None of the ideas and images that pop up in our mind's eye starts from scratch; they are built around the perceived reality, language and the established worldview. But Lukina refrains from deliberate citing of the trivialities and hidden gems of the global cultural archive. She elevates the subjective logic of sensations to the status of a method – not illustrating her private thoughts or stories but visualising Deleuze's idea of the artist as the creator of batches of new, not-yet-familiar sensations, which are folded into and which can be unfolded inside the work.
How is one supposed to look at works like these? How is one supposed to unravel these 'tangles of sensations' that, while having the appearance of being self-sufficient, complete, entitled acts, become phantoms of assumed meanings? And the specific details of each work, including the tags, only emphasise its permanent vanishing act. Perhaps the entire point is in the assembly and adhesive joints of the works, in the way the relief parts are attached to the plywood board and the image is fitted across several wooden surfaces etched with UV light, in the way the Concert acts are interspersed with these barely visible joints, like punctuation marks that give meaning to what has been said.
As the artist builds up her works from randomly selected fragments, they can be viewed in the same manner – by picking out minute details from the whole and 'unfolding' the image in any which way, by focusing on specific details or trying to grasp every act or the entire Concert as a whole. In his article on the politics of installation, Boris Groys defined art as 'a way of making hidden reality visible'. While Concert at the Seeds Club does not expose the hidden reality to the viewer, it indicates the very possibility of its existence without revealing its actual appearance, leaving a gap for what remains unsaid, does not manifest in speech and does not rise to the surface. It remains, in line with Groys's logic, 'a space of openness, disclosure, unconcealment' as opposed to the logic of exclusion that lurks behind the veneer of imaginary completeness and transparency of the current order of things.
Valery Ledenyov
Katerina Lukina (b. 1995, Mytishchi, Russia) is a Moscow-based artist. Alumna of the Moscow University of Printing Arts, Department of Graphic Arts (2019). Lukina has participated in group shows at the ISSMAG gallery, the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, the ZDES na Taganke gallery, as well as in international exhibitions in China, Slovakia, Poland.
Instagram: @lukiplotster