discussion, making the comment section into a competition of wits. Certain phrases are spammed repeatedly, and popular jokes are memed. I think these repeated comments are quite telling — they provide an insight into the younger generation's outlook on the surrounding landscape. It is both an attempt to romanticize the place of own existence, aesthetically conceptualize and accept it, and an attempt to build an ironic distance, find a personal point of view.

The landscapes that resulted from my virtual walks are exhibited alongside the social media comments. I have transformed them into neon signs, like Garage or Groceries, their shape and lettering hinting at the reality that actually underlies these phrases. I planted them into real-life landscapes and made a short series of photographs. The social media comments, directed towards the surrounding environment, have thus incorporated themselves into this reality.

The video Prayer was filmed on the outskirts of Moscow, where a residential project is in development in the flood plain of the Skhodnya River. To protest the development, a local activist dug out huge letters in the ground, so big as to be clearly seen on Google satellite images: Putin, save Skhodnya. However, a high-rise residential project was soon built right on top of the letters. Disillusioned with the government, that same activist dug out a new message nearby, now appealing to a higher authority: God save Russia. These letters, similar to the glowing neon comments placed in real-life landscapes and attributed to no author, sound like an utterance by earth itself

addressing the meanings of history and postmemory as well as representation of space. In the Russian Nowhere series, the artist continues to actively engage with text: he transforms snippets of text found online into light installations, reminiscent of a corner store sign, and then incorporates these quotations into real-life landscapes through photography. The resulting effect is defamiliarisation. Pavel Otdelnov is aware that direct replication of reality is impossible, so he uses different optics — machine vision and collective human intelligence. This typifies his work as postconceptualism. Turning to landscapes that are no longer utilised or populated, the artist reaffirms their existence and proposes to give them a negative definition. These places exist but their description or identification, even supported by an accurate image, is not possible. This “nowhere” is actually everywhere, emerging from the void, which is, in fact, the main character in Otdelnov’s work.

Marina Bobyleva

 The new exhibition by Pavel Otdelnov, symbolically titled Russian Nowhere, makes a mesmerising impression, in a way evocative of David Lynch movies. Trying to articulate its aftereffect on the viewer, which does not quite lend itself to verbalisation, it can be argued that the “enigmatic landscapes”¹ on display are a paradoxical combination of extreme defamiliarisation and materiality, on the one hand, and superhuman tenderness that ventures into mysticism, on the other.

The new series by the artist revisits the subject of “non-places”² and continues the deep exploration of our collective unconscious by focusing on urban marginalia. This time, however, the poetics of non-places is enriched by an infusion of virtual imagery. The term “non-place” was originally coined in art criticism by the founder of land art Robert Smithson, and it has been used to denote the zones, produced by the urban civilisation, that are occupied for short periods of time and anonymously, and that erase personal identity. In philosophy, as introduced by Michel Foucault, such places are termed “heterotopia”, from the Ancient Greek for “other” and “place”. A place is identified here through a differentiating, special mode of life and a special chronotope. Endless casemates of garages, deserted highways going nowhere, industrial estates, road junctions and other “disowned spaces” in the urban outskirts of Russian Nowhere — all that can await us around any corner in our familiar daily routes (“I thought it was a painting, but this is life”) — these are examples of heterotopias with their particular aesthetic and space-time configuration. The heterotopias / non-places in Pavel Otdelnov’s new series are so well known to everybody who lives in Russia that they unfailingly produce an effect of stark déjà vu, which reveals the eternally Russian “it’s the same everywhere”.

Back in 1951, at a Darmstadt conference, Martin Heidegger made a presentation “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” on a bridge construction project, where he argued that the identity of a place emerged from both its objective spatial parameters and from the eye of the beholder. When presented with the heterotopias in Pavel Otdelnov’s new series, the question of that eye immediately comes to mind, which can, once answered, serve as the key to the world of Russian Nowhere. The seminal question posed by Michael Foucault “who is speaking?”, as applied to visual arts, should be restated as “who is looking?” Whereas the past series by Pavel Otdelnov offered a most sympathetic view on the depicted non-places that can be attributed as a view of a person in the future³, in case of Russian Nowhere such perspective is no longer possible: Enthusiasts Street now leads nowhere, and the monolith concrete fence spanning over the entire horizon bears the inscription: “The future has never come”.

