Object #25 from the project "Riva degli Schiavi"

Shishkin-Hokusai developed his own type of alarming Beings that disarm the audience. They are (usually) nude girls drawn with several lines on plywood. They are immersed in contemplation and interaction with (sometimes) invisible companions or objects. They either draw a harsh reaction to nakedness as such, or a feeling of shame in voyeurism, causing a breakdown in erotic markers: their poses and activities contain no hint of the act of seduction. The successors of the girls of the American outsider artist Henri Darger, the maidens of the surrealist Paul Delvaux and the heroines of Hayao Miyazaki, they act in such a way to stop all other movements and motivations around them.

Portraits of female models from South East Asia and Africa are displayed with anthropomorphic bags tied up with ropes. But the story of these items is not a battle with forced exoticization. It is another consideration of the position of “living machines”, whether they are servants as robots, or overseers of the ideals of communities. Is a “museum of cruelty” possible, in which pictures are free from consumer reflex, from the status of inviolable treasures, and from evidence in studying the manipulation of power? And what needs to be freed most of all, the viewer or the work? To find answers to these questions, Shishkin-Hokusai translates the museum ritual into his own language and discusses all the components of the process of interaction with art in one breath, practically in one line. This is the topography of ruins of our personal private Europe. 

A study in the form of a theatrical performance, where different forms of beauty are adjusted by tools of coercion – and vice versa. 

Text: Valentin Dyakonov