Andrey Syaylev

The exposition is structured as a museum of alternative history, preserving artifacts from an imagined era of metamorphosis that humanity underwent in its confrontation with the “other”.

Series of head sculptures, resembling fossilized mutant rebels, appear as witnesses of interspecies conflicts — grotesque alter egos of people who have reformatted their relationship with the planet. These are complemented by assemblage-like representations of masks. The artist's perspective delves into the depths of the dark unconscious, predating civilization and religious concepts, where at the very dawn of human self-identification the distinction between "the other" and "one's own" is formed.

The key installation, "Bees’ Feast," features a table set with crystal tableware and a video. Its main characters are bees, inhabitants of a world that existed millions of years before humans. In the context of the exhibition, they appear as a universal, successful super-organism, and the feasting image of honey acts as an eternal essence of life.
The paradoxical title of the exhibition serves as a semantic gap for the viewer. Like a Zen koan, the contradictory combination of concepts points to the intrinsic complexity of reality as its essential characteristic. In this sense, it becomes a tool for intuitive and sensory critique, based on the cognitive value of illogicism.

By blending visual motifs of an ecological thriller and post-apocalyptic horror, Andrey Syaylev's exhibition attempts to visualize phantoms that lie beyond human experience. Identification — albeit imaginary — with the world of the “other" gives the artist the opportunity to once again feel and sense his own boundaries — the "limits of engagement" with the world.