FALSE SUN. FRAGMENT 12.07.2021
concrete, wood, industrial carpet, tinted window glass, fragments of the finishing layer from the wall of the ruin, two-channel video
Russian State Ethnographic Museum, 2022
The installation in the hall "Resettlement of Russians in the 20th century" in the Russian State museum of Ethnography reproduces a gaze along the south-north axis and its reflection.
The first point on the axis: a futile attempt to capture the Sunset on July 12, 2021 on the edge of the state, a now ghost town Rudnik, the former Soviet empire coal mining monotown above the 67 parallel North.
Reflected point: installation of a transparent recorder of possible sunset in the future
Middle of the axis: a fragment of the wall of the ruins of a typical residential building. Made as a fresco in the technique of applying paint on plaster, it was supposed to imitate the sky in the corridor of a kindergarten. The fall of the wall gave the observer a view of the pending sunset.
The visible trajectory of the sun reminds that of a sunset, however, due to the position of the observer in the far north, in the conditions of a polar day, the sunset does not occur: the moment when the sunset is awaited according to central Moscow time, the sun passes along the horizon, briefly hiding behind the mine building , which is due to definite closure in 13 years. The true sunset is happening the day after tomorrow.
The ruin of a building, presumably a kindergarten, is a vis-a-vis of the pending unset above the coalmine . In a settlement founded in the 1930s as a concentration camp and abandoned despite the development projects of the 1970s, this typical Khrushchev block building in the far north was abandoned and was never inhabited. In the conditions of the intense colonization of the north of the USSR, social infrastructure was built last, often dozens of years after the settlers arrived.
