PRESS RELEASE – ZEDES ART GALLERY Natalya Zaloznaya – Freeze Frame

EXHIBITION: 2/03 – 7/04/ 2018

PRIVATE VIEW: Thursday 1 March – 6 - 9 p.m.

ZEDES ART GALLERY – 36, Paul Lautersstraat – 1050 Brussels Open: Wednesday Thursday Friday 12-6 pm and Saturday 2-6 pm

Natalya Zaloznaya was born in 1960 in Minsk Belarus. She graduated from the Belarusian Academy of Art in 1985. She was granted two European traineeships sponsored by Foundations Kukturkontakt (Vienna, Austria). In 2005, her work was shown at the 51 ième Venice Biennale.She frequently participates in Artist in Residence programs in Ossetia and Latvia. Natalya Zaloznaya art has been extensively exhibited in both Europe and the United States. Her work can be found in the State Tretryakov Gallery in Moscow and in the Belarusian National Museum in Minsk.

Freeze frame

“There is a certain absurdity in the idea, a desire to freeze time, produce figurines, impressions of the moment. A photo works as a trap for the fleeting time, while I'm trying to translate the photo, which contains a moment of the past, into a sculptural material, duplicating a duplicate, thus proposing to consider the plot outside the context of time...” Natalya Zaloznaya

In her project “Freeze‐Frame,” Natalya Zaloznaya works with time. It becomes both the actor and the narrative.

Here, the desire to stop the time, absurd by nature, couples with the intention to visualize this stop by means of sleeping figures and porcelain figurines suspended in a timeless space. An attempt to get out of the context of time. Where a photo is a trap of time, a figurine is its impression, and a painting becomes an opportunity to combine and express the two oppositions. So, the visual part of the project is closely connected with the photographic image. In this case, a documentary photographic image is a basis for designing a painting. However, it is the nature of the picturesque that gives the work that lost aura and uniqueness that has been compromised by inexorable technological progress.

The author raises questions, simultaneously presenting her search for answers and definitions of time, existence, the state of being present here and now. After all, how do we perceive time? Is it through active participation in reality? A sleeping person, an unfinished gesture captured in a photograph, figurines frozen in their movement – are all these the indicators of time? Time exists as a division, a separator from death, a stopping point. The artist works with the opposite purpose, attempting to define the time through stop/pause/suspension.

Translating movement into a standstill gives the image an importance and a special meaning, shuffles the accents. The space of doubt, of rethinking, emerges creating a new present. This need for a “postponement,” a deferred decision becomes a reality for the artist. The French philosopher Descartes defined the present as the time of uncertainty, which opens a clarified and obvious future.

“... the past is being rewritten: names and events appear, disappear, reappear and disappear again. The present has ceased to be a point of transition from the past to the future.” 1 This is the place of stopping, standing still, infinite doubting, in which we, like porcelain figurines, unnamed sleeping persons, are wasting our time. After all, it does not stop waiting for our awakening, it just disappears without turning back.

The symbolic vocabulary of Natalia Zaloznaya's "Escape" project contains several metaphors, which can't be avoided when one gets to interact with them. Of course, there is a great temptation to focus on the aesthetic form of the "Escape," but its ontological context seems to be equally interesting. What does it mean?

A definitive statement about the creativity of art may be found in Gilles Deleuze's works: "Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive,

nor communicative. They are creative, that's all." He thereby takes art beyond the sphere of communication, reflection and contemplation: that is, the practices driven by the question "What does it mean?" Deleuze asserts the superiority of the act of creation in art over the acts of its meaningful functioning in specific socio‐historical contexts. Perhaps, the Deleuze's statement has already been partially historicized in relation to what is happening with the images of art in the contemporary media environment. Nevertheless, it retains that energy of questioning the intention of art "to be in this world" which can't be ignored.

Reality.

If we consider the "Escape" of Natalia Zaloznaya from this perspective, we can come to the understanding that the visual images of the project must and can be viewed not only in terms of what they tell us, but also in terms of what kind of reality they create by means of this message.

This reality is designed with a certain interconnection, about the author informs us: part of the works was created on the basis of documentary photographs. This is an important correlation of the project with what we define as a reality of facts (of what has happened), on the one hand, and it is the challenge to this reality by raising the questions, such as "what has happened? what is happening?" It must be clarified at this point that we are speaking of the reality asserted by documentary photographs to the extent to which they claim to be its ultimate visual representation. We know that there are numerous claimants to represent Reality in our symbolic world. But in the art world every claimant is unique and alone in their attempt to establish a connection with the reality by means of the creation thereof. (A working artist is not so much looking for allies in art, as is captured by the passion of creating new connections.)

The sleeping.

When we look at a sleeping person, we may experience some confusion and excitement due to the fact that we find ourselves in a situation where we do not know exactly where the sleeping person is. They are present to us in his realistic visual substantiality, and at the same time they are absent as we are not there for them at the moment. The question is how the ability of being visible at the time of sleeping alters the very structure of reality? The sleeping person is included in the world through the unconscious isolation from it. This person becomes a symbol of the abandonment of the world, its absolute forlorness and transformation into a dream, which belongs to no one. After all, the metaphor of sleeping is the metaphor of the otherworldly.

Perhaps, it would be appropriate in this case to view the sleeping as a person who "lost" their consciousness, suddenly dropped out of the forced circulation of their social and historical place. The works of Natalia Zaloznaya give one a feeling that the sleep took her characters by surprise; at the moment of this experience, we discover how helpless they are in the face of its sudden influence. This may be a clue to the fact that some radical event may have taken place, which cancelled the reality in the aspect of its perception. This proto‐event can only be deduced from these "unconscious" visual sculptures that experienced the mysterious eventful shift which placed them at the border between "the living and the dead."

The escape.

To be successful in this reality, any real Escape must cross the border between "the living and the dead," the point where the connection between illusory and the real falls apart, the connection which is the basis of our "sleep," of our semi‐conscious existence. The movement of the project images occurs in the direction of this border, although the movement itself is the visually perceived stillness. Motionless motion. How is this possible? And why is this possible?

Maybe because it's the only real escape scenario in the conditions "dictated by reality, when a person, regardless of their beliefs, is forced to act according to the laws of this reality?" (N. Zaloznaya). Therefore the motionless motion is the only possible movement in the conditions of the impossibility of escape. One should point to one important insight, with which the author is working, apparently: escapes are possible, the Escape is impossible. In general, the escape story is one of the most popular cultural subjects, precisely because it formulates the question about the reality of what is happening (what does it mean?), and at the same time poses a question to this reality (what is really happening?).