Project description

My interests revolve around the impulses towards overcoming the present and creating an environment for facilitating humanity’s pursuit of harmonic existence. As history has shown us, such an idealistic existence ultimately turns out to be an immense system of dogmatic strictures that evolve into tyrannical dictatorship regimes corrupted by individual and social weaknesses.

It is the idea of a future equality among humans, as well as a unity of politics, art and thought, that a century ago inspired the Russian painter and architect Vladimir Tatlin to devise (by state order) the emblematic project “Monument to the Third International” (1919-20). Utopian in its youthful zest, absurd in its economic indicators and raw material requirements, the project exerts an impact on XX century architecture and art. Inspired by his Russian colleague and predecessor, the American minimalist artist Dan Flavin constructed “Monument 1” based on Tatlin’s view (1964). It represents a very powerful and much simpler museum artwork which has no claims of making a home base for the Communist International. It is also an artwork of change and influence in relation to the world – by its property of emitting light. Flavin’s work is vulnerable, poetic and aggressive.  

In my own replication of “Monument 1” entitled “Utopia 2” (2013), I have reduced the size even more and “shut off” the light. It presents a kind of household constructivism, consisting of ready-made/purchased lamps, which virtually anyone can concoct without even having to use electricity. I believe the extinguished light “unmasks” the utopia, yet the artwork itself is not intended to ironize the “impulse” but to suggest a different direction.