TOKYO: SOLO EXHIBITION「Transformation」: Vanilla Gallery, Japan

An exhibition-performance, a shared trip through a world of dreams and threats-from places of dwelling to a place of embrace. Transformation can be traumatic. Devirtualization-the transition from the Internet to physical space-can be unpredictable, irreversible, strange, frightening. A transition in unintended places is dangerous. Ulysses' return took a day but lasted a lifetime. Maybe it's time to try survirtualization? What is home for us and for our digital avatars? The virtual spaces where the cyber-hydras of our embodiments live, communicate, and transform? The fantasies and dreams of millions of digital communities across the world, whose presence and recognition manifest in likes and views here and now?

 

Having fashioned herself into a global meta-persona on social media while at the same time inhabiting them as a cozy wonder-box, Elena Sheidlina chose the Internet as her habitat-for herself and her mythical creatures, rejected and condemned by the outside world. Bullying, rejection of the unusual-a world one could escape only by creating one's own and filling it with millions of loving people, allies, and fans. But how does one return?

 

In the first gallery space, seven photographs are displayed. The transformation of a drawing into a photograph through physical reality, through the scenography of readymades and objects created by Lena, is a process of transition from the natural to the surreal, so that the boundary between them dissolves. Like Dora Maar, Elena turns to photography as a form of storytelling-a narrative that happened both to her and not to her, and at the same time to each of us. It is both a journey into a fantastical world where the connections between objects and names blur and an escape into a place where no one can hurt anyone. The feeling of a vague gothic melancholy is merely the imprint of reality, captured in a moment of turbulent emotions. Lena's glossy, detailed, and yet naturalistic world seems to intersect with that of Pierre et Gilles, where the characters in the photographs are not entirely fictional but rather undiscovered versions of themselves.

 

This space also features an installation: sculptures of dead animals by the roadside. The transition between places of habitation is a dangerous zone where the magical meets the real, the familiar conceals a threat-a Mulholland Drive between a cozy wonder-box and an unfamiliar place where physical contact can be either an embrace or a fatal collision. Here, old fears of rejection, misunderstanding, and alienation can strike at any moment, knock one off course, interrupt transformation. A ritual is needed here: the magic of movement, an imitation of sacrifice, a dance of transition. During the exhibition's opening, Lena will perform a choreographed piece over several hours, inspired by the figure and gestures of the Neanderthal as depicted in popular science films-a prototype of a human being, composed of scientific conjectures, media-imposed imagery, and cultural expectations, both fiction and reality at once.

 

The second gallery space presents ten oil paintings. The artist continues her exploration of the transition of images-from reality into photography, from photography into binary code and interface, from social media into painting. Continuing the surrealist tradition and the search for new connections between language and the world in the spirit of René Magritte, Lena addresses transformations of identity through the stages of growing up, in those barely perceptible moments on the edge of fear and freedom, where one can become anyone. The transitions between worlds may lie "above"-"sur"-but not above reality anymore; rather, above the virtuality of our existence. And it is precisely there that the path home unfolds. Survirtualism.

 

Home as binary code within a flat screen, pulsing under the touch of someone's hand at every moment; home as the matter of dreams, where wishes come true without becoming reality; home as a physical interface, where touch, the sound of a voice, and shared visions are possible;home as a dance, a portal. Home as a ritual of transition-from wandering through seductive and ominous, dark and bright worlds-to a place of strength, childhood, embrace, and transformation: home as a return to oneself.

Text by Hanna Zubkoba