The pop/off/art gallery participates in the international art fair Vienna Contemporary, which takes place in Vienna on 24, 25, 26, 27 September. Artists Vika Shumskaya and Vlad Yurashko are represented at the gallery's booth.

Artists Vlad Yurashko and Victoria Shumskaya perform an important experiment, the aesthetic and political dimensions of which are closely connected. Yurashko, peering into the photo chronicles, and Shumskaya, who has renounced figurativeness, operate with experiments in a hybrid war, which has pulled together modern societies in a high-voltage arc, splitting them from the inside. Few artists dare to approach this phenomenon. The uncertainty of the moment is unsettling and turns insoluble questions into neurotic fluctuations. Is there a way out? Does it consist in the unconditional acceptance of one of the parties? Does the grotesque or the final rejection of line and color serve as its aesthetic form? The answer is hidden by a heavy black curtain in the center of the display. He is radical, taking us out of the current debate, sparing us the conflict of propaganda clichés. Pulling back the curtain reveals how both artists respond to the question of the future after the war. For the second year now, uncertainty has been the main characteristic of the present.

The entrance to the booth is blocked by the frozen soldiers of the warring armies, who are recreated by Vlad Yurashko with chronicler credibility. Can you tell which of them is fighting on the side of the Ukrainian National Guard and who is on the side of the pro-Russian separatists? Does the Hollywood trick work here, allowing you to distinguish heroes from anti-heroes by a white passamontana and a black grinning skull on a mask?
Victoria Shumskaya's canvases report the impossibility of the artist's clear expression in the oppressive incompleteness of the roles and the invariably disturbed, disorienting presentation of the current war. The rich blacks of these canvases are heterogeneous: the mechanical smudges of printer powder over the organic movement of the brush are metonymy for machine bureaucracy, the ink of modern warfare that immobilizes the experience of remotely controlled violence. Laconism, aesthetic purity of works do not interfere with the imagination. The canvases open up like projection screens for your experiences.

Moving along the walls, you are immersed in the aesthetically enhanced uncertainty of the present. What opens behind the curtain takes you beyond rational predictions. You are in the face of the dream of a world after the war, the dream of resurrection and the movement of a life that is made possible again. And in this answer - only one of the assumptions, the beginning.

Project curator - Alexander Bikbov