Exhibition project / total installation «The Pavement Echoes».
In collaboration with L’Galerie Paris and Dispard Gallery.
A project about civic resistance in Russia’s recent past and the traces it has left behind — visible and invisible.
The exhibition addresses the past fifteen years of Russian political history: the wave of protests of the 2010s, the escalation of repression, and the rapidly shrinking space for the public expression of dissent. Created specifically for L Galerie in Paris’s 20th arrondissement, the project transforms the entire gallery into a single artistic statement — a reflection on the memory of protest and the traumatic encounter between civil society and a repressive system in a young autocracy.
Bringing together multiple media — graphic works, photography, objects, and sculpture — the artist continues his long-term exploration of freedom of speech, civic resistance, the relationship between the individual and power, and the nature of authoritarianism and political violence.
The Pavement Echoes is a logical continuation of the artist’s previous solo exhibitions and large-scale “total installations” realized in Russia and Montenegro during the years of war, including Macabre and Present Not Perfect. These projects form a consistent line of artistic inquiry, through which the artist examines the causes and preconditions of the current political and social situation in his home country, Russia.
Artist’s text:
A ghost protest.
A political body that has disappeared — yet is still felt.
It speaks through traces, echoes, archives, and memory.
This is silence and absence that resound louder than a shout.
This project is about Russia in the 2010s and early 2020s.
But, of course, not only about Russia.
It is about attempts to attain freedom —
to learn how to be free,
to stop being afraid to speak,
to stop being afraid to disagree.
The first truly mass protests in contemporary Russia took place in 2011–2012. People took to the streets to voice their opposition to election fraud, corruption, and the growing arbitrariness of those in power. But already in May 2012, the authorities delivered their response — harsh, unequivocal, and unchanging:
“No. You are nobody. Your opinion means nothing.”
A civil society that was only just beginning to take shape found itself in a condition of absent dialogue, where criticism and alternative voices were not heard, and those who expressed them were ignored, intimidated, and punished. Over the following decade, the space of freedom continued to contract. From mass demonstrations on Bolotnaya Square to the detention of individuals holding blank sheets of paper in solitary pickets.
The lessons of trying to become free are difficult and bitter.
But they have not passed without a trace.
This project is not a reconstruction of events.
It is an attempt to listen to what remains — to understand what has disappeared and what has endured, what has fallen permanently silent and what continues to resonate.
We turn to the past, to the absent — to that which shapes our present and our possible future. Freedom, perhaps, does not emerge in the moment of victory. It lives in a step that has already been taken — and in the echo that step leaves behind.