In Russian Nowhere, Pavel Otdelnov has aptly captured this recently emergent phenomenon in the collective sensibility of dealing with the loss of the future as a human project. A person is not a personal project anymore, the person has now denounced the myths, which used to hold power over us, of being the architects of our own futures. The initiative now lies with non-human actors: the natural entropy that prevails and erases from the face of the earth the remains of grand social utopias, the onslaught of new deadly viruses brought about by the environmental disaster, the menacing self-animation of technology. Even if the future were to present itself today, this would be through personalised eschatology (“Russia is the land of fascinating wonder: Start your life here, and it all goes under”).

 So whose eye is it, contemplating the dehumanised space with such 

defamiliarisation and distance as if from a bird’s eye view? Might this be a machine eye? Indeed, the optics used in Russian Nowhere is on principle that of a machine: both in the photographs and in the paintings of this series, there is no need for human presence in the landscapes captured by dispassionate machine vision. The artistic gesture — newly introduced here by the author and amplifying the already existing defamiliarisation effect — consists in painting the canvases from images found on street view by Yandex and Google, and in recreating a painterly image from that; this takes to the extreme the themes of dehumanisation of the depicted space and of the subject’s death in art. The artist himself calls this technique the “principle of simulated remote view”.

If this is a machine looking, though, why do we get a persistent anxious apprehension from these landscapes, as if something unseen is lurking behind the seen, as if something has happened or is just about to? Why the presence of vibrating sadness, piercing nostalgia, phantom pains over the era long gone and the man dissolved in these dehumanised landscapes? Over the paintings missing the shadows of people once living, building, dreaming here, whose dreams were turned to dust and faded into oblivion. Or over those who, continuing to dwell in the drab non-places, in the dimensionless faceless spaces of the Soviet (Russian?) Atlantis, which is submerging underground and under tonnes of compressed time right before our eyes, are also becoming invisible, turning on Otdelnov’s canvases into barely distinguishable marks, an empty sign of a person, a ghost. This is no human view: a person in the space of Russian Nowhere is dematerialised (their palpable absence gives a powerful impetus to imagination). Neither is the view that of a machine. Machines have no nostalgia, and the world does not present itself to them as presence. Still, whose eye could be looking at the lands in Pavel Otdelnov’s Nowhere?

The one looking at these monotonous, almost fully devoid of colour, literally in-congruous landscapes (“there is no aesthetic in it”) could be one of the Wim Wenders’s angels from Wings of Desire (1987), Cassiel, whose original purpose was to observe, witness and keep record of reality. Or Wenders’s other angel, Damiel, who is sympathetic to the people on earth and appreciates this flawed world so much that he becomes willing to give up his immortality in order to see it through the mortal’s eyes or, say, experience a “mixture of sadness, nostalgia, romanticism and, probably, hopelessness”, as relayed in one of the anonymous sentiments that Pavel Otdelnov has retrieved literally from our collective unconscious — from the social media. His series of photographs is poetic in its precise use of verbatim quotations from recurring comments in social media communities focused on the “aesthetic of gloomy nowhere”, or, to cut through the euphemisms, on the ruination of Russia⁴.

Ruins are definitely featured among the repetitive structures in Pavel Otdenov’s work. In his artistic world, ruins are not so much a representation of past events as, rather, a hint at the impossibility of such representation, at the contained isolation of past experience from us. Although its progressively disappearing traces are still present, the past is not meaningfully perceived by us, which makes it simultaneously horrific and alluring. Yet, taking a different angle, the non-places — that, despite of all of the above, Pavel Otdelnov makes us admire by virtue of the magical power of art — might be that last haven where the vestiges of humanity can find rescue from the glossy terror of simulated reality. And where amidst the voiceless deserted middle of nowhere, with its invariably grey skies and washed-out lighting, it is the only remaining place to, perhaps, encounter an angel.

Svetlana Polyakova