”
What distinguishes artwork from an ordinary thing? In this work, all applied qualities (such as craft, plot, and image) are purposely removed from the object of art to make this difference easier to experience.

Whatever, performative Installation, Serlachius Museum, Finland February 2020

By creating the ready-made, Marcel Duchamp pointed out the essence of an artistic act as a mechanism endowing any object with a special ontological status. By this act, an artist constitutes a general blank space (place for being) that can be occupied by any object. In addition to the fact that the object becomes a simple manifestation of blank space, its qualities are not erased but become universal signs — the content of an empty medium, which is the art object essentially.
The main thing that a work of art does is that it takes place in the world. As the caretaker of this place, the work of art ensures the reliability of the human world.