Squares and Freaks of Nature in Time of Evil
Part of God Out of a Washing Machine Ilya Orlov's solo show. Forum Box, Helsinki, Finland
2023
Exhibition view
This exhibition revolved around a fictional narrative that, since February 24, 2022, several reports have emerged describing uncanny and inexplicable changes in famous avant-garde pieces within museum collections. According to the story, dramatic transformations were first detected in Kazimir Malevich’s The Black Square at The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. These changes continued with Malevich’s and El Lissitsky’s pieces in MoMA, Stedelijk, Guggenheim, and other museums: the geometrical shapes have gradually slipped down to the lower limits of the picture, as if gravity had been introduced into the utopian, weightless space of avant-garde fantasy.
The narrative was conveyed through exhibition texts on the walls, supplemented with manufactured ‘documentary photographs’ and fabricated quotations from influential contemporary theorists. For the show, 11 of Malevich’s oil paintings and 5 of Lissitsky’s lithographs were meticulously reproduced, maintaining the precise original sizes and techniques, even imitating craquelures, but altering the position of the figures according to the fictional plot.
The story was written in collaboration with Eero Karjalainen and Mark Maher.
After “Kazimir Malevich. Painterly Realism of a Football Player — Color Masses in the 4th Dimension. 1915.” 2022-2023. Oil on canvas. 71 × 44.5 cm
Click the image to see the wallboard content. Text is co-written by Ilya Orlov, Eero Karjalainen, and Mark Maher. Idea and images: Ilya Orlov.
Squares and Freaks of Nature in Time of Evil was part of Ilya Orlov’s solo show God Out of a Washing Machine at Forum Box gallery in January 2023, along with two other installations (Stella Laura Andersson: The Missing Matriarch of Finnish Dada and Metaphysical Washing Machine) and a conceptual sculptural assemblage Overthrone.
From God Out of a Washing Machine exhibition press release:
"In Orlov’s new show, his trademark strategy of hacking traditional exhibition formats, toying with contemporary art clichés, and poeticising art administration jargon is pushed a little further. A solo exhibition looks like a group show of mutually incompatible artists; wall texts that normally explain the exhibits become exhibits themselves, to be explained by the works. Finally, the exhibition statement, instead of telling explicitly what it is all about, offers a piece of ‘international art English’ so convoluted that it makes one nostalgic about the clarity of e-flux announcements:
“Marrying Duchamp’s eroticist mechanics with forgotten baroque landscape painting; scrupulously recreating Malevich’s craquelures (only for the sake of switching on gravity in his weightless utopia); putting the artist’s own witticisms into the mouths of contemporary philosophers like Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway; planting inverted perspective of Byzantine icons into constructivist axonometry; and finally, turning Sol Lewitt’s cube into a ‘metaphysical washing machine’, the exhibition invites the viewer to look at culture and art itself through a psychedelic conceptualist kaleidoscope of sorts.”
Taide-lehti journal critical review (in Finnish) can be accessed here
Guided tour to the exhibition (Anna Rawlings)
God Out of a Washing Machine exhibition was made with the participation of Eero Karjalainen, Mark Maher, and Anna Rawlings.
Consultants: Juha-Heikki Tihinen, Leonor Ruiz Dubrovin, Matthew Cowan, Andrey Ustinov, Semyon Motolyanets, Sezgin Boynik, and Jyrki Siukonen.
Acknowledgements: Irina Ptakhova, Jan Kaila, Mika Elo, Kaisu Koivisto, Pasha and Sasha Rotts, Frank Brümmel, Elisa Vuori, Lars Federley, Seppo Sinkkonen, Anna Akins, Kamilla Billiers, Avreno Heikka, Jana Siren, Katharina (Ina) George, Martin Ormin.
Special thanks: Riikka Anttonen.
Photographs: Anna Autio, Mark Maher, Anna Rawlings.
The exhibition was supported by Taike, The Alfred Kordelin Foundation, and The Finnish Cultural Foundation.
