Anna Kazmina
Anya Zholud
Anton Tonukhov

TRANSCODING

PA Gallery presents TRANSCODING by artists Anna Zholud, Anna Kazmina and Anton Konyukhov, featuring their signature works. The artists are exploring the themes of transitional states and the fluidity of materials in response to the increasing complexity of the contemporary world. Fredric Jameson described "transcoding" as the process of translating between different cultural codes and forms of representation. It is the process of drawing "lines of relationship from signs in one code to signs in another, letting each translate and interpret the other".

The rapid proliferation of digital information and discourses has given rise to a vast, chaotic network of meanings that challenges our ability to navigate and comprehend society and common world. The presented artists offer various models and reference points for moving in the cultural spaces, an attempt to structure the current information-rich environments we inhabit.

Anna Zholud is one of the key authors of the 2000s generation, participant of the 53rd Venice Biennale. Her art is characterised by a focus on the "essence of things" and the "nerves of feeling", with simple forms and materials depicting everyday objects like teapots, clothes, furniture and plants. Zholud peels off the skin of things, leaving only their primary, unadorned essence. She uses the expressive power of line to reduce objects to their contours and boundaries. She is described as an artist of reflection, not commotion, reflects a conceptual approach aimed at exposing the "eidos" of things, rejecting external husks, and striving for the utmost honesty in artistic expression.

Participant of the Beijing Biennale and finalist of the Zverev Prize 2021 Anna Kazmina strives to uncover hidden potential within the human experience and the world, which she envisions as a unified multiverse, a living organism. She operates with fabrics, paper and porcelain, their textures contain a language for communication with infinite realities. The blue organza spreads in the air like a gas cloud connecting meta and physical spaces together into a single sign. Formalistic porcelain patterns on plates and teapots stick together, through the process of transcoding they give new life forms. The thick impasto brushstrokes on canvases laid over previously created images serve as a guide to the creative substance itself which forms all this visible world.

Anton Konukhov works at the confluence of paintings and objects, creating canvases that acquire sculptural characteristics thanks to metallized color combinations which flow and become solid like traces of pure time. In the "Present" series, the artist works with mirroring and deformation of reflections. The artists' appeal to the element of unstructured experiential contents, not articulated in stable forms, gives rise to images similar to organic entities, flickering in random fluctuations here and now.

The three artists utilise diverse methods of information coding through different mediums to create new frameworks for engaging with the complex and overwhelming landscape of contemporary visual culture. Their work aims to provide alternative perspectives and tools for guiding the abundance and ephemerality of images and data that characterise our current social environment.