Work from dolls series

Shishkin-Hokusai develops a type of characters that one would like to call anti-Creatures, although they also disarm the public. These are (most often) naked girls outlined with several lines on plywood. They are immersed in reflections and interactions with (sometimes) invisible interlocutors or objects. And they cause either an acute reaction to nudity as such, or the shame of peeping, which causes a malfunction of erotic orientations: there is no hint of an act of seduction in their poses and activities. Rather, they are centers of Reason and antagonists of the "Faustian man," who searches and decomposes corpses everywhere. The heiresses of the girls of the American outsider artist Henry Darger, the maidens of the surrealist Paul Delvaux and the heroines of Hayao Miyazaki, they act in such a way as to stop all other movements and motivations around.

Portraits of female models from Southeast Asia and Africa are mounted with anthropomorphic bags tied with rope. But the plot of these things is not in the fight against violent exotisation. This is another reflection on the position of "living machines", whether servants, like robot vacuum cleaners, or overseers of the ideals of communities. Is there a museum without cruelty, in which images are free from the consumer reflex, on the one hand, the status of untouchable treasures, on the other, and evidence in the investigation of government manipulation, on the third? And who should be liberated first, the viewer or the work? To find answers to these questions, Shishkin-Hokusai translates the museum ritual into his own language and talks about the elements of interaction with art in one breath, almost in one line.

This is a study in the form of a performance, where different forms of beauty are corrected by instruments of coercion — and vice versa.

Text: Valentin Dyakonov